Big Man Read online

  “One more,” he said.

  He then proceeded to perform “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” for the young lady in the stands. And he really performed it. The same way he did it in concert to an audience of twenty thousand people. Toward the end of the song he climbed down off the stage and danced across the pit doing two slow pirouettes, walked up into the stands, kissed the young girl’s cheek, and finished the song sitting next to her.

  It was a beautiful moment.

  Don

  I’ve seen Clarence do the same kind of thing.

  After the show in Oakland a few days earlier, there were some fans lining the sidewalk outside the arena hoping to get a glimpse of their heroes as they drove past behind blacked-out windows.

  One of the fans on the sidewalk was set apart from the others. A middle-aged woman in a wheelchair. She had just seen the show and was as thrilled as she had been at her first show thirty years ago. During that show she had danced in the aisle in front of the stage. Tonight she had been confined to the handicapped area behind the railing on the first level at the very back of the arena. But the giant video screens brought the stage to her, and she truly believed that she had the best seat in the house.

  She had come to the show with her seventeen-year-old daughter tonight, who had been listening to the albums since she was little and was also a big fan. They both loved Clarence, and tonight when he’d stepped forward into the spotlight for his first solo they had both cheered at the top of their lungs. There was something so pure, so emotional, to the Big Man’s music that the sight of him brought tears to her eyes. Her daughter was still in the arena. She wanted to try to get backstage and meet somebody. Of course that wasn’t going to happen, but there was a thrill and a lesson in trying.

  The people clustered off to her left began to cheer as headlights appeared at the mouth of the tunnel leading into the arena. The first vehicle was a black SUV that turned left and accelerated past them and off into the night. She waved and cheered with everyone else, even though none of them had any idea who was in the truck.

  Two more SUVs followed, and she thought she saw Bruce waving from the passenger’s seat in the second one, but she couldn’t be certain.

  Then the limo pulled out.

  Surely one of them was in this car.

  The other folks jumped up and down and waved at the car as it drove by them.

  And then the car began to slow.

  It cruised to a stop right in front of her. She sat in her chair on the sidewalk, speechless, as the back door of the car slowly opened.

  Clarence Clemons slowly unfolded himself out of the car, stood tall, and smiled at her.

  He was wearing a long black coat and some kind of hat that held his dreadlocks. He wore black sunglasses.

  “Your daughter told me you could use a hug,” he said, as he walked toward her.

  This could not be happening. She knew for a fact that she had passed out and died and this was some kind of vision or maybe heaven itself.

  But it was true. The Big Man was five feet in front of her and closing.

  She began to tremble. Tears fell unbidden from her eyes.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

  Clarence bent down and embraced her. For a moment she thought he might lift her out of the chair and waltz her down the sidewalk, but he just held her.

  “I love you, Clarence,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” he answered.

  He stood up. His sunglasses had slipped off and were on her lap. She handed them to him.

  “Your glasses,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. He took them and put them back on. Then he took her tiny hand into his giant hand. “I met your daughter. She’s a lovely girl.”

  “She loves you, too,” she said. “We’re such fans. I saw you thirty years ago. Before my accident.”

  “I’m glad you made it back,” he said.

  The other fans had gathered around and were watching. The back door to the limo was open, and the driver was standing beside it waiting to help Clarence back into it. She could see a beautiful woman in the backseat smiling at her.

  “Thank you,” she said. She wanted to say much more, but that was what came out so that was what it would be.

  “Thank you,” said Clarence. “God bless you.”

  He leaned down again and kissed her forehead. Then he turned and waved to the others, who stood starstruck. He stepped off the curb and with what looked like a painful and practiced move got back into the big car. A moment later it pulled away, and he was gone.

  She looked down the street in the other direction and saw her daughter running toward her, smiling, now laughing, as she got closer. The world felt like magic.

  The Legend of Clarence Getting High with the Funniest Man in the World, Hollywood Hills, 1984

  This story is based on actual conversations I had with Redd over a period of time. I’ve just rolled them into one story. It’s as close as we can come to what it was really like to be with him. He is missed. —D.R.

  Redd Foxx lit a cigarette, took a drag, and smiled. “My wife weighs four hundred and fifty pounds,” he said. “She thinks I love her ’cause when I get in bed I roll toward her.”

  Clarence laughed.

  “Not true,” said Redd, “but funny.”

  They were standing in the living room of Redd’s new house, located on the south side of Mulholland Drive near the top of Benedict Canyon.

  “You just got this place, huh?” asked Clarence.

  “Brand-new,” said Redd. “Take a look at this.” He crossed to the window and gestured. “How about that view?”

  Clarence admired the view. It was daytime and very hazy, so you couldn’t really see much besides the other houses that dotted the distant hillsides.

  “On a clear day you can see Catalina,” said Redd.

  “Wow,” said Clarence. He had only a vague notion of what Catalina was. An island, he thought. There was an old song about it. “Twenty-six miles,” he said.

  “Not that I give a fuck about Catalina,” said Redd. “I’ve never been big on geography. I was parked up here with a girl one time and she said, ‘Kiss me where it smells,’ so I drove her to El Segundo.”

