Big Man Read online

  I was at this stone crab restaurant one night and Bo Diddley was in there. Everybody’s got the mallets, you know, for cracking the crabs. Bo Diddley starts tapping out the Bo Diddley beat. Pretty soon the whole place is doing it and Bo starts singing. It was fucking great. I miss Bo.

  I used to work for this fishmonger when I was a kid. Big racist. He was always amazed when I knew shit. He used to call his daughter out, she worked in the office. She was fat and dumb. He’d give us these quizzes. Like he’d say, “What’s the capital of England?” and she wouldn’t know, and I’d say “London,” and he’d shake his head and say, “Isn’t that the goddamndest thing?”

  He couldn’t have been more amazed if I had risen up into the air and flown around the room. It was as if he’d just seen an orangutan run out of the jungle and start to play the piano.

  Bruce wrote “Hungry Heart” in ten minutes. He wasn’t happy with something the record company was doing. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I know he was pissed off about something. We’d been in the studio all day with nothing much to show for it. In fact, we had started to pack up for the day. Bruce goes to take a piss and when he comes back he says, “Back in the studio, guys, I think I’ve got something.” And he sits down and writes the whole thing out without pausing. Boom! Just like that. I think it’s still our biggest hit. One of them, anyway. “Got a wife and kid in Baltimore Jack.” I loved that it was Baltimore and Jack. Good sounds. The perfect words. “I went out for a ride and I never went back.” Who hasn’t been there? Ten minutes. Amazing.

  * * *

  I was talking to somebody the other day, I can’t remember who… Shit, I can’t remember anything anymore. This getting old stuff is a lot of fun. You know what the best advice is about getting old? Bring money.

  Anyway, I was talking to somebody and for some reason they said, “Tramps like us,” and I said, “And vice versa.” Then I find out somebody said that in a song. The Hold Steady. Maybe I heard it somewhere. I can’t remember.

  Matecumbe Key II

  Don

  Clarence’s world is different from the world in which you and I live. Like the very rich, his life is very different. I’ve been around famous people my entire adult life and I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone tries to make his life easier.

  Waiters, drivers, golf pros—everyone seems to have genuine love for the Big Man. They want to help him in any way possible. All would overlook bad behavior on his part, but there isn’t any.

  It’s not only like this here in south Florida. It’s the same wherever he goes. People who have never met him feel affection for C. Not even Bruce elicits this response. There is a warmth that radiates from Clarence, and it touches everybody who comes into contact with him.

  It is extraordinary.

  It makes you feel good to be in his company. Today was my birthday. Having spent it with Clarence was a very good present.

  A writer I knew named Ron Leavitt died. I’d read it in the news that morning. Lung cancer. It’s usually cancer or heart disease that takes us. I never knew Ron well, in fact we’d only spoken a few times, but I know he was a bright and talented guy. He cocreated Married… with Children and put the Fox network in business. It was a home run and made him rich, and now he’s dead.

  It feels that fast to me now. A lifetime can be summed up in one sentence.

  Clarence and I talk about death a lot, but with the dark humor that binds us. Death may be a motherfucker, but life has been a hell of a ride so far, and all you can do is keep riding until the end.

  “Don’t look back,” Clarence has said to me many times, and I know it’s good advice.

  So now we bid farewell to fallen comrades and look ahead.

  The road beckons, and the E Street nation is ready to take that long walk from the front porch to the front seat.

  It was a blustery and rainy morning in south Florida. The weather forecast was calling for lightning and thunder and isolated tornados. It was a good time to throw some things into a suitcase and head west toward home. It was a good time to hasten down the wind.

  Dick Moroso

  Clarence

  There are three pictures on my saxophone stand onstage. I look at them every night. One is of my spiritual guide, Sri Chinmoy, shaking hands with Terry Magovern. The second is of Danny, and the third is of my friend Dick Moroso. All of them are gone now, but they live in my heart every single day.

  I met Dick in the mid-’70s, and we had some high and wild times together. I mean that literally. We were high most of the time and we were wild. I had a friend in Jersey named Bob Duffy who was into racing cars, and he invited me out to the drag strip in Englishtown one weekend. Dick was also a race car driver, and we met and hit it off right away. We had similar views of the world, and we both liked girls and booze.

  Dick went on to build a hugely successful business in the racing world called Moroso Performance. His company manufactured aftermarket parts to make cars go faster. At the same time he got rich and I got famous. This proved to be quite a combination. I could attract lots of women, and Dick was there to charm the ones I wasn’t with.

  He moved to Connecticut and bought a big house there that became party central for a while. There was a period of time in the early ’80s where we got into serious recreational drug use. I remember one night when we’d gotten deep into it. We had some girls visiting, and it was about midnight when Bruce called and said he wanted me in the studio right away.

  It’s amazing that I didn’t kill myself or some innocent strangers driving down the turnpike doing lines to stay awake. One of the girls I was seeing at the time came from a family who traced their roots back to the Mayflower. Needless to say, she was white and her folks were not happy about her seeing me. It had snowed earlier in the day, and as I approached the exit that led to their house I got an idea. It was the kind of idea that only occurs to you when you’re loaded. Despite the fact that Bruce was waiting for me in the studio I decided to make a short detour. I pulled up in front of her parents’ house, got out of the car, and spelled my name in the snow on the lawn in a lovely shade of yellow.

