Clarence Clemons Gets Honest And Personal
(Originally published 1982 in the Aquarian Weekly. Used with permission.)
Photos by Bob Sorce
“We were coming home from a gig one night when the car broke down. We went into a bar to have a drink and that’s where I met Norman Seldin who was playing some mean rock’n’roll. I asked him if I could sit in and he said no. I wound up there again about a month later and got to play. He took a big step in putting me in his band. They weren’t hiring Black people in a lot of places down the shore in 1970. It was real hard to get a gig. People gave him a lot of shit about it and he faced big problems.”
Clarence Clemons, sitting in his own club, Big Man’s West, looks down at his hands, fingers an imaginary saxophone, and solves a quick problem that a work crew is having. They’re “struggling,” as he says, with original music since April in an area where “all the bars do cover acts and good business.” We’re sitting in a back office and can hear workmen banging away.
Little did The Big Man know that Stormin’ Norman Seldin’s lead singer at the time, a bluesy Joplin-esque ball-buster, Karen Cassidy, had a roommate who was going out with a local musician named Bruce. “You’ve just got to meet this guy,” Cassidy would enthuse almost every night. It happened just like Bruce tells it onstage. Clarence performed at The Wonder Bar. Bruce performed at The Student Prince. The wind was blowing hard on a freezing cold night. Clarence walked slowly down the street, his sax in his hand. Bruce walked towards him. They were both in the middle of the street.
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“Hi, my name is Clarence.”
He was known as CC. “I never really grew up,” he says sheepishly, “but I’m working on it.” A Virginian by birth, he claims “I’m still groovin’” and enjoying the music like never before. He’s 40 now and “life is not to be wasted.” At nine, his father “forced me to play football. All I wanted was an electric train set.” After he got his first sax, his path was set. But first came his discouragement at his sax teacher’s regimented exercise schedule. So he gave up sax for the rigors of high school football, earning a scholarship to the University of Maryland. He was good! So good, in fact, that he flirted with the NFL as both a defensive lineman and offensive center. “I was supposed to go to Dallas with some guy as part of a package deal,” he remembers, “but when the guy opted out, that killed the deal.”
So he returned to the sax, hooking up with a nonet called The Vibratones. “We played covers for hot dogs and beer,” he laughs. Leaving college with no known plan, he still had yet to find himself. “But I was looking,” he says. “I was looking for that thing that I knew would be in music for me. I just didn’t know what it was yet.” So he got married. Worked in a boy’s home for the emotionally disturbed, counseling mentally retarded youth for nine years, all the while gigging with local cover bands in South Jersey. “I still had this thing where I knew there was something that was going to happen in my life that I hadn’t yet found. I could sense it.”
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“When I first walked on that stage with Bruce and I played that very first song ... It was like we had been onstage together all of our lives.”
Bruce was gigging at The Upstage. CC, as he was still known, was playing funk gigs “on the other side of town,” as he remembers. ‘I knew where all the white kids were hanging out but I stayed with my funky music ‘cross town playing army bases and such.” That brings us to where the car breaks down. He meets Norman Seldin. At Seldin’s singer’s suggestion, he re-meets Bruce after introducing himself in the street. “When I first walked on that stage with Bruce and I played that very first song,” he remembers as a huge smile lights up his face, “it was like we had been onstage together all of our lives. And I said, `thank god, this is what I’ve been looking for the whole time. I knew it right there and then at that moment.” Karen Cassidy was right! “It’s a perfect match,” she used to say before they even met. “You guys have got it goin’ on! When you two meet, it’s gonna be magic!”
Bruce had finished with Steel Mill and Doctor Zoom. He then formed what was called at the time The Bruce Springsteen Band. It was Bruce on vocals and guitar, CC on sax, Garry Tallent on bass, Vini Lopez on drums and Danny Federici on keyboards. It wasn’t called The E Street Band until jazzy piano player David Sancious joined who actually lived on E Street.
Clarence chuckles when he remembers Sancious. “That dude was always late! We’d be waiting for him at his house all the damn time! He just was SO slow. Then, when we finally got to where we were going, we’d say, `here we are, the E Street Band, only because we had been waiting so long for him on E Street!”
Nobody knew what to make of them at first. Then Bruce gets signed as a solo artist to Columbia by legendary record man John Hammond whose notable other signings were only Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen, Pete Seeger, George Benson and Stevie Ray Vaughan. So with their lead singer now signed to a major label as a sensitive singer-songwriter type, the band lit out for a gig in York Pennsylvania opening for comedy team Cheech & Chong. “It was so funny,” Clarence laughs after giving me my fourth drink. “It was at a college and I think the promoter booked us because he thought Bruce would show up alone with an acoustic guitar. After our third song, he told us to get off the stage and kicked us out.”
He's still CC in CC & The Red Bank Rockers these days. Besides this club, besides being Bruce’s right-hand man, and after performing on the biggest stages of the world in front of tens of thousands at a pop, he’s loving doing club gigs again. “We’re not looking for a recording contract,” he maintains. “That’s the whole beauty of it. We do not have to fucking hassle with that shit, man. You come to the show? You buy a ticket. We don’t need no press stuff. We don’t send no labels free passes. We go in. We play some rock’n’roll. And we usually knock ‘em out. Hell, we knock ourselves out! Pack up our equipment, get our money and we’re gone. Then we go out and do it again. It’s the most energizing thing happening to me in a long long time. It’s getting back to the people, man, and I just love it.”
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“I don’t think there’s ever been a band that works as hard. We practice hard. We perform hard. And Bruce doesn’t ask us to do anything that he won’t himself do. It’s our work and you get out of it what you put into it. Hell, that’s how it is with life.”
