Credit: Far Out / Bruce Springsteen
Sun 2 August 2026 0:00, UK
Bruce Springsteen always understood that rock and roll isn’t something to be done by yourself.
Some of the greatest musicians of all time have tried their hand at making music on their own, and while there are some truly great musicians who have made it as solo acts, Springsteen’s entire persona always comes back to what the E Street Band did together. They were a tight unit every single time they performed, but there were many members of the band that meant a great deal to ‘The Boss’, even if they weren’t on the stage.
Because it’s not like he could have kept the band together for the rest of his life. There have been many periods where he created tunes that wouldn’t have worked with a full band behind him, but even when working on records like Nebraska, you could tell that the entire group was in solidarity behind him as he started singing about the most disturbing characters to ever emerge from his catalogue.
At the end of the day, though, The E Street Band was a family, and Springsteen would gladly have all of them back in the band if they wanted to be. Each of them brought something new to the table and delivered the right performance on every one of his albums, but Danny Federici was the first of the prime members of the group to pass away. Federici wasn’t on everything that ‘The Boss’ ever produced, but getting him on the title track of Born to Run would have been enough to put him in the upper echelon of players in his band.
Losing him wasn’t something that Springsteen took lightly, but Clarence Clemons was the kind of tragedy that Springsteen took the hardest. ‘The Big Man’ was one of the greatest saxophonists in rock and roll history, and any number of Springsteen’s songs would have never felt complete if it didn’t have one of those classic horn lines blaring over top of it, whether it was the main hook of the tune or one of the greatest solos of all time, like on ‘Jungleland’.
But Clemons was also more than just another member of the band to Springsteen; he was a long-lost brother in many regards. Both of them were different in every single way when they came off the stage, but when they embraced at the end of one of their shows, you could tell that something about the music brought them together in a way that no amount of talking ever could. So when you can communicate with someone like that, hearing that they’re gone feels like losing a piece of the sky.
And even when Springsteen tried to move on, he was fairly candid about Clemons occupying a lot of his day whenever he plays a show, saying, “The loss of Clarence and Danny still echoes every day in my life. I still don’t believe it. I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna see Clarence again? That doesn’t sound quite possible!’ I live with the dead every day at this point in my life. Whether it’s my father or Clarence or Danny, all those people sort of walk alongside you.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Having one of Clemons’s relatives replacing him onstage certainly doesn’t hurt, but that doesn’t mean that it was easy for someone to slide into that slot. In all fairness, anyone who had the saxophone in their hands after him had a massive undertaking to do, and Springsteen figured that everything wasn’t going to sound right until he felt like they had channelled the spirit of what Clemons could do.
So while Clemons and Federici are two of the power players from the beginning of Springsteen’s career, there was no way that he was going to forget their contributions to the band by any stretch. They were extended members of his musical family, and even if they have their fair share of living to do on another plane of existence, their spirit lives on every time he counts off ‘Born to Run’.
