There are obvious spots where he pauses to acknowledge the losses; every show review describes them. (If you haven’t read reviews and you want to discover these moments yourself, as I did at my first show, bookmark this piece and read it later.) In the elegiac “My City of Ruins” (from “The Rising,” his epic album of grief to commemorate 9/11), he announces a roll call for his band members, introducing them one by one, and then asks, “Is anybody missing?” over and over, as the crowd screams an ever-louder “Yes!” What began early in the tour as a spoken riff about the loss, “If you’re here, and we’re here, than they’re here” is now, in mid-tour, part of the song, and the crowd sings along. The first time I saw him, in Madison Square Garden, that ruined me. I had never heard the closing lyrics, “With these hands, with these hands,” as a prayer before.

The show famously ends with “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” the E Street Band’s founding myth, which tells the story of how Springsteen and Clemons met, solidified the band, and changed one another’s life. After the line “When they made the change uptown and the big man joined the band,” Bruce goes silent, the jumbo televisions in every arena now show a montage of Clemons photos, to crowd cheers and tears. After that, “all the little pretties,” most of them now 40 to 60, “wave their hands” like it’s 1975.

Seeing the show a second time, in San Jose Tuesday night after New York two weeks earlier, it worked on a deeper level. I came to feel that even the tour’s joyous climax – Springsteen’s backwards plunge into the pit from mid-arena, when the crowd rapturously and reliably ferries him from one stage to the next – had to do with death, and our physical duty to help deliver one another from this world to the next. That might be because I wasn’t a spectator, but part of the crowd in the pit, charged with the duty of carrying him safely overhead. (For ultra-fans: I know he body-surfed at several shows toward the end of the 2009 “Working on a Dream” tour; this feels more central to the tour.)

As he passed above me, dressed in all black, drenched in sweat, I felt his literal body weight in my hands as I handed him back to the folks behind me. (I had a lot of help – we were never in danger of dropping him, only of maybe devouring him with love, lust and need.)  The corporeal reality, his body in my hands, reminded me for one eerie moment of the duty of a pall-bearer. I thought about Anna Deavere Smith’s “Let me down easy,” her poignant show about illness and dying. We do physical and spiritual work helping one another die – and helping one another cope with death, too.  It’s all here, in this one show.

The “Wrecking Ball” tour is also making me more conscious of Springsteen’s Catholic upbringing (which was maybe more overtly on display in “Devils and Dust.”) In the haunting gospel “Rocky Ground,” he’s the shepherd who needs his flock. “We are Alive,” a song told from the point of view of the dead in their graves who declare that their “spirits rise,” opens with a reference to “Calvary Hill,” which is one of the album’s two references to Calvary, where Jesus died. The other reference is sort of controversial. In his searing “We Take Care of Our Own,” an indictment of all the ways we actually don’t do that in this country, he rails against our indifference to the struggles of the poor, “from the shotgun shack to the Superdome,” continuing

There ain’t no help, the Calvary stayed home

There ain’t no one hearing the bugle blowin’

Springsteen fan boards immediately lit up about the “mistake” – he would seem to have meant “cavalry,” the soldiers who charge in on horseback to save the day, often at the cry of a bugle – but I recognized his Catholic school education, in which you learn the excruciating physical details of Jesus’s suffering and death at Calvary before you learn about divisions of the military, and you confuse the two words for the rest of your life. Two other recent “Calvary-cavalry” mix-ups come from two other Catholics, Bill O’Reilly, who confused the two when reading his Lincoln audiobook, and Conan O’Brien, who reportedly mixed them up in a comic-dramatic rendition of “War Horse.” Even though the song’s official lyrics were later corrected to “cavalry,” he sang “Calvary” again Tuesday night, another deeply Catholic reflex that provided a clue to why his rituals of grief and redemption are so physical.

Of course his physical performance isn’t only about death and grief, it’s about love and sex. Early in the show the 62-year-old promised to send his aging crowd home “with your back aching and your hands aching and your voice hoarse and your feet aching and your knees aching – and your sexual organs stimulated.” At the end, during the six-song encore, he asked us “are your sexual organs stimulated?” Apparently dissatisfied with the answer, he launched into the rollicking teenage love song “Rosalita.”

I was singing along with “Rosalita” in high school, back when you could sing “we’re gonna play some pool, skip some school, act real cool” without nostalgia or irony. The fact that I sang along with “Thunder Road” just as passionately – particularly the searing line “so you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore” — at 17 today seems a little odd.