Our conversation strays to music and what we both listen to in our most private of moments. “I heard Otis Redding’s `Try A Little Tenderness’ the other day done as a disco song. I wanted to cry, man. It hurt me so bad. Kids be hearing that shit and thinking it’s the original. We take these old R’n’B songs, almost every song I loved growing up, and we fucking do them better than the originals! It’s a really hot tight show. We call it `The No Product Tour.’”
Why would a musician want to go back to dingy clubs after hitting the kind of rock’n’roll heights most mortals merely dream of? Clarence pauses, smiles, and says, “It’s something I need. I need the feedback because playing for 20,000+, the folks in the back could be playing Monopoly for all I know. You just don’t know if you have them all.” CC & The Red Bank Rockers certainly have every small crowd they play for in the palm of their collective hand. And why not? Jack Scarangella has drummed for Stevie Wonder. Keyboardist Jeff Levine was in The Chambers Brothers. Guitarist Billy Ryan played with blues legend James Cotton. Guitarist David Landau was in the bands of Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon. Collin Tilton, who heads up a smokin’ hot four-piece horn section, blew for Van Morrison. Bassist Harvey Brooks has played with Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and The Doors.
This is the kind of lineup that could shake the Earth off its axis. So might Clarence leave Bruce? The answer comes quick. “Oh no, God forbid! There’s no such thing as me ever leaving the E Street Band. Bruce needs time to do all the other things he does and that’s when I’m CC again. And I’m just starting to get back into the swing of singing. I’ve never really sang before, other than a few groans here and there. Now I’m singing lead and, I gotta tell ya, it gives me so much more appreciation for what Bruce does on such a grand scale night after night. I’m the guy’s biggest fan. If you’ve never seen him live, you don’t know how great he truly is. I still say he has yet to capture it on record but as we continue to record, we’re getting close.
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“I don’t think there’s ever been a band that works as hard. We practice hard. We perform hard. And Bruce doesn’t ask us to do anything that he won’t himself do. It’s our work and you get out of it what you put into it. Hell, that’s how it is with life. The culture that follows most star groups doesn’t apply to us. I’m not into a lot of those scenes so I don’t really know but I can say this—we’re straight, above-board, and that whole drug culture thing is totally contradictory to what we’re all about. We’re not resting on our laurels, or our reputation. We’re going out and creating a rep by doing what comes natural.
“Yes, Bruce is fortunate to have six people who are totally dedicated and devoted to him,” continues Clarence. “Just to be on that stage with him, watching him, seeing the show develop as it does, is quite a thrill to me still. It’s difficult to define. The feeling I get onstage with him is a natural high. I find myself almost forgetting about the audience and playing for him. And I know he plays for me. And, when we play for each other, it’s like, uh, we’re creating something. Every song is like a one-act play in and of itself.”
A silence ensues as we both ponder what was just said. I push Clarence to continue. After a long pause where I think he’s just not going to go down that conversational avenue anymore, he looks me right in the eye and says, “we just wouldn’t be The E Street Band without each individual character. It’s a chemistry thing. I prefer to be humble about it. There’s no need to verbalize it. Talk is cheap. You can see it and feel it at the shows. You know then what it is. They truly are—each and every guy—the most magnificent people I have ever met.”
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After telling Clarence how much I love those carefully rehearsed routines they do similar to James Brown who would be led off the stage in a cape before bursting back to the mic to yowl out more action, he surprises me. “they’re not rehearsed! I swear to you, Mike! Those bits come right out onstage in moments of inspiration on Bruce’s part. Each time he does it, it’s a take-off on what he did a few shows ago so we get to know and anticipate his every move.”
“Oh come on,” I challenge him. “You mean to tell me Bruce doing a perfect hook slide right through your legs isn’t carefully rehearsed?” At that he laughs. “I’m telling you, it happens within the rock’n’roll insanity of what we conjure up at any given moment. All the things that happen—from Bruce picking out a girl in the crowd to dance with onstage, or Bruce and Miami [Steve Van Zandt] having a tug of war, they all just happened spontaneously and, because they worked, it happens again…and again. It does not happen during rehearsals, I can assure you of that.
“I can sit there afterwards,” he continues, “and look on video at some of the things we’re done onstage and oftentimes I cannot remember even doing them. And if I tried to do them consistently, I’d never be able to get up! I’d be crippled! But when you’re out there, adrenaline takes over. It’s the best drug in the world.”
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Swearing some of the receptions the band garnered in Europe this past year were like “playing Philly every night,” Clarence claims “the energy level is as high and higher sometimes than right here in Jersey! Bruce sticks that mic out in the crowd and to hear these folks sing `Hungry Heart” in German, in French, is a kick that cannot be equaled.
Greenblatt and Clemons
Yeah, The Big Man has it made. He always wanted to own his own club. He’s in one of the most revered bands in the universe. He’s funking it on down with his own side-project band. And he gives me the scoop that he’s heading back into the studio with Bruce and the boys to work on a new album! He says he wants to do a solo record one day but he’s in no hurry. “Right now, I just want to play.”
The plumbers are fixing a leak. The carpenters are clearing more space. He’s being called on the intercom. He says he has to go. But he leaves me with one overriding sentiment—“enjoy life. That’s all that matters, man. We live in a time that’s very difficult. Everybody seems so depressed. People seem so down. This is the purpose of rock’n’roll. It’s a relief. It’s something to give you hope and good feelings in the midst of all your trials, troubles and tribulations. It’s something that comes through the cracks and says you can still enjoy life. It gives you another day.”
[Clarence Clemons passed away at age 69 in Florida on June 18, 2011, after suffering a stroke six days earlier.]
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