  I got back on the road and somehow made it to the studio in Manhattan. When I got there Bruce said it was a false alarm and he didn’t need me after all.

  The next year Dick moved to Florida. He’s really the reason I went down there and why I still live there to this day. He called and said he’d bought a boat and invited me down. He said it would be fun. When Dick said something would be fun, he was usually right. And this time was no exception.

  The boat was a fifty-two-foot Bertram, and Dick was living on it in the marina on Singer Island. When I arrived the boat was filled with beautiful women. A party took place. I’m not sure of any details, but I do remember lots of naked bodies and booze and loud music. And I do remember the harbormaster stepping over passed out girls to tell Dick to get the hell out of the marina and to never come back.

  Dick bought a house a short distance away on the intercoastal waterway. He tied the boat up to his dock, and we continued to enjoy everything there was to enjoy—and there was a lot.

  We started taking boat trips. Dick loved being out at sea on the boat. It was the great joy of his life. We’d go out for weeks at a time and island hop. There are still people on the island of Bimini who know me as Calypso Joe.

  Of course it wasn’t all debauchery. Dick was a great friend, and we shared a lot of ups and downs. We’d seek out country-and-western bars and I’d sit in with those bands—something I had done when I first started out. And he introduced me to fishing.

  He started going down to the Keys and entering these competitions. He invited me to go with him to try to catch bonefish. My first time out I caught the biggest fish and won the contest. I was hooked more than the fish were.

  Dick and I were alike in so many ways. I bought a red Cadillac Eldorado convertible one day and drove it over to his house to show off. He was just pulling into his driveway in the new car he’d j
ust bought: an identical red Cadillac Eldorado convertible.

  Of course over the years we stopped the drugs, except for the occasional joint, and settled down. Our lives became almost semi-normal. During that time our friendship deepened, and we talked about more important things than cars and girls.

  Dick got sick and died in the late ’90s. I went to visit him in the hospital near the end. The cancer was obviously going to win the battle, and his doctor gave him the option of going home. He said he wanted to take his boat out one last time. So the doctor and I took him to the boat, and we went out for one last ride.

  And that’s how I remember him. Standing there in the sun laughing as we flew through the waves for the sheer joy of it. That’s why we were there… for the sheer joy of it.

  The Ride Home

  Don

  For me all the discussions about the best show ever ended (temporarily, I would guess), on August 30, 2008, at the Ride Home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That night I saw the best show by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band that I have ever seen.

  It was a performance that had all the things that make any concert great and more. It lasted three and a half hours and contained thirty-one songs. And it was an emotional roller coaster. You come to expect the hard-driving anthems and the sing-alongs, and those were present and accounted for. But this one had more humor—and more bittersweet sadness—than most shows.

  Partly because it was the last show. As mentioned earlier, every time this band ends a tour, there are no guarantees that they will ever take the stage together again. So that feeling was there on that Saturday night in the middle of America. Danny’s son, Jason, who looks so much like his dad, came out onstage with his father’s accordion, stood between Roy and Bruce, and played “Sandy.” There were not a lot of dry eyes in the huge crowd of bikers.

  It was a beautiful night on the edge of the lake, and the band was in a playful mood. The great photographer Danny Clinch was along for the ride, covering the whole thing and doing a formal photo shoot before the show in front of a scrim set up between the trailers. He took pictures of Bruce alone, Bruce with his son Sam. Then Bruce and Clarence, Clarence alone and then with the core members of the band, finally joined by Jon Landau. I watched the whole thing from just a few feet away with Victoria, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching something special—that these photographs would take a special place in the huge photo album that’s part of the band’s history. The whole shoot didn’t last a lot longer than fifteen minutes because Bruce was chomping at the bit the whole time to get the show started. Alejandro Escovedo had finished his set about fifteen minutes earlier, and we could all hear the big crowd getting restless, ready to start the celebration that is Bruce and this band.

  At one point Bruce spoke to his assistant, Wayne Lebeaux.

  “I just had an idea,” he said. “Download ‘Born to Be Wild’ and play it on the sound system when we get off the stage.”

  This was a nod to the occasion, the 105th anniversary of Harley-Davidson. There were hundreds of thousands of bikes in town, all having completed the ride home. The ride back to Milwaukee, where the company started and where every engine for every bike is still built.

  “Fuck it,” said Steven. “Let’s just play it ourselves.”

  I had started the day before in Los Angeles. Clarence had called me late Thursday night and invited me to ride with him to the gig on the chartered jet. As jaded as I am at this point in time, the opportunity to take that ride was thrilling. I flew into New York on Friday night and made my way to the Trump International Hotel the next afternoon at one. I met C in his suite. Victoria had rejoined him after getting her folks on their way back to Russia. His fantastic assistant, Lani Richmond, was busily packing the five bags they take to every show. These are filled with clothing, specific foods, medical equipment, computers, and music. Clarence was feeling good after his recent heart scare. The tequila and the cigars were gone, and his eyes were clear.

