Teardrops on the city (Clarence Clemons: 1942-2011)

Legendary saxophonist Clarence Clemons is gone, and The E Street Band will never be the same. Neither will I

By Wallace Stroby

FILE - In this July 2, 2009 file photo, U.S. rock singer Bruce Springsteen, right, and saxophonist Clarence Clemons perform during the first German concert of his "Working On A Dream" European tour in the Olympic stadium in Munich, Germany. A person who has worked with Clemons in the past confirmed Sunday night, June 12, 2011 that Clemons has suffered a stroke. (AP Photo/Christof Stache, File) (Credit: AP)

Topics:Bruce Springsteen

It was the loudest noise I’d ever heard.

It was June 24, 1993, and Bruce Springsteen was ending his “Human Touch”/”Lucky Town” tour with two New York-area shows, one at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., the venue he’d opened in 1981. But this homecoming was different. Four years earlier, Springsteen had fired the members of his longtime E Street Band in favor of working with other musicians. He recorded two albums with studio pros, then toured behind the records with a new band put together shortly before hitting the road.

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.”

: 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." More Wallace Stroby

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The Boss embraces Occupy

Bruce Springsteen's new single explores income inequality and captures the rage of the 99 percent

By Stephen Deusner

(Credit: Pitchfork.com)

Topics:Bruce Springsteen, Occupy, Music

Bruce Springsteen officially announced today that his new album, “Wrecking Ball,” would hit shelves on March 6. Rumors had hinted that this would be his angriest album and that he would be addressing the current recession and the economic travails of middle- and lower-class America. If the first single, “We Take Care of Our Own,” is any indication, this will be to Occupy Wall Street what “The Rising” was to 9/11: the moment when Springsteen takes up a cause and makes sense of an event that has stymied other musicians.

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.

: More Stephen Deusner

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How big was the Big Man?

"Too f-ing big to die." Bruce Springsteen remembers the great Clarence Clemons and their early interracial bromance

By Joan Walsh

Musicians Clarence Clemons and Bruce Springsteen appear on the "Today" show in New York

Musician Clarence Clemons (L) grabs Bruce Springsteen during an appearance with the E-Street band at the "Today" show in New York, September 28, 2007. The band's U.S. tour begins October 2, 2007 in Hartford, Connecticut. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (UNITED STATES) (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Bruce Springsteen

I still remember the thrill I felt looking at the iconic black and white cover of “Born to Run” in 1975, with a grinning, sweaty Springsteen leaning on the shoulder of Clarence Clemons, gazing at him adoringly; that early interracial bromance. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since Clemons died way too young at 69, 10 days ago. It was the way we were all supposed to live, but still weren’t living. And still aren’t today.

Springsteen and Clemons weren’t quite living that way, either. In his memoir Clemons wrote: “You had your black bands and you had your white bands, and if you mixed the two you found less places to play.” Springsteen explained the power of the “Born to Run” cover this way: “When you open it up and see Clarence and me together, the album begins to work its magic. Who are these guys? Where did they come from? What is the joke they are sharing? A friendship and a narrative steeped in the complicated history of America begins to work and there is music already in the air.”

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.

: Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh

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Bruce Springsteen: The classiest celebrity cheater

Thanks, Boss, for putting the romance (and politics) back into tabloid scandal

By Rebecca Traister

Bridgestone Super Bowl XLIII Halftime Show

Musician Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform at the Bridgestone halftime show during Super Bowl XLIII between the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers on February 1, 2009 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. (Credit: Jamie Squire)

Topics:Bruce Springsteen, Coupling, Rock and Roll, Broadsheet, Love and Sex

It is a testament to the tawdry depths of recent celebrity scandals that I found myself strangely pleased this weekend to read about allegations that Bruce Springsteen, the celebrity for whom I feel the most regard, cheated on his wife Patti Scialfa, whom I also admire.

Yet, there I was, shaking my head with relief and amusement as I flipped through “Swing Steen,” the New York Post’s ingeniously headlined tale of Springsteen’s reported dalliance five years ago with a woman from his hometown. I grinned as I read the story, not just because of the ample Boss puns (“Springsteen’s ‘Human Touch’ made her melt;” “[T]he Jersey girl got lost in a ‘Tunnel of Love’”), but because after a year of John Edwards, Tiger Woods and Jesse James, even after the none-of-our-business-but-nonetheless-dispiriting splits of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins and Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes, the Springsteen infidelity feels like a clean mineral rain washing away months of grimy revelations.