Or maybe not. My mother died after a long fight with cancer when I was 17. I saw my first Springsteen show a few months later, at Madison’s Dane County Coliseum. That time, it wasn’t about mourning. Unbelievably (to me, to this day), he jumped off the stage and danced with me and another woman to “Rendezvous,” a sweet pop-love song that’s only on “Tracks”; I stopped telling that story after he danced with Courtney Cox on the “Dancin’ in the Dark” video. Back then I needed cheering up, a way out of the land of sickness and death, grounding in the world of youth and joy, moving on without my mother. I took my little sister to her first show a year later, when she was just 14, to save her from the undertow of too-early grief as well. (We still see him together every chance we get; we were side by side in the pit Tuesday night.)

Now, though, we need a different way to approach death, as losses mount in middle age, and here he is again for us, with a tour that acknowledges our changed relationship with time. And we’re there for him, too. I’ve always felt that those in the pit were the anointed, the saved – you have to win a lottery, and if you lose, you stand fenced outside in general admission, like the damned. This time I wondered whether we in the “pit” are in fact saved. We spend so much time writhing beneath him, reaching up to touch his hand, or just his clothes; hot, thirsty, craving a drop of water from when he periodically soaks the crowd with a drenched rag. I know we aren’t damned, but maybe it’s purgatory?

If so, he’s there in purgatory with us, and we’re all trying to take one another to the Promised Land. “I’ve been so lonely,” he crooned sadly, as he opened his tribute to lost loved ones in “My City of Ruins.” Then he told us about the magic world we were about to visit during the show, and added, “We need you to take us there, we can’t get there by ourselves.”

If there were a church like this, I’d be there every Sunday. If you can see him this Sunday in New Orleans, do it. Experiencing this show in the land of stately above-ground cemeteries and glorious marching-band funerals, as well as Hurricane Katrina and the Superdome, might be the ultimate way to experience this sad, heroic, redemptive tour.

CORRECTION: I first wrote that an early version of “Rosalita” dreamed of “a sandy beach where we’d never grow old.” It was actually in “Wings for Wheels,” an early version of “Thunder Road.” Thanks, Rebecca Traister!

It is hard to remember it now, but in the beginning of his career Springsteen was largely apolitical. During his first decade and a half as a professional musician, he made almost no political endorsements or even statements from the stage. In November of 1980, he told an audience at Arizona State University that the election of Ronald Reagan “frightened” him, but he didn’t specify just what he was afraid of. In September of 1984, Reagan’s reelection team, looking for local references to liven up a campaign stop in Hammonton, N.J., had Reagan name-check Springsteen in that day’s variation on the president’s standard stump speech. When informed of this, Springsteen tried to shrug off the association and distance himself from Reagan, but there were certain vague similarities. More than anything, Springsteen and Reagan both often saw life in the United States as the same essential conflict: a war between individuals with dreams and the larger institutions that sought to keep them down.

Being a pop star doesn’t have much in common with being a president, but it does have a great deal in common with being a presidential candidate. Both pop stars and presidential candidates can’t just sell their material. To be widely popular, they have to sell a vision that unifies that material. To tell the truth, in 1984 Springsteen and Reagan did have strikingly similar ideologies, even if they were politically far apart — and that was Springsteen’s dilemma. Even if it is necessary for pop stars to sell a national vision, policy and government have nothing to do with their jobs. Nevertheless, if Springsteen didn’t want his audience to get too comfortable with his ideological similarities to Reagan, he had to find some way to make their political differences more explicit.

From the fall of 1984 on, activism — particularly attention to local causes — became a regular part of Springsteen’s concerts. His public attachment to World Hunger Year, City Harvest and Amnesty International, among other broad-based organizations, became well-known, but he also made sure to invite local causes to set up booths at each of his venues. He began, not only to take much more open stands on the issues about which he cared, but to inform himself in more detail about those issues so that he could speak more knowledgeably to them.