  Clarence laughed again.

  “I like you, Big Man,” said Redd. “You laugh at all my old jokes.”

  “They’re not old to me,” said Clarence.

  “Then I like you even more,” said Redd. He turned toward the hallway off the living room. “Hey, Honey,” he called.

  A moment later a beautiful, young Asian woman entered the room. She wore black pants and a white blouse with the top three buttons open. She wore heels that made a click-clacking sound on the tile in the hallway. She smiled like a woman who didn’t speak English but was acting like she did.

  “This is Honey,” said Redd, putting an arm around her waist and kissing her cheek. “My current wife.”

  “Hi, Honey,” said Clarence. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Honey, repeating it phonetically.

  “Her real name’s not Honey but I can’t pronounce it. Her Japanese name,” said Redd. He turned to her. “This is Clarence Clemons, the Big Man. He plays saxophone for Bruce Springsteen. You savvy Bruce Springsteen?”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Honey.

  “Good. Get us a couple of drinks. Scotch.” He looked at Clarence. “That okay with you?”

  “Sure,” said Clarence, who hated scotch. Once as a teenager he drank nineteen shots of scotch and was sick for three days. The smell of scotch still made him nauseous. “I’d love one.”

  “Two scotch,” said Redd to Honey.

  “Two scotch,” said Honey, turning to go.

  Redd patted her on the butt as she turned. She giggled. They watched her leave.

  “Asian women are the best,” said Redd. “They know the man is in charge. They like that. Part of their culture. White women think they own you. You ever see me with a wh
ite woman, I’m holding her for the police.”

  Clarence laughed. He’d been laughing at everything Redd said since he met him last night at the bar in Dan Tana’s. The guy was funny when he said, “Hello.” They’d hit it off, and Redd had invited him up to see the new house.

  “And I’m done with black women,” said Redd. “I’m too old to fight.”

  He stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray with an elephant on it. There were lots of elephants in the house. Pictures, figurines, photos… Clarence knew people who got into shit like that. He had an aunt who collected turtles. When he finally asked her why she said it was because she liked turtles. He figured Redd must like elephants.

  “Have a seat,” said Redd.

  They sat on different parts of the big red leather sectional couch that dominated the living room. Clarence sat on the long back section facing the view, Redd on the shorter section to the left.

  “Nice couch,” said Clarence.

  “Had it made,” said Redd. “Hard to find red cows. You wanna split a little reefer?”

  “Sure,” said Clarence. “I never turn down reefer.”

  Redd took a fat doobie out of his cigarette package. “This is Panama Red,” he said. The joint was stuck in between the Salem package itself and the cellophane wrapper.

  “Spark it up,” said Clarence.

  They smoked the joint. Honey returned, put down two glasses of scotch and a glass of ice, and left. She never stopped smiling. Redd and Clarence smiled back at her.

  “So you okay in this white world you’re in?” asked Redd.

  “Yeah,” said Clarence. “I love to play, and the music Bruce writes… I don’t know, it speaks to me.”

  “He’s a good guy?” asked Redd.

  “He’s my brother,” said Clarence.

  “Good,” said Redd. “Just remember that he’s white. I don’t mean anything bad by that; it’s just that he looks at the world as a white man. It’s different.”

  “Yeah,” Clarence agreed. It was difficult to argue with that logic. If it was logic. Shit, that dope was good. Clarence picked up the glass of scotch and sniffed it. It smelled good. He took a sip. It didn’t taste anything like scotch as he knew it. “This is scotch?” he asked.

  “Single malt,” said Redd. “The best. It’s from Scotland, where the Scotch people live.”

  “I gotta pay them a visit,” said Clarence. Redd laughed and took a sip.

  “See, black people are trying to get ahead,” said Redd, as if he had been interrupted and was picking up some previous train of thought. “It’s the niggers who are holding us back.”

  “That’s deep,” said Clarence, uncertain if it was in fact deep or just good-dope deep. “Heavy,” he added. He had the feeling that someone else was talking, using his voice, and that he was outside himself, listening. Time began to fragment the way it did on strong shit. You had to float with it or you could get scared, and that would be so uncool. He floated.

  “That’s Agnes,” said Redd, looking out the plate-glass doors to the lawn and the pool area.

  “Agnes?” said Clarence about the same time a big St. Bernard lumbered into view. “Oh, Agnes,” he said.

  “My watchdog,” said Redd. “A motherfucker comes in my yard, Agnes will tear his ass up. She will rip him long, deep, wide, and consecutively.”

  “Cool,” said Clarence. He hadn’t liked dogs since being bitten by Jimmy Lincoln’s pit bull Fever when he was ten years old.

  “I hate midgets,” said Redd. “You want to cut a midget, you’ve got to stab him on top the head.”

  Clarence laughed. Longer and harder this time. The guy was hilarious. He really was.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” said Redd, lighting another Salem. “Agnes is trained to attack white people.”

  “No shit?” said Clarence.

  Redd raised his right hand. “Swear to God and two other white men,” he said. “I have to put her away when my agents and Jew lawyers come over.”