When rumors about the 60-year-old musician and a married 45-year-old housewife from Red Bank, N.J., were first reported more than a year ago, I was saddened. I am always saddened when I read about Bruce Behaving Badly, especially when the behavior seems likely to endanger his two-decade marriage to E Street Band member Patti Scialfa, a marriage in which I have an inappropriate emotional investment. I am that rare Bruce Springsteen fan who loves Patti Scalfia. I have written thousands of words about how much I love Patti Scialfa. In fact, if you have been to a Bruce Springsteen concert and have heard — over the chorus of grumbles and “boos” that traditionally greet Bruce’s introduction of his wife — a voice bellowing “Patti!” as loudly and supportively as possible, then you have heard me.

But the celebrity train wrecks of the past year have made the details of Springsteen’s alleged fling — revealed now in the divorce papers of New Jersey mortgage broker Arthur Kelly filed against his wife Ann, Bruce’s reported co-adulterer — seem like an episode of “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” especially if the episode were viewed immediately after a “Jersey Shore” marathon. It’s like dipping into the story of Edward Ferrars and Elinor Dashwood in “Sense & Sensibility,” after having just read “Poor Little Bitch Girl” by Jackie Collins. Instead of cringing and holding my hands over my ears to block out news of my idol’s personal transgressions, the details of Bruce’s alleged infidelity made me want to wrap my arms around him, his purported paramour, his talented wife, and the New York Post, bestowing on all of them a big wet kiss of thanks for not being gross and horrifying.

According to the Post, which based its story on the Kellys’ divorce proceedings, Springsteen first began checking out Ann Kelly at the swank gym they both attended. Reportedly, they lunched together so often that Kelly’s daughters, who frequently joined them, took to calling Bruce “Bruce.” (If I have children, I can promise that they too will call Bruce “Bruce.” And I have never had an affair, or even lunch, with the guy.) Apparently, at the height of their supposed liaison, local whispering about Springsteen and Kelly got so disruptive that Ann’s father urged her to quit the gym. Hear that? Quit the gym. As opposed to quitting Ambien, random cocktail waitresses, call girls, the campaign for the American presidency, or couch sex at your office with a tattoo-covered woman who was not your wife and had a thing for the Third Reich.

As far as I can tell, there were no Nazi outfits or salutes involved in this story. No used tampons or violent text messages. No one’s wife had terminal cancer, no one got a mistress pregnant. No one had a business card reading “Truth Seeker” or one reading “Being is Free.” There was not even a “ping-pong impresario” involved in this story. Also, Springsteen’s scandal has not prompted veiled public apologies, hiatuses from the sport; no press conferences or girlfriends who have follow-up press conferences to your press conferences. Just some bitingly angry lyrics from Scialfa’s 2007 album “Play It As It Lays” (on “Play Around,” she sang, “You’ve got all the toys/That money can buy/But still you come to me like a little boy/So unsatisfied”) and a statement from the Springsteens reading, simply, “Bruce and Patti continue to have a terrific marriage and are very devoted to each other and their children.”

While Tiger Woods reportedly texted one of his lady friends, “Hold you down while I choke and Fuck that ass that i own Then im going to tell you to shut the Fuck up while I slap your face and pull your hair for making noise,” Bruce reportedly hung around Ann at the treadmill and told her that she had the “‘nicest ass’ in the gym.” Where Tiger reportedly scraped up enough change to offer one of his mistresses a chicken wrap sandwich from Subway, Bruce may have sent Ann unsigned Valentines and given her front-row seats to his rehearsal shows at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, as well as two lefty books in the hopes that they might prompt her to reconsider her conservative politics.

Which gets at one of the reasons this story sounds practically wholesome in comparison to the grunge that has floated to the surface in recent months. While, if true, Springsteen’s behavior was likely painful for his family, it seems on its face not to have been built on the degradation, objectification, hatred for or cruel treatment of wives or mistresses, but on appreciation for a specific, normal-looking 45-year-old woman who happened to be a dead ringer for his wife. When viewed in the light of celebrities who have sex with multiple, seemingly interchangeable women half their age, who hire staff to cover up for them, who have sex with interlopers in their spouse’s beds and choose as sexual partners fame-seeking publicity generators, the aged rock star who flirts awkwardly and tries to change the politics of the age-appropriate(ish) lady at his gym is practically chivalric.

I feel bad about feeling so good about Bruce’s alleged missteps. I really do. I don’t want to lionize the guy for lying to his wife, for possibly hurting his family. I don’t want to pretend that just because infidelity does not include car crashes or Nazi paraphernalia that it is not agonizing to the people it damages. But I’m not the only one feeling this wave of affection for the slightly corny nature of Bruce’s breach, for the straightforward purity of his alleged misdeeds.

