On the night of March 9, 2012, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band reached the line in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” that has always belonged to Clarence Clemons, and the band stopped playing. For the next minute and a half, the Apollo Theater in Harlem did the work the saxophone used to do. It was the first full concert the E Street Band had ever played without the Big Man.
Nine months without the Big Man
Clarence Clemons suffered a stroke at his home on Singer Island, Florida, on Sunday, June 12, 2011. He died of complications six days later, on the evening of June 18, at a hospital in Palm Beach. He was 69, and he had stood beside Springsteen for nearly 40 years.
The funeral was held on June 21 at the Royal Poinciana Chapel, a small church in Palm Beach, with about 150 mourners inside. Before he gave the eulogy, Springsteen played “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” alone on acoustic guitar, in a quiet, softened version. The service ended with Springsteen, Jackson Browne and members of the E Street Band playing “You’re a Friend of Mine,” Clarence’s 1985 hit with Browne.
A week later Springsteen posted a slightly revised version of the eulogy on his website. The line most fans remember answered the question everyone was asking, whether the band could go on.
Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies. He leaves when we die.
A small room in Harlem
The band’s first test came at a private concert for SiriusXM’s 10th anniversary. Tickets went only to subscribers, the show aired live on E Street Radio, and it was Springsteen’s first concert ever at the Apollo. The theater holds roughly 1,500 people, a tiny room by E Street standards. Tom Hanks, Michael J. Fox and Michael Douglas were among the guests.
The Wrecking Ball album had come out only days earlier, and the night carried several debuts at once: the first live performances of the new songs, a new five-piece horn section called the E Street Horns, and new percussionist Everett Bradley. Before the first song, each member walked onstage one at a time and touched the Apollo’s old good-luck tree stump on the way.
A nephew in the horn line
Springsteen had already said publicly that it would take a village to fill the Big Man’s shoes. Part of that village was Clarence’s nephew, Jake Clemons, who shared saxophone duties with Eddie Manion. According to Rolling Stone, Jake learned somewhere between 30 and 40 of his uncle’s solos, because the band treats those parts as part of the songs themselves.
For the first two numbers he stayed back with the horns. On the third song, “Badlands,” he stepped to the front of the stage to play his uncle’s solo, and the whole theater seemed to exhale.
The roll call
The first tribute came early, during a gospel-styled “My City of Ruins.” Springsteen introduced the band one by one, then asked the room whether anyone was missing. The crowd answered with long applause for Clarence and for organist Danny Federici, who had died in 2008. Springsteen kept repeating the same promise.
If you’re here and we’re here, then they’re here.
The silence in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”
“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” came in the encore, second to last. The song, from the 1975 album Born to Run, tells a loose version of how the E Street Band came together, and one line in it marks the moment the Big Man joins.
Springsteen first held the microphone out and let the crowd carry part of the song. When he reached Clarence’s line, the band dropped out and he sang it alone. Then everything stopped. The audience filled the gap, shouting Clarence’s name again and again. A Spin reporter in the room timed the roar at 82 seconds.
The song came back in through the horns. Instead of one saxophone, the whole section played Clarence’s famous two-bar figure in unison, and the band kicked back into gear. The Rolling Stone reviewer wrote that the moment could easily have been a sad one and turned out exuberant instead. Steven Van Zandt later told the magazine he had been awe-struck by how perfectly it worked.
What the pause became
The Wrecking Ball tour opened nine days later in Atlanta, and the stop in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” went with it. It stayed in nearly every one of the tour’s 134 shows as the nightly tribute to Clarence, and fans in arenas and stadiums around the world learned to wait for it.
Clarence was still on the record, too. His last recordings with the band appeared on Wrecking Ball, including the saxophone solo on “Land of Hope and Dreams.” In April 2014 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the E Street Band, and his widow, Victoria, accepted on his behalf.
In November 2014, the Apollo concert became the very first official release in the Bruce Springsteen Archives series. The pause is on that record, as long as the crowd made it.