In 1996, he performed at rallies to defeat California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. In 2004, he endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time, John Kerry, and headlined one of the pods of the Vote for Change tour, which sought to build awareness and support for Kerry’s candidacy in swing states. Four years later, Springsteen was an earlier and even more enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama. As he told a crowd at a voter registration rally in Philadelphia in October of 2008, “I’ve spent most of my creative life measuring the distance between [America’s promise and its reality] … I believe Sen. Obama has taken the measure of that distance in his own life and in his work, and I think he understands in his heart the cost of that distance, in blood and in suffering, in the lives of everyday Americans.“

Like many Americans, Springsteen has apparently spent time over the last four years measuring the distance between the promise of Mr. Obama’s candidacy and the reality of his presidency. At a press conference in Paris last month to promote the release of his new album “Wrecking Ball,” which will be in stores March 6, Springsteen gave a mixed to favorable review of President Obama’s first term, commending the president’s hard work on healthcare and his reduction of the war in Afghanistan but expressing frustration that neither effort went further. At the same press conference, Springsteen was more unalloyed in his praise of Occupy Wall Street, for their introduction of the very idea of income disparity to the national dialogue. Significantly, he told reporters that he probably wouldn’t take part in the presidential campaign this year, suggesting that it had been more essential to get up off the bench in 2004 and 2008.

As much as Springsteen may applaud Occupy Wall Street, much of “Wrecking Ball” predates it. At least two of its songs (“Wrecking Ball” and “We Take Care of Our Own”) were written in 2009, in the first shock of the current recession, and another (“Land of Hope and Dreams”) dates back 13 years to the days of Starr vs. Clinton. Here, as in his last several albums, Springsteen references the botched handling of Hurricane Katrina on multiple occasions, with at least two songs specifically calling back to that moment and others seemingly alluding to it. While some of the songs on “Wrecking Ball” do address income inequity, a far more abiding theme on the album is unemployment, specifically among those who do manual labor. The woeful narrator of “Jack of All Trades” spends six minutes listing all the jobs he would be willing to do, just to put bread on his family’s table, and not one of them is a desk job. The narrator of “Shackled and Drawn,” one of the album’s best songs, is far more assertive and direct. “Let a man work — is that so wrong?” he righteously yells. “Freedom, son,” he declares, “is a dirty shirt.”

Springsteen may be a lifelong individualist, he may be every bit as suspicious of institutions and bureaucracies as Ronald Reagan was, but he clearly doesn’t believe that success is wholly individual either. There isn’t a Social Darwinist bone in his body, and Ayn Rand may very well be his ideological antipode. In paying tribute to OWS at the Paris press conference, it was this sort of solipsistic individualism against which Springsteen most directly raged, accusing those who disproportionately profited from the boom years of “a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community.”

The history and community to which Springsteen most clearly appeals on “Wrecking Ball” and throughout his career is the workingman’s world of his youth, a world of factories and union halls, in which good-paying jobs, benefits and affordable housing were much more widely available to those who might not have an Ivy League education but were willing to get their shirts dirty. For decades now, since 1978’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” at the very latest, Springsteen has been lamenting the loss of that world, as globalization has seen the union-made jobs of Springsteen’s childhood vanish or flee overseas. In “My Hometown,” the closing song on 1984’s “Born in the USA,” Springsteen lamented the loss of a local textile mill, famously declaring that “these jobs are going, boys/And they ain’t coming back.” On “Wrecking Ball,” in the deliberately titled “Death to My Hometown,” the castoff workers aren’t just lamenting, they’re pitchfork-and-torches mad. Even the seemingly more resigned narrator of “Jack of All Trades” is looking for a gun in that song’s last verse, to use on those responsible for his underemployment, if he can even find them.

Springsteen knows, more than anyone perhaps, that neither this cause nor these characters are new. “Wrecking Ball’s” final song, “We Are Alive,” specifically links the struggles of 19th-century railroad strikers and 20th-century civil rights activists to 21st-century immigrants who die during border crossings. These are the citizens of Bruce Springsteen’s America, generation upon generation who have looked to their more affluent neighbors for a fair shake and not a handout. The music in which Springsteen sings of these characters is old, too. In fact, it is doubly old: The songs and their arrangements stem from Springsteen’s love of early 20th century folk, blues and gospel; and in Ron Aniello’s production, those songs and arrangements are frequently infused with audio samples drawn from the Smithsonian’s archive of Alan Lomax’s 1930s and 1940s field recordings. The sounds on “Wrecking Ball” (as on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s recent “Watch the Throne”) aren’t new, but the artists have tried to make them fresh for our ears, because we need to listen to them again. Indeed, the ideas on “Wrecking Ball” (as on Ani DiFranco’s recent “Which Side Are You On?”) aren’t all that new either, but we need to give them a fresh hearing too, because it is blind faith in progress that got us into this mess in the first place.

