Church with Bruce

                

                Following the general cancer survivors’ motto of “Get Busy Living,” on Friday, John and I dragged our three children to a Bruce Springsteen concert in Washington, DC. John and I had not seen the Boss in 27 years.  Last time we did: the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour, July 4, 1985, in London, at Wembley Stadium. Of course, Bruce opened that night with the song “Independence Day.” The venue was big enough that you could go down on the field and dance if you wanted to, and everybody did. Bruce played for four hours. That was our second date.  It was amazing.

                I wanted my kids to experience that.  I wanted to experience it again. My oldest kid, Sean, is going to college next year; when would we have the chance to do this again, together?

                My older kids were open-minded about going to see Bruce, but Matthew, who is nine, really and truly didn’t want to go. He would have rather gone anywhere else. He would have rather gone to the doctor for a flu shot.

                He was remembering too well being dragged, by me, for my birthday treat, to a Willie Nelson/John Mellencamp/Bob Dylan concert at a ball park in Aberdeen, Maryland, a couple years ago. That concert was awful. The Willie Nelson portion of the evening was washed out when a severe thunderstorm caused the authorities to shut the show down for a long while.  Mellencamp was okay. But when Dylan finally appeared, he clearly did not want to be there. He phoned it in. Every song sounded the same. He didn’t interact with the audience at all. The crowd was pretty much drunk, having had nothing to do during the rain delay but drink beer. It was the saddest excuse for a concert I had ever seen. And it skewed my children’s faith in my musical tastes forever.

                I promised them that Springsteen wouldn’t be like that. Really. It would be fun. They would be singing and dancing themselves before it was over, I swore.  But Matthew still begged for me to find a babysitter rather than make him go.

                “You are coming with us and you are going to enjoy it, dammit!” Hey, I know how to put everyone in a party mood.

                Needless to say, the minute we got to Nationals Park, the baseball stadium where Bruce played, Matthew came around right away. The energy was just there, and even Matthew knew it. Bruce played until midnight, and there was not a complaint or a whine the whole time. Matthew fell asleep eventually—a skill I would love to have—but he fell asleep happy.

                So, what does all this have to do with a cancer blog? Two words:  Clarence Clemons.

                Clemons, the “Big Man,” was the E Street Band’s saxophonist since, what, 1971?  He died last year, following a stroke.  If you have ever heard any of Springsteen’s more rocking songs—“Rosalita,” or “Jungleland,” or whatever, when you get to the part where there is an intense sax solo, that’s Clemons. He also played with many other artists, including Aretha Franklin and Ringo Starr and Lady Gaga.

                Clemons was a huge part of the E Street thing. If you Google Clarence Clemons images, you will find many photos of Springsteen and Clemons together. My own favorite is on the cover of the album Born to Run. On the front, you see a very young Springsteen laughing and leaning on someone.  If you see the back of the album, the rest of the photo, the person he’s leaning on is Clarence Clemons.

                So Clemons’ loss left a big, gaping hole in the E Street Band. I am looking for a metaphor here, but struggling to find one, for a loss like that. It was hard for me to imagine how Bruce would continue being Bruce without Clarence Clemons. How would he ever make the music sound right again?

                Eventually, Bruce hired Clemons’ nephew, Jake Clemons, as his new saxophonist. I was sort of afraid this would turn out to be a lame gesture. What if Jake wasn’t up to it?

                Well, he was up to it. He was there at Nationals Park with Bruce on Friday, and I can tell you, he’s great. Every time he showed his face, the crowd went nuts.  As John put it, he was channeling his uncle. At one point Bruce stopped and said to Jake, “I wrote this song before you were born!” And that was fine, because Jake was totally rocking it.

                As the evening unrolled, it became clear that it was all going to be, in part, anyway, a big, fun, rocking memorial service for Clarence Clemons.    It was like going to church. It was a big revival meeting. And the sermon was on coping with loss, great loss. It was on how you cope gracefully with loss, not with denial, but with hope.

                Of course, every person has loss of some kind to deal with. In my case, I have breast cancer. My self-help books and mental health professionals tell me I am dealing with loss right now, whether I know it or not. I am supposed to be mourning the loss of my old physical body in general and specifically, my right breast. I don’t think I am in denial when I say I do not feel like I am mourning that right now. I am not in denial. I know what I look like. It’s not so bad with clothes on. I mean, a good bra can cover a multitude of sins. But I have seen myself naked. One of my breasts is literally three inches higher than the other one, and it’s messed up. And I have the hair of a seventy-five-year old.

