Big Man

August 31, 2009
As the saxophonist for the E Street Band, the famed backup band for Bruce Springsteen, Clemons has lived a kind of pop music celebrity that's rare these days, a life spent rising and staying at the top of the album charts and performing before stadiums packed with tens of thousands of people. Along the way, he's mastered the art of telling yarns that are entertaining, whether plausible or dubious. It's a skill acquired during long hours waiting for gigs, traveling to gigs and recovering from gigs (Clemons now suffers from knee, hip and other joint ailments). His storytelling prowess is on display in this memoir, written with friend and producer Reo (My Wife and Kids
; 'Til Death
). The book is part episodic memoir (printed on white pages) and part bull session (“legends” printed on gray pages). The authors trade chapters about how the E Street Band got its name, how Spring-steen and Clemons met and why Big Man decided not to cut his hair, among other things. The intent is to give readers, especially fans, an idea of life behind the music by sharing the stories bandmates told each other. It's a novel approach to memoir that unfortunately skimps on serious insight and Springsteen's music and too often settles on nostalgia and celebrity name-dropping. Fans of Springsteen (who contributes a foreword to the book) will no doubt be more tolerant and eager to savor every page.

August 15, 2009
Bruce Springsteen's ebullient saxophonist and onstage foil recounts nearly four decades of the rock'n' roll life, assisted by best friend Reo, a TV writer and producer.

This account, the first by a member of the E Street Band, is"not a standard memoir," the authors warn. Half the chapters can be taken literally, but the rest, labeled"Legends," feature imagined conversations, altered times and places and more—just what a musician might offer up in the long hours on the road, fueled by Jack Daniels and other mind-altering substances, many of which Clemons cops to consuming over the years. Among the luminaries in these droll, quasi-fictional encounters are Thomas Pynchon, Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Redd Foxx, Fidel Castro, Robert DeNiro, Bob Dylan and Groucho Marx. Clemons demonstrates that he might be every bit the raconteur that the Boss is in concert. For example, he describes how, in 1972 gig at Sing Sing Prison, the band escaped with their lives after their musical equipment blew out by jamming for an hour with just sax and drums. Fans will find especially fascinating the Big Man's account of the marathon Born to Run (1975) recording, the early road groupies and at least some of his five wives, the ornate touring sanctuary known as the"Temple of Soul" and the E Street Band's late organist, Danny Federici, who was given to such hijinks as running down hotel corridors naked. Any resentment lingering from Springsteen's 1989 decision to break up the band—a decision happily rescinded several years later—has dissipated, leaving only gratitude to a friend responsible for the best years of the author's life.

Clemons imparts a warm, Indian summer feeling that deftly accompanies his rollicking reminiscences, making this a must for the legion of fans that he and the Boss have accumulated over the decades.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2009
As Springsteen fans all know, Clemons is the Big Man of the title, the E Street Bands larger-than-life sax player since the early days. Funny, entertaining, often profane, his book is a collection of stories real and imagined, presented out of chronology, from life on the road in one of rocks most famous bands. It begins and ends with the bands 2009 Super Bowl appearance, with Clemons, fresh from his second knee-replacement surgery, wondering whether he can play through the pain. In between come accounts of, for instance, his prophetic 1966 encounter with an elderly woman who tells him hes going to be a very important man, the night he first met Springsteen, early and recent E Street gigs, and, of course, his relationship with Springsteen, my anchor and my friend . . . my brother. En route through the book, we learn many incidental and fascinating details of the big mans character, habits, and likes: he likes to fish and cook Italian, and to play the bagpipes before every show, presumably to warm up.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)