  “I’m so ready for this show.” He smiled. “After tonight I get to go home and get ready for these knee operations. I am sick of being in pain.”

  This show was almost like a reward to the people in the band. They got to do it one more time, but since they knew there was a long break following it they could cut loose a little. There was a festive feeling about the whole experience. The only thing that kept it from being complete was Patti’s absence.

  About 1:45 we headed downstairs and piled into the big stretch limo and headed for Jersey.

  “I’ve been in a haze for so long, it feels totally different to be going to a show with a clear head,” said Clarence.

  “Do you feel better?” I asked.

  “Better is a relative term,” he said. “I’d like to have a buzz going, but on the other hand I’m kind of enjoying the feeling of being… I don’t know what the right word is… present. Yeah, that’s it.”

  We looked at a wedding video on Victoria’s computer on the ride to some far corner of the Newark airport.

  Jon Landau greeted us when we walked into the lounge. We sat down and told a few show-business stories and laughed at a few of Clarence’s latest jokes.

  The guys from the band began to arrive. Garry came in first, wearing a spiffy Panama hat with a black band. Max followed with his son Luke and signed a few autographs for Clarence, and vice versa. The guys in the band do this a lot. They are like fans of each other and go around getting autographs on drumheads and album covers and magazines and books just like everybody else. They like to collect along with the rest of us.

  Bruce came in and hung out. He’s a good guy to be stuck with when the plane breaks down and you have to sit around somewhere and kill time.

  Which is exactly what happened.

  The planes being chartered for the last part of the tour were standard Midwest Airlines Boeing 717s. They’re designed to carry eighty-eight passengers. Our group that day was under thirty, so although these were not fancy Gulfstreams there was a lot of room to stretch out. These planes get you where you want to go. Except for today.

  There was some mechanical problem with the plane sitting out on the tarmac, and it would be about an hour and a half before the replacement plane would arrive. This came as no surprise to anybody in the band.

  “Something always happens on the last show,” said Bruce. “One time in Boston our plane got struck by lightning. Put a big hole in the fuselage.”

  To save time, and since all the catering was already on board the aircraft that wasn’t going anywhere, it was decided that we would get on the first plane, have lunch, then switch later. So, with Bruce in the lead, we walked out to the plane and went through an abbreviated security check. Somebody looks at your bags, checks your name off the manifest, runs a metal detector over you, and off you go. This is a good example of the phrase, “Rules is rules.” What happens if Bruce’s name gets left off the list?

  “Sorry, sir, I can’t let you on board. The rest of these folks can go, but you’ll have to stay here.”

  So after this bit of silliness we all got on the plane (except for Nils, who was already in Milwaukee, having gone directly from his Arizona home), and had lunch.

  For about an hour this plane was the most unusual diner on the planet. But the food was good, and the sense of anticipation about the show was high. Milwaukee is an hour earlier, so even with the delay we’d still arrive in town at about five thirty in the afternoon. Next time I’m stuck in a delay at JFK, I’m going to remember that even if you’re the biggest rock star in the world, this kind of shit happens when you travel.

  Eventually a plane identical to the one we were sitting on pulled up alongside. We all deplaned, walked thirty yards, and climbed the stairs into the new one. (It should be noted that Clarence actually rode the thirty yards in a van, as he did to the first plane. The idea being that the less he has to walk the better off he’ll be. In this case, the thirty-yard case, I think he expended more energy and took a greater risk of injury getting in
and out of the van.)

  After all this we took off and flew west for an hour and forty-five minutes into the heart of America.

  Flying with Bruce and the band is the same as flying with anybody else, only it’s a thousand fucking times better. Maybe ten thousand. The cool factor alone is almost incalculable. I don’t care who you are; you’d enjoy the experience. Other rock stars would enjoy it. Why? Because you’re flying with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, that’s why.

  We landed in Milwaukee and they rolled the stairs up to the door of the plane. At the bottom of the stairs was a fleet of vehicles: SUVs, vans, and the Big Man’s limo. Bruce hopped into the shotgun seat of the lead SUV, a black Escalade. I’ve never seen Bruce get into the backseat of any of the cars or trucks that take him to and from the gigs. He’s always in the front, and more often than not he has the window open so that he can wave to people as we pass.

  We climbed into the limo, and as soon as the cops arrived (two cars and eight motorcycles) we took off.

  “How far is it to the venue?” I asked the driver.

  “Twenty minutes,” said Clarence. “It’s always twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes,” said the driver.

  It was an interesting drive. During the last two or three miles the streets were lined with Harleys. There were bikes of all shapes, sizes, and vintages. I saw one with New Zealand plates.

  On the hill just before we dropped down to the site, the lead police car had to stop for a bike that was in the road. Within seconds a huge crowd gathered around Bruce’s car, taking pictures and asking for autographs. Bruce smiled and waved and accommodated everybody he could. Clarence kept the window in the limo closed.

  “These situations still scare me,” he said.