“Too fucking big to die”: the musician Bruce Springsteen wouldn’t be here without
Sometimes, a band member’s departure or passing can rock the group so hard that it becomes impossible to carry on without them. Perhaps their contributions were so instantly recognisable or essential to a group that nobody else could possibly fill their shoes, or maybe there was always a pact of sorts that the band should remain as one lineup from beginning to end and that the demise of a member would immediately spell the end. Led Zeppelin knew that things would not be the same without John Bonham, for example, and following his untimely death in 1980, the band would immediately call it quits.
However, there are other cases where the death of a member has spurred the rest of the band on to continue making music together, believing that that’s what the deceased member would have wanted. AC/DC, who also lost their lead vocalist in Bon Scott in 1980, did consider throwing in the towel, but after Scott’s family insisted that he would have urged the band to carry on, they brought in Brian Johnson of the British hard rock group Geordie – a vocalist who Bon Scott was said to have been impressed by previously.
It must be hard to make a decision of such huge proportions in an emotionally straining time, but such are the realities of life that bands are often faced with making a firm choice to keep going or call it a day. While there have been several members of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band over the years, there are some who have been part of the furniture for so long that it would be devastating to the band to lose them – and that doesn’t just apply to The Boss himself.
In 2011, the band would learn of the passing of their saxophonist, Clarence Clemons, who had been a member of the E Street Band ever since their inception in 1972. While the group obviously revolves around whether Springsteen is still breathing and well enough to perform, the loss of such a key member of the band was a significant blow to the members, and having also lost original organ player Danny Federici only three years prior, it was another major stumbling block for the group to overcome.
With two notable members of the band gone, the E Street Band were at something of an emotional crossroads, and Springsteen himself would acknowledge this in his obituary for Clemons, also known affectionately as The Big Man. In the essay that he published following the saxophonist’s death, he noted that he had lost “my inspiration, my partner, my lifelong friend,” and in remembering the good times the two of them shared together, he would go on to say how “standing together we were badass, on any given night, on our turf, some of the baddest asses on the planet.”
Despite this loss, however, Springsteen was resilient and felt determined to carry on with Clemons’ spirit still coursing through the band even in his absence. Nothing like this could tear the rest of the group apart according to Springsteen, who stated that “Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies. He leaves when we die.”
While the band would eventually choose to recruit Clemons’ nephew Jake to fill his role in the group, a position he remains in to this day, they knew that even in his passing, he would remain with them. “How big was the Big Man?” Springsteen would ask. “Too fucking big to die. And that’s just the facts.”
