The Word Cloud

It’s not always fashionable these days to admit to being a fan of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Not fashionable, that is, in certain circles, although there have been times in recent years when the world has kicked back and admitted that you know what, maybe we can allow ourselves a little admiration for a legend.

            Me, I’ve never made any apology for it; I grew up with Bruce, or at least it felt like I did. Listening to the late Roger Scott playing Springsteen bootlegs on Capital Radio because he felt that the world should hear them and realising that here was a songwriter and musician of such importance, such grandeur, that he would always transcend fashions and trendsetter foibles. It was music in its biggest sense, sweeping, cinematic and bold, conjuring Kerouac, Dennis Hopper, Steinbeck and rock and roll in Technicolour widescreen.

            And yesterday the pantone darkened a little as a light went out; Clarence Clemons, Springsteen’s sidekick and sax player for 40 years passed away.

            Clarence –

            The Big Man, the Bruce-proclaimed Master of the Universe –

            Gone.

            This. Is. Important.

            At least it is to me.

            At its finest, Springsteen’s music provides the backdrop to a nation, cramming stories that others would take 200,000 words to tell into four minutes of poetry, poetry that rides waves of guitar and keyboards and a big, crashing rhythm section. They’re stories of the lost and the troubled, stories of the wide-open spaces and highways and turnpikes and the people that travel along or live alongside these lonely, dream-filled, rattlesnake interstates. And much of their ability to connect, musically, to US history comes from the fact that in Clarence, there was man with a sound that gave them an unspoken resonance with music from an earlier era, one of prohibition and jazz clubs and John Coltrane.

            His soaring, joyous sax breaks were the starbursts, the thunder claps, the mile-high rollercoasters that projected a wall of sound up into the night and let it arc across the sky, from state to state and beyond.

            Blaze on, Clarence.