Remembering Clarence

I'm a Jersey girl. I've lived in NJ since I was 8 months old. With the exception of other year of my life, I have lived in the Garden State my entire life. As much as  I hate it here, I love it here. If you take the area around exit 13- and 13A of the turnpike  (Newark, Elizabeth, think the opening montage from "The Sopranos") out of the equation, it's really a beautiful state.

New Jersey has given the world some great musicians. My parents generation had Sinatra. The generation between had Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. My generation had Bruce Springsteen, and then later Bon Jovi. Today the big group is My Chemical Romance. But in my heart and head, it's all about Bruce and the E Street band. And the best saxophonist to come from NJ had to be Clarence Clemons.

Clarence passed away a week ago,  at the age of 69, and to many of us who grew up listening to the Boss, hearing him play in the Stone Pony and the later in the Meadowlands- the loss hit hard. The man was a genius on the sax. He made it look easy. I tried to play sax in high school. It's not an easy instrument to play. If you look at his biography on Wikipedia, you can see all the bands, way to numerous to print here he played with. All the TV shows he made guest appearances on, including 'The Simpsons'.

Clarence wasn't born in NewJersey and didn't die there. But he was an integral part of the E Street band, in my eyes he was part of the New Jersey music legacy. He's really going to be missed.

Below is my favorite Springsteen songs- you can hear Clarence on the sax. The photo is from Wikipedia.
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Clarence can be heard at 1 minute 31 seconds in all his glory.

My favorite Springsteen song:

NJ's Greatest Poet

I have been trying for over half an hour to cut and paste this, but my computer is dying ,and for some reason will not lt me cut an paste to Blogger. I feel anxious, I was not planning on buying a new mac until next year, when money will be better.

This is the video- NJ's greatest Poet - and musician. Forget Whitman, Forget Joyce Kilmer, Forget Williams. Even (as much as I adore him) forget Ginzberg. (Do they even read "Howl" anymore?) My grandparents and parents had Sinatra.
We had the Boss.


.This video was made when I was in 10th grade, 2 years before "The River" came out and converted me to a Bruce fan. What is really amazing is this- the lyrics for the song- are after the second stanza, totally different then what appears on "The River", album. The music melody is the same. It's a good video- you can see Clarence Clemons and Stevie Van Zandt, and the Boss looking the way he looked in my teens an I had a crush on. To this day, if I was on a desert island and could only pick 5 songs to have with me, this would be on of the five.

I am indebted to Bob Fiddaman, for posting some Bruce clips on his blog yesterday for this. Lucky guy got to see him perform. Alas, I cannot say that. I have seen Clarence perform at the Stone Pony, but solo. I did see Bruce once on a vacation trip in LA, he and his wife were at the same Pizza restaurant I was eating it.
I almost choked on my pizza, I was so excited to see him.