Miami Steve eulogizes the Big Man, says E-Street will go on

Miami Steve Van Zandt

In an eloquent send off to the late Clarence “The Big Man” Clemmons, the saxophonist of Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band, guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt said the band will continue to tour and perform because “that’s really all we know how to do.” Clemmons died during the past weekend of complications from a stroke he suffered the week before.

Here’s what Miami Steve had to say:

“Rock ‘n’ roll has lost an irreplaceable performer. The E Street Band has lost its second member. And, personally, I have lost a lifelong friend and brother. Rock ‘n’ roll historians will discuss in great detail and lengthy discourse the profound racial implications and effect of a white rock band in the early ‘70s having a black man with such a strong featured presence as well as the unmistakeable and dangerously unfashionable … more than just a nod, but marriage to tradition, by the inclusion of, to many, the embarrassingly and hopelessly anachronistic saxophone. It was a time of reaching for the future. Glam had started. And yet Bruce Springsteen decided to keep a firm grasp of the past, as he looked ahead. Commercial suicide for anyone less talented than he.

Band members have a special bond. A great band is more than just some people working together. It’s like a highly specialized army unit, or a winning sports team. A unique combination of elements that becomes stronger together than apart. We become a part of each other and experience marvelous, miraculous moments in life that only we truly share. We will continue to make music and perform. Let’s face it, that’s all we really know how to do. But it will be very different without him. Just as it’s been different without Danny (Federici), our first lost comrade.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist. It’s a different world without Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Jones and the rest. But like all of them, Clarence leaves us his work, which will continue to inspire us and motivate us, and future generations, forever. Rock ‘n’ roll is our religion, and we will continue to lose disciples as we go, but we pick up the fallen flag and keep moving forward, bringing forth the good news that our heroes have helped create, their bodies lost, but their spirits and their good work everlasting.

And for the E Street Band, the heart of us, Clarence and Danny, will always be there, stage right. So thank you, Clarence. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. But I’ll see you again, soon enough. Thank you for blowing life-changing energy and hope into this miserable world with your big, beautiful lungs. And thank you for sharing a piece of that big heart nightly with the world. It needs it. You and that magnificent saxophone, celebrating, confessing, seeking redemption and providing salvation all at once. Speaking wordlessly, but so eloquently, with that pure sound you made. The sound of life itself.”

Now, of course, Bruce Springsteen is never coming to me for advice, but if he did I would tell him not to try to replace The Big Man. He was irreplaceable. But I could see him adding a three-piece horn section: sax, trumpet, trombone. And although it was always one of the highlights of any Springsteen concert, he’s got to retire Jungleland. It might be played as well by another saxophonist, but it just wouldn’t be the same song without Clarence. That song is just as much his as it is Bruce’s.