The Irish Times – Saturday, July 2, 2011

Clarence Clemons: CLARENCE CLEMONS, who has died aged 69, was a saxophonist and, as a key member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, a highly influential rock musician of recent decades.

His imprint was all over Springsteen’s defining Born to Run album of 1975. Almost as much as the music, it was the sleeve image of Springsteen leaning nonchalantly on Clemons that symbolised the intense fraternal bonding which helped fuel Springsteen’s rise. Throughout the years of their greatest success, Clemons was a vital ingredient of Springsteen’s sound and an invaluable onstage foil to the “Boss”.

Clarence Clemons was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the eldest of the three children of Thelma Clemons and her husband Clarence, who owned a fish market. His parents worked long hours and were devoutly religious, and the young Clarence cut his musical teeth with the local church choir and in a gospel group. He used to help out with the family fish business after school, and shouldered some domestic responsibilities while his mother took a college course. “I didn’t have much time for childhood innocence,” he said later.

He began playing the saxophone after his father bought him an alto instrument one Christmas, and enrolled him in music lessons at a local college. He switched to the baritone sax, but decided the tenor sax was the way to go after feeling inspired to imitate the playing of King Curtis. He was also a keen football player, and won a football and music scholarship to Maryland State College. It looked as if he might be destined for a sporting career, but his footballing hopes were crushed by a serious car accident.

He had gained musical experience by playing with an R&B covers band, the Vibratones, and also played with Tyrone Ashley’s Funky Music Machine, an outfit featuring future members of Parliament-Funkadelic. Clemons moved to Newark, where he took a job as a counsellor to emotionally disturbed children at the Jamesburg Training School for Boys, while playing in clubs by night.

He was moving among the same circle of local musicians as Springsteen, and first ran into him when they were both playing in separate bars in the resort of Asbury Park. Clemons went to check out Springsteen and asked if he could play sax with him. Springsteen invited him to join in on a version of Spirit in the Night . “I sat in with him that night,” Clemons told People magazine. “It was phenomenal. We’d never even laid eyes on each other, but after that first song he looked at me, I looked at him, and we said ‘This is it’.”

By now Clemons had married and fathered two sons, Clarence III and Charles, by his first wife, but the union quickly became a casualty of his decision to quit his job and join the E Street Band.

Clemons stayed the course for Springsteen’s first couple of commercially unsuccessful albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, and The Wild, The Innocent the E Street Shuffle (both released in 1973), before the band-leader exploded into stardom with Born to Run (the story of how Clemons joined the E Streeters was alluded to in the song Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out ). Clemons’s saxophone featured prominently on Thunder Road, Jungle-land and Born to Run itself, and his background in R&B and soul lent an authentic earthiness to the soul-band feel of the E Street crew in their early days.

Clemons became an E Street mascot, his 6ft 4in bulk contrasting with that of the Boss onstage. His playing lit up some of Springsteen’s best-known pieces, including Badlands, The Ties That Bind, Independence Day and Bobby Jean. After the colossal success of the 1984 album Born in the USA and the follow-up, Tunnel of Love (1987), Springsteen decided he wanted a change, and in 1989 told the band members they were no longer required. Clemons was shocked, though for some years he had been pursuing musical directions of his own. Indeed, when he received Springsteen’s call, he was touring in Japan with Ringo Starr.

Clemons had formed his own band, the Red Bank Rockers, in 1981. An album, Hero , included a duet with Jackson Browne, Y ou’re a Friend of Mine , which became a Top 20 hit. He also played on Aretha Franklin’s 1985 hit Freeway of Love.

In 1999, Springsteen saw the error of his ways and recalled the E Street Band to his side for a reunion tour. The Rising (2002) was the first album he had made with the full E Street squad since Born in the USA.

Springsteen and the band were prominent on the Vote for Change tour in 2004, which aimed (unsuccessfully) to put a Democrat in the White House, and the E Streeters were also united behind Springsteen for the albums Magic (2007) and Working On a Dream (2009). In between, Clemons found time to perform with the band Temple of Soul. “We have one life and that life is on that stage,” he said. “Everything else doesn’t matter because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

In 2009 Clemons published his autobiography, Big Man: Real Life Tall Tales, which was hailed by the former US president and part-time saxophonist Bill Clinton as “an essential read for any music lover”. Clemons played on several tracks from Lady Gaga’s 2011 album Born This Way , and performed with her on the television show American Idol.

He had been experiencing health problems. He had two knee replacements in 2008, and also needed spinal surgery. He suffered a serious stroke earlier this month.

On his website, Springsteen wrote: “He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music.”

Clemons is survived by his sons Clarence, Charles, Christopher and Jarod, and his fifth wife, Victoria.

Clarence Anicholas Clemons: Born January 11th, 1942; died June 18th, 2011