Charles Shaar Murray on Clarence Clemons
Lean on me: Clemons + Springsteen in Eric Meola's Born To Run cover shot.
Here is Charles Shaar Murray’s contribution to my Clarence Clemons obit in today’s Daily Telegraph; his quotes fell victim to space considerations.
“Clarence Clemons was a limited player but an enormously effective one,” says rock music authority Charles Shaar Murray. “He did one thing – a glorious tenor sax rock & roll noise – and he did it fantastically well.”
Murray believes the presence of a larger-than-life African-American in the line-up of an otherwise white group carried particular significance in that racially sensitive period. “On stage Clemons symbolised Springsteen’s musical and cultural debt to rhythm & blues, so the impact he had on audiences was infinitely greater than that of some skinny white kid blowing sax,” says Murray.
“Clemons was also important as a mainstay of The E Street Band, since Bruce took a couple of albums to settle on the classic line-up. Clemons was part of the old gang from the hometown – Asbury Park, New Jersey – with whom Springsteen had grown up and struggled, so he helped Springsteen to stay rooted.”
I was particularly pleased to talk to Murray about Clemons, since news of the saxophonist’s death had immediately brought to my mind CSM’s NME review of a Bruce Springsteen show in Houston in October 1975. In that piece, Murray perceptively pinpointed Clemons’ role as a visual foil to Springsteen.
Read the Telegraph obituary here and CSM’s 1975 review here.