Sheila Weller, author of “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation,” was so struck by the retro-chaste quality of the story that on Monday she posted a message on her Facebook wall about the “Updike-esque” tale of “two decent, respectable, age-appropriate, long-married, probably bored people in a leafy suburb [who] meet and try to be discreet. It’s 50s-60s quaint, next to every other celebrity affair we’ve heard about.” Weller told me later by phone that she’d “always thought Springsteen was a very decent guy – I think we all do – and it just seems so old-fashioned in comparison to all this other stuff! It seemed like a ‘Mad Men’-era affair. I mean, it’s never good to be unfaithful, but these things happen. If you’re going to do it, that’s the way to do it.”

And Weller’s friend, the writer Jesse Kornbluth, held a contest on Monday on his site, Head Butler, offering a prize to the reader who offered the best guess as to which two political volumes Bruce gifted Ann. Weller guessed Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters.” My money is on “Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass” by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson,” a book I have heard Springsteen mention in concert. Hopefully, unlike the ceaseless stream of information about the vulgar proclivities of Springsteen’s faithless fellow celebrities, this particular detail will remain shrouded in mystery.

: Rebecca Traister writes for Salon. She is the author of "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women" (Free Press). Follow @rtraister on Twitter. More Rebecca Traister

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“This Is It” and “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is”

Remarkable, rare glimpses of the tortured souls behind the fame and self-delusion we're well aware of

By Erik Nelson

"This Is It" and "Elvis: That's the Way It Is"

Topics:The Perfect Double Bill, Film Salon, Dvd reviews, Michael Jackson, This Is It, Bruce Springsteen, Movies

British director Peter Hall once said of another British Peter, one named Sellers, “It’s not enough in this business to have talent. You have to have the talent to handle the talent.”

This dark art of handling the talent and dealing with deification is the tie that binds this week’s Double Bill, which would be today’s release of “This Is It,” and its doppelgänger, the 1970 documentary “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.” Obviously, it does not take any particular genius to point out connections between Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. Haunted relationship with parent, incomprehensible musical genius, pet chimps, oh yeah, Lisa Marie, to count off just four of the easiest ones.

But this one-sided Death Match between legend and life is what ultimately tied these men together. Elvis and Jackson brought an impermeable membrane of fame and self-delusion with them that kept the real world outside their experience. Both “This Is It” and “The Way It Is” shoot through that membrane, and those rare glimpses of the tortured soul inside are what give the films their real power.

This “splendid isolation,” in the words of Warren Zevon, made the end of their careers a slow-motion bus wreck — and we were all bozos on that same bus.

“To me,” wrote Bruce Springsteen the week Elvis died, “he was as big as the whole country itself, as big as the whole dream. He just embodied the essence of it and he was in mortal combat with the thing.”

From about that moment on, Springsteen consciously crafted that growth industry called his career on Elvis’ shaky foundation. The lessons he has articulated over and over again in both song and interviews are his attempts to try to live outside that bubble of fame. But it isn’t easy. In a recent small book by Big Man Clarence Clemons, the only truly insightful and honestly disillusioning images that emerge are Springsteen’s private jets flying from concert to concert, and the alpha celebrity decorum of who sits just where along the way. And, oh yeah, a second jet for the wife and her entourage. And special planes dispatched for the likes of Brian Williams. But, as Clemons (actually, probably, his hack ghostwriter) points out, Springsteen does make a point of personally greeting everybody in all rows, on every flight, so, it’s a start.

I guess.

Springsteen’s talent has been very comprehensible, and his career arc tightly controlled. Bob Dylan’s talent belongs more in the incomprehensible category, and he has somehow made it work for him. For the last 20 years, Dylan has conducted a bold experiment in hiding in plain sight, called the “Never Ending Tour.” Night after night, Dylan appears in State Fairgrounds and minor league stadiums in minor league towns, and at night, according to at least one local police report, roams the streets in hooded sweatshirts, searching for Dylan knows what.

Nobody is more closely guarded than Dylan both on- and offstage, in all senses of that word, but somehow, he stays connected to his muse, and it, somehow, to him. If anything, one of his many particular geniuses has been turning the very act of retreating from legend into accelerant for its fire. It’s only in the last 20 years where Dylan finally carries the burden he promised he would heft in the notes to his second album. “I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people.”

Bob Dylan made that legend thing work for him, and only went a little crazy along the way. But as we all know, Elvis and Jackson went big-time crazy, and if you know where to look, you can see in these two films just where — and maybe, why.

