Missing Clarence Clemons
I was reading a book on the train yesterday. "Neurologists at Stanford University," the chapter said, "have demonstrated that when we listen to music it is the silent intervals in what we hear that trigger the most intense, positive brain activity. In part, this reflects the way our brains are always searching for closure. When we confront silence, the mind reaches outward." The passage came to mind when I heard the news.
With Clarence's passing, the silent intervals, the gaps, fell out all over my favorite songs. Born to Run lost half its backbone and its first break. Thunder Road lost its culmination. Rosalita lost the lightness of its jump. Drive All Night lost heartsick hours on the imagined road. And of course there was Jungleland. The song almost disappeared. Without Clarence, there came a silence of 10 seconds… a minute… two minutes… nearly three, a musical eternity, before the piano led to the end of the song.
The Jungleland sax solo was not a literal silence. It wasn't even a pure solo. If you knocked the instrument from the mix or just listened with half an ear, you could hear other sounds playing background texture.
But in the narrative, in the story of the song, the sax was everything, and everything was silence. The machine was sleek. The rain was soft. The kids were like shadows. Highways were operas and fights ballets.
Noise broke out in the night but then subsided, the players vanishing. Sex came in whispers. Death came with an echo. The saxophone solo explained the gauze, how we perceived a world through our wounds. Our senses surprised us, and alone, quietly, we tried to take it all in.
Without that solo, how would we get by? The question was a silly one, self-centered and overwrought. But to those of us who looked to music for answers, moments like that solo were critical. When we looked, we didn't often find answers directly. What turned up all the time, though, was sympathy, consolation at not finding what we sought. The affinity came in stories. In the accounts we received, listening closely enough, we could hear points forward. The solo was a therapy. When I heard news last night, I didn't know how to react. Where were my tools?
So, I went to bed. I posted on Facebook before I did, with an image that had come to mind that had made me happy – that somewhere a pearly gate had blown off its hinges, and there stood a big man in a white suit. The shaggy God story wrote itself. But that idea was the only one to make me happier. I was fighting off thinking about a line from A Visit From the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan was responsible for writing the only Powerpoint slide to ever make me cry, and anybody who had read the book knew it. The line/slide was about silence in songs, with a wife raising her voice into a shout. "The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL."
Clarence, we knew, hoped the hardest against the real end.
He had taken Springsteen's break-up of the E Street Band roughest, having committed the band to his identity. At the brief 1995 reunion, captured in the Blood Brothers documentary, the lingering separation and hurt were obvious. When the band finally did resume four years later, no one enjoyed the opportunity more visibly. As much as could be written at his death about influences and stylings, Clarence most crucially held the longest note, not just in the band but for the band.
Without him, I doubted a reunion would've happened, taking with it the full E Street Band time I was able to witness. My very first show, the seats were just off Clarence's side of the stage. The first time he turned our way, it was surprising how nuts we went. Here came the Big Man and the sparks. Couple years later, I got an autograph from him and even an interview. (I couldn't have been more nervous. He couldn't have been more laid-back.) In concert, my favorite moment may have been hearing the Jungleland solo at Fedex Field, from sad folding-chair seats at the field's wrong end, 90 yards from the stage. The sax floated so easily up and over the crowd to where we stood.
Everyone who went to a show had the same experience. There was always a point in the night when the claim Clarence was the biggest man in the universe somehow came true. Clips to this effect filled my streams last night. Badlands. Ties That Bind. Spirit in the Night. The list went on and on. Secret Garden in rare plays. Radio Nowhere recently.
The mourning continues today in the feeds but so do the videos.
All of the gaps that exist in the songs now, the silences that mean a for-real end, the mind reaches outward, like the scientists say. How joyous it is to find so much sound there, waiting for us to remember.