For a young woman or man around the age of thirty today, the world of Bruce Springsteen’s childhood is unimaginable. A federal government that funds college and cheap mortgages? Employers that routinely supply health benefits and pensions? To those unfamiliar with American history, that doesn’t sound like the world of the Greatest Generation; it sounds like a socialist fantasy. Obviously, the world has changed immensely during the last 62 years; neither America’s economy nor the world’s generates jobs and wealth in quite the same way as they did in 1949. But justice does demand that the “right to work” mean something more than the right for employers to underpay their employees — and it’s not Bruce Springsteen’s job to determine the details of how to make that happen. He’s measured the distance between our past and our present, between our promises and our reality, and he’s given us the benefit of his vision. It’s up to presidents and senators to make that distance shorter, to turn visions into policy and actually govern.

Springsteen’s not the first artist to take up the occupiers’ cause, nor is he the first to filter his outrage through the iconography of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl folkie who has become, 44 years after his death, the patron saint of the 99 percent. Tom Morello evoked Guthrie’s example when he strolled around Zuccotti Park singing “This Land Is Your Land,” which won MTV’s dubious award for Best #OWS Performance last year. More recently, Jackson Browne debuted a folksy number at Occupy Wall Street that played against his soft-rock strengths in favor of talking-to-the-masses piety. Guthrie has proved to be a potent symbol of grass-roots dissent, yet these songs make it appear as though the folk singer has been thrust upon OWS rather than embraced by its demonstrators. And it’s a limited view of the singer as well, one that doesn’t accommodate his sense of humor or his sense of wonder.

In a sense, it could be considered a failure of imagination: No one has been able to conceive of a new form of protest music specific to this moment in American history, so they revisit the old, obvious exemplar and hope it still fits. Springsteen certainly draws from this vision of Guthrie. The cover of “Wrecking Ball” shows him hoisting a guitar as a symbol of proletariat power, partially obscured by text in the Guthrie Bold Condensed font. “We Take Care of Our Own” is a tangle of barbed lyrics that confront economic and social issues in the broadest way imaginable: “Where are the eyes, the eyes with the will to see?” he asks, not quite rhetorically. “Where are the hearts that run over with mercy?” Later, he poses the burning question, “Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?”

It’s all very straightforward and sincere, in language that’s simultaneously plainspoken and grandiose. Springsteen has long identified with the Okie folkie, covering “This Land Is Your Land” on the box set “Live 1975-85″ and recording a handful of spare acoustic albums addressing social concerns. On “Nebraska” (1982) and even on the fairly forgettable “Ghost of Tom Joad” (1995) and Devils & Dust (2005), Springsteen channeled his own worries through Everyman characters, such as the desperate gunman of “Johnny 99” and the hard-luck meth cooks of “Sinaloa Cowboys.” The people came first, it seemed, and the issues second. Springsteen may have stretched to rhyme “ravine” and “methamphetamine,” but those songs had the power of parables, delivering potent messages without sounding preachy or overtly political. “We Take Care of Our Own” does just the opposite. Rather than view this historical moment through the eyes of a character, Springsteen writes like he’s using bumper stickers like magnetic poetry. There’s nothing in the song to personalize the outrage, to give it relevance or impact or specificity.

Musically, “We Take Care of Our Own” doesn’t sound much like Guthrie at all. Rather than austere acoustic folk, the song nods to Springsteen of the past decade, with its florid strings and busybody production courtesy of Ron Aniello (Lifehouse, Jars of Clay). It sounds ostentatiously expensive, yet Springsteen’s vocals are lively and sympathetic, which makes him sound like the 99 percent instead of the 1 percent.

He’s writing what he thinks the country needs, which is not the same as what it actually needs. Yet, the best aspect of “We Take Care of Our Own” — the one component that makes you look forward to hearing the rest of the album — is that wonderful boardwalk bells-and-guitar theme that repeats throughout the songs, sounding heraldic and optimistic and perhaps even celebratory. It’s signature Springsteen, both a throwback to the immigrant culture that produced him and an ageless alternative to the blues-derived riffs that pervade so much rock ‘n’ roll. That theme turns “We Take Care of Our Own” into something like a singalong — inclusive rather than exclusive, a communal experience that supports the sentiment of the song’s title. That may be truer to the spirit of Guthrie than any of the song’s well-meaning lyrics.

I love that quote, but it might also make their collaboration sound like a civics lesson. It wasn’t. Describing the first time he met Springsteen in an interview, Clemons captured the chemistry fans witnessed more vividly: “I swear I will never forget that moment. I felt like I was supposed to be there. It was a magical moment. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love. And that’s still there.”

