RIP Clarence Clemons

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Yikes---the E Street Band's imposing saxman, Clarence Clemons, died of a stroke yesterday in Florida. He was 69. I did not know he was that old---an age that is not that far in the future of any Baby Boomer, but pretty old for a touring rocker in a rowdy band. Live performances by Bruce Springsteen can never be the same, in my opinion.

I was privileged to see Clemons twice in during fall and early winter of 1975 at the Auditorium in Chicago, when for a brief period a sort of SpringsteenMania swept the nation (for young adults, at least). Apart from Springsteen, Clemons was the salient presence on the stage and in the music. This 1978 clip gives a few glimpses of the Big Man and what he contributed to the lineup.



10th Avenue Freeze-Out, Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (19 September 1978, videotape transfer of live performance at the Capitol Theater, Passaic, NJ), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

It's Bedtime!

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Apropos of nothing: RIP Chris Kanyon and Herb Cohen.

Kanyon was a minor figure during the WCW "invasion" of the WWF back around the turn of the century, when professional wrestling was still entertaining. Beer-D reminded me that he was mainly known for entering the ring spouting some sort of lame monologue that ended with the rhetorical question "Who better than Kanyon?" Then, just about anyone would enter the ring and kick is ass seven ways for Sunday. It was his role. HuffingtonPost wants to make something of the fact that he was openly gay, but I doubt that gayness is particularly rare in the wrestling racket. In fact, gayness (and gaylike styling weirdness) were professional wrestling conventions for awhile, and treated in a fairly matter-of-fact manner insofar as opponents of the gay characters never resorted to any particularly homophobic invective. Professional wrestling must be one of the hardest things in the world to do, and "detraining" from it has to be much more complex than retiring from a mainstream athletic career due to the toll of steroids and brutal physical punishment. Peace, Chris.

Herb "Herbie" Cohen was a picaresque character, evidently capable of being a major league motherfucker, who was tightly enmeshed in the careers of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits, plus a menagerie of unlikely lesser lights. The Barry Miles critical biography of Zappa tells of Herbie's alleged mismanagement of and skimming from Zappa's various record labels, not to mention a previous career selling weapons of war to African insurgencies and manning the barricades for the Mothers of Invention at a 1969 Berlin concert in which the Baader-Meinhof Gang (aka the Red Army Faction) turned things very scary for the group. Herbie was the subject of many in-jokes on Zappa's albums from the '70s, but they eventually had a non-amicable parting of the ways late in the decade. You can see Herbie rising like a wraith from a crack in the pavement in the surreal wraparound painting (verso) for the cover of Zappa's 1973 Over-Nite Sensation. Now he's a wraith for real.

Oh, and get back to bed! I don't wanna hear a peep outta ya! Thank you for your attention to this matter!