R.I.P. Clarence Clemons

It's ironic that news of the passing of 69-year-old E Street Band saxophoist Clarence Clemons arrived in the midst of rumours of a new Bruce Springsteen album and speculation as to whether it would feature the E Street Band or show new material in a different setting.

On the strength of The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils and Dust and The Seeger Sessions it's possible to imagine Springsteen without the E Street Band, but I find it impossible to imagine the E Street Band without Clarence Clemons.

While Clemons had worked in other settings with, among others, Ringo Starr, Jackson Browne, Aretha Franklin and Lady Gaga, it's hard to imagine any of that happening if it hadn't been for a legendary encounter on the Jersey Shore that may or may not have happened quite the way the participants tell it, but if it didn't go down that way it should have.

Actually, the way it should have been factor goes well back before thatr. A much younger Clarence allegedly wanted an electric train set for Christmas but his fish merchant father bought him an alto sax and arranged lessons.

Forced to practice in the back room of the fish shop while his peers were playing baseball, Clarence wasn't a happy camper but switched to baritone for a stint in his high school's jazz band before his uncle gave him a record by R&B tenor player King Curtis. which didn't quite seal his fate, but was a vital factor in the way things turned out.

A music and football scholarship took Clemons to college in Maryland and a sociology major landed him a job in Newark, New Jersey counselling disturbed youths. In the bars and clubs along the Jersey Shore he worked with bands like Norman Seldin and the Joyful Noyze before the dark and stormy night that took him from the Wonder Bar to a place called The Student Prince, where he sat in with a scrawny kid called Bruce Springsteen on Spirit in the Night. Whether the door actually blew off the club that night doesn't matter. If it didn't, it should have.

Anyone familiar the gatefold sleeves of the first two Springsteen albums, densely packed with lyrics in fine print can't help noticing the trimming down that occurred on Born to Run and subsequent albums, but after two less than spectacularly successful albums, number three was, to all intents and purposes, crunch time.

And when you look at the front cover of Born to Run, what do you see? A grinning Springsteen leaning against someone. Turn to the back and you'll spot that the someone is a largish Afro-American wearing a black hat and playing a sax.

The word about Springsteen had been out for a while, largely based on his strengths as a live performer rather than the records, good though they might have been. There were a myriad of new Dylans out there, but there weren't too many that sparked off huge ex-college footballers homking on a tenor sax, were there?

Anyone who's seen the video footage that turned up on the box sets that celebrated the 30th anniversaries of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town will be all too aware of Clemons' importance as the man mountain visual counterpoint to the energetic front man. As Springsteen hopped and bopped Clarence anchored the visuals on stage right the same way Garry Tallent's bass anchored the music.

The Springsteen phenomenon was built on the strength of the live performances between Born to Run and Darkness, fuelled by the recording standoff as Springsteen sorted out his issues with former manager Mike Appel. No new record? Well, play the songs anyway. Need to get the word out? Well there are these FM stations that'll broadcast the sold out shows from medium sized venues like San Francisco's Winterland. Bootleggers, roll those tapes!

It'd be easy to run on from there, telling much the same story as the flood of newspaper and magazine obituaries, the disappointment when Springsteen put E Street on ice in 1989, the collaborations and side projects, the 1999 reunion tour and subsequent albums, how much he contributed to, say, Spirit in the Night, Rosalita, Born to Run and Jungleland, all of which went on to become staples in the E Street live set as Springsteen developed into the stature that allowed him to sell out multiple nights in stadium sized venues…

But if you're not familiar with the man, his stature and his contribution to post-seventies rock, I'd point you right here and rest my case.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia on 11 January 1942, Clemons suffered a massive stroke at his Florida home on June 12 and despite hospitalization and subsequent brain surgery, departed this life on 18 June 2011.

Rest in peace, Big Man.

Owsley Stanley

With a recent focus on the fiction end of the spectrum, it's been a while since I looked at my Interesting Times history of the latter part of the twentieth century, but I will be back there, and, eventually, my attention will turn to the antecedents of those halcyon days fondly remembered as The Summer of Love.

By the time the hype machine had moved into high gear in mid-1967, the original factors that had created the San Francisco West Coast scene were in the process of being swamped, both by an influx of would-be hippies and a media orthodoxy that has produced a conventional wisdom about what was going on in those parts that would seem to differ markedly from the actual historical reality.

Looking back, the inevitable tendency is to classify things into convenient categories, so you'd probably expect most of those involved to have fitted into a generally environmentalist, probably significantly vegetarian and committedly left wing political world view. The reality, when you start looking at these things, invariably fails to fit into those convenient categories.

That San Francisco scene was the result of a number of intersecting strands that ran right back past World War Two, and there was a rather diverse mix of influencers that ran into the confluence.

Among other things, you had the legacy of the beat era, the poetry and jazz scene that coalesced around Ferlinghetti's City Lights book store, the Bay area folkie bluegrass scene that moulded the players who ended up in the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which threw up concert entrepreneur Bill Graham, the Texas diaspora that brought Chet Helms and Janis Joplin into town and the Stanford University writing school environment that gave us Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

And that was on the western side of the bay. Throw in the eastern side around Berkeley and Oakland and there are a whole new batch of ingredients that went into the mix, including the Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam Moritorium and the Hells Angels.

Looking at that list of influences there's more than one maverick element, but if you were looking for someone who out-mavericked most of the rest of them you'd probably find yourself looking in the general direction of one Augustus Owsley Stanley III, who died in a car crash in North Queensland on 13 March this year.

Now, the average reader might be surprised to see an obituary to a non-musician on these music pages, but apart from Owsley's status as the chemical architect who provided the substance that fuelled much of the West Coast exploration of inner space his involvement with the Grateful Dead was a key influence on much that came afterwards.

For a start, his status as the Dead's sound man, and the financial resources he contributed that helped build the Dead's Wall of Sound concert audio system shaped much of what ca,me afterwards when it came to the sonic presentation of rock & roll, though few of his successors went to quite the same lengths.

Then his espousal of recording what was passing through that system laid the foundation for the whole tape trader scene which the Dead exploited to build a sustainable marketing operation that continues to this day. He also made significant contributions to the iconography of the Dead, including the Lightning Bolt Skull Logo.

And that's without considering any of his widespread influence as an industrial-quantity manufacturer of LSD.

When my attention returns to that Interesting Times project and I get to that particular era it would, perhaps, have been interesting to interview the Bear, but I suspect that any intrusion into the environs of his home on the Atherton Tablelands would have produced an acerbic reaction.

He was not, by all accounts, a man who suffered gladly, and it seems fair to conclude that he regarded almost everyone who disagreed with him as a fool. According to the Dead's Jerry Garcia, "There's nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldn't cure" hail lyricist John Perry Barlow is on record as saying "If you wanted to be an idiot and do something any way but his, that was your decision. And he was not surprised you would choose to be an idiot. Because you were. And he was probably right."

More along the same lines here.

Perhaps the most extreme example of his idiosyncrasies was his belief that humans should be totally carnivorous and the fact that he claimed to have existed on a diet of meat, eggs, butter and cheese since 1959.

The grandson of a US Senator and Governor of Kentucky, Stanley ended up in Berkeley in 1963 after an enlistment in the US Air Force and a spell studying ballet in Los Angeles. Involvement with the production of what he subsequently labelled the sacramental substances predictably led to legal entanglements and a spell in prison, and after he was released he returned to work with the Dead, and migrated to Australia after becoming convinced that it was the most likely place to survive an imminent ice age.

Obituaries often end with the suggestion that we'll never see his like again, but in Owsley's case that statement is truer than most.