Clemons died of complications from a stroke, on top of complications of getting older and living life joyously and full-throttle. His friends gathered to remember him last week, and Bruce Springsteen posted his eulogy on his website today. Go read the whole thing, but I loved this part:

Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet. You were proud, you were strong, you were excited and laughing with what might happen, with what together, you might be able to do. You felt like no matter what the day or the night brought, nothing was going to touch you. Clarence could be fragile but he also emanated power and safety, and in some funny way we became each other’s protectors; I think perhaps I protected “C” from a world where it still wasn’t so easy to be big and black. Racism was ever present and over the years together, we saw it. Clarence’s celebrity and size did not make him immune. I think perhaps “C” protected me from a world where it wasn’t always so easy to be an insecure, weird and skinny white boy either. But, standing together we were badass, on any given night, on our turf, some of the baddest asses on the planet. We were united, we were strong, we were righteous, we were unmovable, we were funny, we were corny as hell and as serious as death itself. And we were coming to your town to shake you and to wake you up. Together, we told an older, richer story about the possibilities of friendship that transcended those I’d written in my songs and in my music. Clarence carried it in his heart. It was a story where the Scooter and the Big Man not only busted the city in half, but we kicked ass and remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship would not be such an anomaly.

And that … that’s what I’m gonna miss. The chance to renew that vow and double down on that story on a nightly basis, because that is something, that is the thing that we did together … the two of us. Clarence was big, and he made me feel, and think, and love, and dream big. How big was the Big Man? Too fucking big to die. And that’s just the facts. You can put it on his grave stone, you can tattoo it over your heart. Accept it … it’s the New World.

Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies. He leaves when we die.

The fan reaction was mixed, to be kind. The touring band – though it featured some talented players – felt less like a new direction than an attempt to recreate the E Street sound without the actual E Streeters. It seemed as if that band’s 20 years of history had come to an ignominious end.

But there was something in the air that night in the Meadowlands. E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt had come out to play on “Glory Days,” and the crowd was buzzing when a horn section kicked into the intro for the E Street classic “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” Then, in the last verse, when Springsteen sang the line “When the change was made uptown/And the Big Man joined the band,” the Big Man himself – saxophonist Clarence Clemons – came on stage, resplendent in a black suit and white hat, horn in hand, and blew a riff that brought the crowd to its feet. They filled the arena with a sustained roar that was like nothing I’d ever heard before. It drowned out the musicians on stage. The building shook.

Of all the times I’ve seen Clemons perform, that night is one of my most vivid memories. Not only for what a great show it was – and the amazing outpouring of love that met his appearance – but for what it signified. Less than two years later, Springsteen reformed the E Street Band to record new tracks for a greatest hits album. In 1998, he released a box set of unreleased songs, most featuring the E Streeters, and then launched a full-scale reunion tour the following year. The E Street Band was back, this time to stay.

What the future of the band will be now, with Clemons’ death yesterday at age 69, from complications of a stroke suffered June 12, is uncertain. But for me at least, the E Street Band that I knew and loved will never exist again.

I grew up in the beach town of Long Branch, N.J., about five minutes north of Asbury Park. I was familiar with some of Springsteen’s earlier bands, including the heavy metal/jam quartet Steel Mill, but wasn’t old enough to see them in their heyday. But when “Born to Run” came on the radio in the mid-’70s – and Springsteen simultaneously appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek – it was something special. Here was a local guy singing about places I knew, but putting them in a universal context. “The Palace” mentioned in “Born to Run” became something more than the crumbling amusement arcade I’d known for years. In Springsteen’s songs, the “Circuit” – a teenage cruising area along the beach in Asbury – assumed an almost mythic quality.

Clemons and his saxophone were an essential part of that transformation. The only E Street Band member to share an album cover with Springsteen, Clemons was a larger-than-life character who brought a soulful R&B vibe to the songs of a scruffy street poet. Without Clemons, there would be no “New York City Serenade,” no “Kitty’s Back” and certainly no “Jungleland.”

Over the last 32 years, I’ve seen more than 100 Springsteen performances, from impromptu appearances at tiny clubs to sold-out stadium shows. I’ve attended multiple nights on every tour since 1980, and Clemons loomed large at all of them. He was the rock of E Street, supporting Springsteen musically as he had physically on the cover of “Born to Run.” He was the band’s “Minister of Soul,” as Springsteen often referred to him, introduced on-stage at various times as “The Big Man,” “The Kahuna,” “The Duke of Paducah,” able to “leap tall refineries in a single bound.” His sax sound was a mixture of King Curtis, Junior Walker and Gene “Daddy G” Barge. It could be breathy and sweet (“Secret Garden”) or loud and raucous (“Sherry Darling”). An E Street show never really caught fire until Clemons stepped forward to blow his first solo of the night.