  “Huh,” said Clarence. He was very high and felt like he could rise up and float out of the room, out over the yard and the lawn and the pool and Agnes, all the way to Catalina.

  “I tell everybody she likes to eat crackers,” said Redd.

  Los Angeles

  Don

  Clarence has drifted in and out of my life like smoke. As I wrote earlier, I had tried to book the band on my first producing job with Cher and I failed. Through the years I still looked for ways to incorporate the music into my work and, if possible, put Clarence on camera in something. If you don’t believe that everything is connected to everything else, consider this: in the summer of 1989, I went to Florida to celebrate Dion DiMucci’s fiftieth birthday. He’s the same guy I met while doing the Cher show years before, when Phil Spector threatened to shoot me. While I was down there I noticed how Dion and his wife, Susan, interacted with their three daughters. Their behavior was normal. Normal except for the fact that the dad in this scenario was a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  This gave me the beginnings of an idea for a show, a family sitcom, in which the father would be hipper than the ones who were then on TV. Those dads were like my dad and not like Dion or even me. Following a whole bunch of other stories, that notion became the NBC television series Blossom.

  That show ran for more than five seasons and earned me acceptance into the ranks of television series creators and show runners.

  Blossom led to The John Larroquette Show, another NBC series with its own book’s worth of stories. I booked Dion to play a part on one episode. Another featured my old pal Kinky Friedman, the legendary Texas Jewboy and future president of the United States.

  Down the road a ways I created a show called My Wife and Kids along with Damon Wayans. In the show’s third season I cast Clarence Clemons as Damon’s old friend. I finally got to put the Big Man on one of my shows, and he was great. It only took a little over thirty years to do it.

  Japan, 1989

  Clarence

  Ringo and I were drinking tea in a Japanese hotel suite when the phone rang and the world changed.

  We were in Japan as part of the “All-Starr Band” tour. Ringo had assembled a bunch of players who weren’t busy at the time, each a “star” in his own right, and we went out on the road. It was a successful endeavor. There were some great guys along for the ride, including Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Joe Walsh, and Nils Lofgren.

  I had been having a great time. I loved it there in Japan. I would’ve attracted attention on the streets here even if I weren’t famous. Most of these people had never seen anything as big as me outside of Godzilla movies. They would stop and stare and giggle when they caught sight of me. I really didn’t mind. As Dr. John, another member of the band, said, “Pussy is pussy.” Some things were difficult to argue with.

  Ringo and I had just been hanging out and shooting the shit about the old days and the Beatles and whatever else came up. Ringo’s easygoing manner reminded me of Danny a little bit. Both of them stayed out of band politics, and that was not an easy thing to do. When Ringo talked about the first three years, it was amazing. Those four guys had taken a ride that very few people had ever been on. Sinatra and Elvis, maybe, but that was about it. It was one thing to have screaming fans and sold-out stadiums, but it was another thing entirely to change history. I was fascinated and wanted to understand how it had felt.

  “It felt like we were traveling at a very high rate of speed.” Ringo smiled. I had some sense of what he meant, although only the four of them would ever really know. What a remarkable thing to happen to a person—a drummer, yet—with no real expectations of any kind of fame much less overwhelming, impossible fame. It was astounding.

  Ringo looked at the phone when it rang. Neither of us was in the habit of answering the phone. It was almost always somebody you didn’t want to talk to. As luck would have it, at that moment all our assistants were off doing something else and the phone would have to be answered or ignored.

  �
��What do you think?” said Ringo. He looked at the ringing phone then at me. I had just picked up a tiny cucumber sandwich from a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  “Maybe it’s somebody trying to give you money,” I said.

  “More likely to be somebody with a problem,” said Ringo.

  “So let it ring,” I said.

  “On the other hand it could be one of the fucking loved ones,” said Ringo.

  “True,” I said. I ate the tiny sandwich in one bite. When I looked at it before popping it into my mouth I was reminded of King Kong holding Fay Wray.

  The phone kept ringing.

  “Damn,” said Ringo. “I wonder if they’d let it ring all day or would they give up after a while.”

  “Must be somebody important enough to get the switchboard to keep trying,” I said.

  “Damn,” said Ringo, looking at the phone. It sat on a side table about eighteen inches away.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Either answer it or throw it out the fucking window.”

  “Damn,” said Ringo. He looked around to see if anybody else was going to walk in who could solve this problem for him, but we were alone.

  “Want me to answer it?” I asked.

  “Damn,” said Ringo. Then he picked up the phone and held the receiver to his ear. He didn’t say hello. He just listened for a moment.

  “Who is it?” I said, picking up another tiny sandwich. This one appeared to be either tuna or maybe crab. I smelled it. Crab.

  “Who are you looking for?” asked Ringo, who then listened again and pointed to me.

  “Me?” I said. “No, nobody knows I’m here. Nobody could find me here.”

  “Who is this?” said Ringo. Then he laughed and his body language changed. He uncrossed his legs and relaxed his shoulders. His face became more animated and his voice rose slightly. “Hey, cool breeze,” he said.