Aging and ailing, Big Man keeps rocking

By KILEY ARMSTRONG

NEW YORK — It’s a touching moment, increasingly familiar to fans watching the E Street Band make its entrance: As the audience howls in anticipation and the rest of the band stands at the ready, Bruce Springsteen gently and lovingly helps Clarence Clemons walk to his saxophone at the front of the stage.

“Take your time,” Scooter says reassuringly as they inch forward. “Don’t rush. You’ve got time.”

Time is on the minds of many as E Street nears the finale of back-to-back tours that have kept the band globe-trotting for the better part of two years.

Death has touched a band that had remained unchanged for decades. And Clemons — the Big Man — is showing his 67 years. Rife with painful ailments, he moves gingerly, a huge contrast to Springsteen’s explosive and unflagging energy. Both knees have been replaced; he spent a long time in a wheelchair.

Then in February, the band appeared at the Super Bowl, before a U.S. television audience estimated at almost 100 million. And Clemons stood.

Since then, he’s logged thousands of miles with E Street. Amid doctors and physical therapy, he’s wedged in book-signings for “Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales,” released in October. And he’s started a second book with friend and Hollywood producer Don Reo.

If sheer willpower is all it takes, the Big Man will never be down for the count.

“I always said in my life that when it doesn’t feel joyous any more, then it will be time to quit,” he said in a recent interview. “But the joy is getting better and better.”

Clemons got his first horn at age 9. He was awed by the sax sounds of King Curtis, Junior Walker, Sil Austin and Boots Randolph — and by the voice of Aretha Franklin, with whom he later recorded.

In his youth, he sloughed off racism. He had trouble forming attachments in his segregated, black high school, because it was outside the white community where his family lived.

For years, he seemed destined for football. After a car wreck ruined his Cleveland Browns tryout, he decided “God wanted me to do something else.”

He refuses to dwell on the negative. Ask about the glory days, though — the band’s gritty, camaraderie-fueled beginnings in the 1970s — and his eyes light up.

His book details the rags-to-riches adventures. As legend has it, a gale blew the door off an Asbury Park, N.J., club as Clemons — horn always at the ready — entered and asked to sit in with the Boss-to-be.

He shared a house with keyboardist Danny Federici, drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez — and three boa constrictors.

The old ties still bind E Street. But Springsteen has remained his No. 1 bro-mance.

“When I first met him, I didn’t want to let go, and he didn’t want to let go,” said Clemons. “It’s like you finally found out what you were looking for all your life artistically, creatively.”

They were “inseparable. ... We just talked about ourselves, about what we wanted in life.”

The connection is “still there. I love being with him. I love being around him.”

Clemons admits he can’t understand how the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame could have inducted Springsteen without E Street. “We have been together as a band for 33, 34 years. And we contributed so much,” he says.

But he takes the high road: “When a fan says, ‘Man, you saved my life; I heard “Jungleland” ... and I cried ... and I felt joy in my life again,’ that’s my hall of fame.”

And to be honest, he’s had problems far greater than any Hall of Fame concerns: the knees; three hip replacements; two eye surgeries; a pacemaker; sleep apnea. He’s avoiding back surgery because “the down time is so long.”

Powerful narcotics after the knee replacements muddled his thinking, triggering depression and self-doubt — so he swapped them for a diet-and-fitness regime.

“I stopped smokin’ pot. I stopped doing any of that stuff,” except for a rare, light beer, watered down by ice.

He likes the new feeling of playing with a clear head.

“The stage is a healing floor — no matter how bad you hurt.”

On Nov. 22 in Buffalo, the band has one last blowout. Then they’ll go their separate ways for who knows how long.

“We’ll be seein’ you further up the road,” Springsteen reassured the New York City crowd.

But retirement is “something I think about,” says Clemons. “I’ll be 70 years old in a couple of years. I don’t know how much energy I’ll have left. That energy, I want to spend with my family.”

The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.