19. June 2011 · Comments Off on RIP Clarence Clemons · Categories: Ain't That America?, Memoir

In late August of 1975 I was 13 just a week away from 14 and a week and a half from high school when music for me suddenly changed drastically.  If you were like me, you fell asleep with a small FM transistor radio under your pillow playing soft enough so Mom and Dad couldn’t hear it.

One of those nights it was so hot that I actually left my bedroom door open so a breeze could run through the apartment.

On that night, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Born to Run” came over the radio in it’s entirety.  From Thunder Road to Jungleland.  That big block of wood guitar.  Those keyboards that sounded like they come straight off a midway.  That bass and drum-kit driving, driving into the night, and that saxaphone…that soaring magical flow of brass that rose me above the street right down the gangway between our apartment and the next.

I can’t tell you how many times that saxaphone literally saved my life through the rest of the 70s.  Some of it’s just normal teenage hormonal angsty bullshit, some of it was real insanity that comes from living in as a teen in a major city in the 70s.

Thank you Big Man.  God bless and keep you in his band.

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