There will be a hell of a lot of Bruce and E-Street Band fans tonight who’ll be listening to some variation on the song above, in memory of the Big Man, King of the World, Emperor of the North Pole, Clarence Clemons, who died this Saturday due to complications from a stroke. Only 69 years old as well, way too young to die.
It was his saxophone, as much as anything that defined the sound of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, always there in the background, driving the songs and sometimes in the foreground, making them. Rosalita is one of these songs, a concert favourite, unthinkable without the Big Man there to lay down the horns. Jungleland is of course the other one:
Sometime in the mid-eighties Clarence Clemons also had a rare hit without Bruce and the rest of the E-Street Band, working with Jackson Browne on their own album, coming out with a song so very eighties that it makes me happy each time I hear it:
Goodbye Clarence; you’ll be missed.