While Elvis was in mortal combat with some kind of dream of America, Michael Jackson became the poster boy for an even more devolved America, one where self-delusion, narcissism and grotesque materialism are somehow mistaken for canny career management. He even had the spectacular bankruptcy thing going for him, with the promise of an impending bailout, if he could pull off that one last desperate deal.

Which leads us to this week’s release of “This Is It” — a film swept off the cutting-room floor of Jackson’s last hurrah, and last rehearsals.

To be clear, this film was originally conceived of as a home movie, financed by Jackson personally. Had things gone differently, an abbreviated version might have appeared as a supplement on some future holo-hagiographic 3-D monolith box set commemorating Jackson’s 10th year onstage at the Luxor in Vegas. And like so many DVD supplements, there is a cheap, offhand quality to the production.

But what keeps this “This Is It” from being a shameless exercise in commercial necrophilia is the sheer joy of watching a performer, if not at the top of his game, in the bullpen warming up. Based on the performances here, Jackson had it until the end. Just what “it” was remains open to debate, and this movie does not help the discussion.

Throughout the two hours, Jackson stands alone, surrounded by indifferent technicians, a puppet being put through his paces by the Geppetto of his own ego. Many of the production numbers look as if they were choreographed by Albert Speer, and the fascist architecture of the proceedings don’t shed much light on their creator.

It helps that much of Jackson’s dialogue is subtitled, for he seems to be speaking a private language. “I’m trying to adjust to the inner ears,” whispers Jackson at one point, “with the love — L.O.V.E. It’s not easy, though.”

Tell me about it.

Director Kenny Ortega cajoles Jackson like a toddler being coaxed to eat his broccoli. Jackson is clearly phoning it in, but one is often reminded, what a phone.

One such moment occurs at the end of “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” where Jackson takes off at the end of a duet with an anonymous background singer. This sequence is intimate, sexy, and we see Jackson momentarily possessed by the music and his muse. But then, the song ends, and Jackson crashes back to Earth, clearly angry at being led to this kind of self-revelation. You see for an aching moment the raw talent that Jackson had all the way to the end, and then, the door slamming shut on it.

Which brings us to our second feature.

“Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (Special Edition)” was shot in the summer of 1970 and reworked by TCM for this 2001 rerelease. It is perhaps the best surreal evocation of the ’70s since “Zodiac,” except, of course, this is a documentary. Shot by the great Lucian Ballard, it brings you as close to the real Elvis as you want to go.

The film begins with some more tantalizing rehearsals. The musicians look at Elvis like the borderline hysteric family looked at demon child Billy Mumy in that great “Twilight Zone” episode. It feels like everyone always laughs a millisecond too late at his jokes, and you can feel his entourage praying that they too don’t get wished into that cornfield. Why is it not at all surprising that Rod Serling’s opening narration from this “Twilight Zone” episode was sampled in 2001 for a song called “Threatened” — by Michael Jackson? In one particularly gruesome sequence, Elvis has an onstage water fight with members of the Memphis Mafia. When Elvis, in a flash of feigned anger, picks up a mike stand, as if to impale them with it, you get the idea that this, in fact, could happen.

It is clear that Elvis just had nowhere to go, no one to talk to about the hellhounds on his trail. Every conversation is a transaction, and Elvis knows it. The striking thing is how little is different backstage from onstage. Same jokey nervousness, same nonchalant diffidence to his musical gifts. Elvis was always on, and could just never get off. In all of the footage, he can’t stop moving, looking for distraction from the Sisyphean task of just being himself. One can see his genius emerging like the chest buster from “Alien,” and at times, Elvis looks as shocked at the results.

At least Bruce Springsteen can get it off his chest with Brian Williams.

But there are compensating musical treasures. Where Elvis is all looseness and evasiveness, lead guitarist James Burton is all paisley precision, spitting out chicken-licking’ licks and anchoring the proceedings like the Country Gentlemen he is. “Play it, James,” Elvis regally commands, and Burton does just that, brilliantly. When they swing into an impromptu medley of “Little Sister” sliding into “Get Back,” one wishes that the Beatles, instead of breaking up that same summer, had dropped by this rehearsal studio instead.

They might have changed their minds.

When we move to Las Vegas for the pre-show rehearsals, you can feel the dingy surroundings and smell the fossilized cigarette smoke in the carpets of the “International Hotel” where the show had to go on.