The oldest of the E Streeters, the Big Man had more than his share of health problems in recent years. He’d had hip and knee replacements and multiple back surgeries. On stage, he often sat for long stretches, rising only to play a solo, sometimes missing his cues. But in March 2009, I sat in the stands at Asbury Park’s Convention Hall, a 1920′s-era dance hall on the boardwalk, at a rehearsal show for the band’s “Working on a Dream” tour, which was about to kick off. They opened with “Badlands,” with Springsteen leaping onto a ramp that led out into the audience, and playing a ripping guitar solo. When Clemons joined him for the sax solo, they both looked 25 again, standing side by side, spotlighted in a sea of people, the crowd on both sides reaching up to touch them. Despite the celebratory nature of the moment, it also choked me up a little. I wondered how many chances there would be to see that sight again.

There were more nights, of course. The band toured for most of that year, but those final shows had the bittersweet tang of last days. In Baltimore, at the penultimate show of the tour, an emotional Clemons hugged Springsteen as if he didn’t want to let him go. On the final night, two days later, Springsteen played “Growin’ Up,” adding a long story about meeting Clemons for the first time in 1971, the aftermath of that encounter being a metaphor for the journey that followed.

That meeting is the stuff of legend. The way the Big Man tells it is not far off from the story Springsteen spun on stage. Clemons was playing with a cover band at the Wonder Bar on Ocean Avenue in Asbury Park, while Springsteen’s pre-E Street band was at the neighboring Student Prince on Kingsley Street (both buildings are still there. The Wonder Bar continues to operate as a night club, the Prince has been many things over the years, including a male go-go bar). One stormy night, during a break in his set, Clemons walked over to listen to Springsteen play, and asked to sit in. “That night we first stood together, I looked over at C and it looked like his head reached into the clouds,” Springsteen remembered years later. “I felt like a mere mortal scurrying upon the earth.” A rock and roll partnership had been born.

I now live one town south of Asbury Park, and I’ve made the walk between those two buildings many times, imagining what that night must have been like. Last December, nearly 40 years later, I stood in a bone-chilling wind, with 100 other Springsteen fans, leaning against a metal barricade outside Asbury’s gutted Casino carousel house, while Springsteen and band were inside filming a mini-concert to promote a box set release of their 1978 album “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” I never got in, and only caught occasional glimpses of the band through an open doorway, when some VIP entered or left. But when Clemons’ sax came floating out into the frigid boardwalk air, there was no mistaking who was inside.

When longtime E Street keyboardist Danny Federici died in 2008, after a three-year illness, there was no question the band would go on. Charlie Giordano, a veteran musician, had already been filling in for Federici on much of the tour. At a memorial service for Federici, Springsteen’s eulogy ended with a reference to the “heart breakin’, soul cryin’… and, yes, death defyin’ legendary E Street Band.”

In a statement yesterday about Clemons’ death, Springsteen again indicated the band will continue. “With Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music,” he wrote. “His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band.”

But is there an E Street Band without Clarence Clemons, without his presence, his commanding solos that are so much a part of Springsteen’s music? It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the epic sax solo at the heart of “Jungleland,” and it’s hard to picture the band on stage at all, without Clemons up there with them.

When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, Springsteen singled out Clemons at the close of his speech. “You want to be like him but you can’t,” Springsteen said. “The night I met Clarence, he got up on stage (and) a sound came out of his horn that seemed to rattle the glasses behind the bar, and threatened to blow out the back wall. … But there was something else, something that happened when we stood side by side. Some energy, some unspoken story. … He always lifted me up. Way, way up. Together we told a story of the possibilities of friendship, a story older than the ones that I was writing, and a story I could never have told without him at my side. I want to thank you, Big Man, and I love you so much.”

The Big Man’s sound lives on, on record and in 30-plus years of fan-shared live shows now available on the internet. But the E Street Band will never be the same. Neither will Bruce Springsteen. And neither will I.

Wallace Stroby is a lifelong resident of the Jersey Shore, and author of the novels “Cold Shot to the Heart,” “Gone ‘Til November,” “The Heartbreak Lounge,” and “The Barbed-Wire Kiss.”