Shot across six nights, the performance footage is a Groundhog Day’s nightmare of the same songs, same fans, same jokes. Here we stand by helplessly as Elvis, as described in some other lyrics of Zevon, throws it all away for that “porcelain monkey,” and his face on Velveteen. There is a viscous quality in the film, like you are trapped in the amber with Elvis, and after about an hour, you just want to get out of there. At one juncture, during “Love Me Tender,” as Elvis leaves the stage and walks deep in the ballroom it feels like nothing so much as watching grainy footage of a Bigfoot sighting.

Watching him kiss one bouffant fan after another, on the lips, you truly get a feeling of what hell must be like. At one point, one hysterical, crying fan almost swallows Elvis alive. He pulls back in shock and discomfort, but then, moves to yet another predatory encounter. And another.

Six nights, and then, 600 more nights, until it all ran down.

It is clear from both of these films that Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley were getting everything they wanted, and nothing they truly needed.

As William Carlos Williams so famously wrote, “The purest products of America go crazy.”

That was the lecture.

These films would be the lab.

Got any fly-on-the-wall-of-musical-train-wreck “Double Bill” ideas for “This Is It”? That Wilco film, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart?” “Don’t Look Back,” or better, a bootleg of Dylan’s 1966 surreal masterpiece, “Eat The Document”? Kirk Douglas IS a chin-dimpled Bix Biederbecke in “Young Man With a Horn”? Do tell!

: More Erik Nelson

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The GOP can’t hold a tune

Jackson Browne, one in a long line of musicians to tangle with Republicans, settles suit against the McCain camp

By Vincent Rossmeier

Topics:War Room, John McCain, R-Ariz., Bruce Springsteen

Tuesday, singer Jackson Browne settled a law suit with the Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and the Republican Party over the McCain campaign’s use of Browne’s song “Running on Empty.” Browne received apologies from both McCain and the GOP, but perhaps even more unfortunate for Republicans was that the settlement also included a pledge requiring the party to ask for a musician’s permission before using his or her music in any future campaign. To be fair, singer Sam Moore also asked President Obama’s campaign to stop using “Soul Man,” but when it comes to recent political-musical run-ins, pop has certainly had a liberal bias. Here’s a look at the musicians who have caused the GOP the biggest headaches over the past few years.

John Mellencamp — It seems like every four years, Republicans try to claim the staunchly Democratic Mellencamp’s music as their own. In 2008, the singer, who had been a supporter of John Edwards at the time, told McCain to stop using his tunes “Our Country” and “Pink Houses” at campaign rallies. But it wasn’t the first time Mellencamp has rebuked a Republican politician for what he considered improper use of his songs. Mellencamp drew the ire of the right wing in 2003 when he criticized former President George W. Bush on one of his albums. But the singer/songwriter had a history with Bush — during the 2000 presidential campaign, Mellencamp tussled with the GOP over what he considered the Bush campaign’s improper use of “R.O.C.K. in the USA.”
Van Halen — He might not have been the most successful presidential candidate, but McCain did have a talent for ticking off musicians. Legendary rockers Van Halen became incensed after McCain’s campaign used the band’s “Right Now” at the August 2008 rally in which he introduced Gov. Sarah Palin to those of us who live outside Alaska.
Tom Petty — Petty told Bush not to do him like that in 2000 when he demanded that the Bush campaign stop playing his “I Won’t Back Down” at rallies. The campaign complied and instead decided to use a Billy Ray Cyrus track.
Orleans — Both McCain in 2008 and Bush in 2004, received the wrath of band member John Hall for using the group’s “Still the One” without permission.
Don Henley — In June of this year, the lead singer of the Eagles sued Chuck Devore, a Republican running for Sen. Barbara Boxer’s seat in California in 2010, for copyright infringement. Devore created musical parodies that criticized Boxer and Obama using two of Henley’s songs.
The Dixie Chicks — In 2003, country radio stations across the nation pulled the Dixie Chicks from the airwaves after the band’s lead singer, Natalie Maines, said that she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas” during a concert in London. The ensuing controversy involved Fox News and Bill O’Reilly, but in the end, the Dixie Chicks had the last laugh, generating huge sales with a 2006 album that refused to back down from Maines’ criticism.
Kanye West — In one of the most iconic moments of the TV coverage of the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, Kanye West had a very simple message about Bush’s priorities.

Bruce Springsteen — There’s no love lost between the Boss and the GOP. Springsteen constantly criticized Bush throughout his presidency, including during a memorable performance on the Today Show in 2007. “Born in the U.S.A.” has also been misinterpreted by presidents as a patriotic jingle since Ronald Reagan first made the mistake in 1984.

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly referred to Don Henley as the former lead singer of the Eagles — the band has reunited and is currently touring.