                But I am not mourning those losses yet.  I am still thinking we are going to fix them. The hair, I hope, will continue to slowly come back.  I will be having a bunch of plastic surgery, starting tomorrow, actually, to address the breast situation. I am cautiously optimistic there.

                No, what I feel like I am mourning is the loss of innocence about death.  I know that in theory, we all know we are going to die some day.  But I really KNOW it. I know more and more people with cancer, because of the circles I move in right now, and some of them are dying. And every time I go for one of my three-month checkups, for days afterward, any time the phone rings, I am expecting it to be the oncologist with bad news. Or, I will hear a song on the radio, and think, “That is really a great song. I wonder if Jeff would sing it at my funeral if I asked him,” and I hadn’t even been aware I was thinking about my own funeral.

                My husband said a couple days ago that I should try to think of it this way:  A couple more plastic surgeries and you’re done. It’s over.

                No, I replied. It is never really over.

                That’s the loss that has been bothering me lately. I am just tired of the knowledge of it. Knowing it could come back any time, knowing life is fleeting, wondering if the spirit lives on, pissed off that the body has to cave in so soon.

                It turned out, a Springsteen concert was the best possible place for me to be this weekend.

                Bruce always talks a lot between songs, and he had two themes going on Friday (and apparently at other concerts during this tour).  One was, broadly, “Trains,” as in, “People get ready, there’s a train a-coming,” or, “This train is bound for glory.”  The other was “Ghosts and Spirits,” and of course everyone knew the lead ghost was Clarence Clemons.

                Bruce asked the crowd what they thought, if anybody was missing anything, missing anyone, feeling the loss, and thousands of people screamed back, “YES!” So did I.

                He sang “My City of Ruins,” which I believe originally referred to 9/11. Now it was just about the loss of his dear friend:

                                Now there's tears on the pillow 
                                darling where we slept 
                                and you took my heart when you left 
                                without your sweet kiss 
                                my soul is lost, my friend 
                                Now tell me how do I begin again? 

                

                And 40,000 people sang back,

                                

                                Come on and rise up! Come on and rise up!

                

                Bruce talked about the spirits that were present with us. He came very, very close to quoting Hebrews 12:1, which goes:  “Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

                 Specifically, Bruce said, the spirits’ presence with us is to remind us of: 1) who we are; and 2) that today is beautiful and precious.

                Of course, all this led to him singing “Spirit in the Night,” and 40,000 people singing back to Bruce, line and response, like Psalms at church, at church with a fired-up black Gospel preacher:

                Bruce:  And they dance like spirits in the night

                                Forty thousand people:  All night!

                Bruce: In the night

                                Us: All night!

                Bruce:  Oh, you don't know what they can do to you, Spirits in the night

                                Us:  All night!

                Bruce:  In the night

                                Us: All night!

                Bruce:  Stand up right now and let them shoot through you!

It was all very rousing, like it should be at church, when the preacher says, “The Lord be with you,” and everyone says, “And also with you!”  Or like when my friend and minister, Rick, tries to call out to our congregation on a Sunday morning, “God is good!” And we are supposed to yell back, “All the time!”  Or, he says, “This is the day that the Lord has made!”  And we are supposed to answer, “Let us rejoice and be glad in it!” But being mostly suburban white people and Methodists, we are not very good at this sort of thing, especially first thing on a Sunday morning, when we haven’t had all our coffee yet.  It works better on a Friday night, with a lot of drums and sax and 40,000 people and beer.

                Bruce went on to talk about the ghosts not being really dead. I do believe this was the Good News, in rock form. He sang “We are Alive,” from his new album, Wrecking Ball.  It starts out with the cross of Calvary and goes on from there about death and resurrection:

                        We are alive, and though we lie alone here in the dark

                         Our souls will rise to carry the fire and light the spark

                         To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

                         

                         Let your mind rest easy, sleep well my friend

                         It's only our bodies that betray us in the end

                               

                         

                  I am afraid I am making this all sound a lot heavier than it was.  I would be giving you the wrong impression if I made you think this was all heavy. I mean, we were thousands of people singing and dancing with Springsteen to “Twist and Shout,” and such. It was not heavy. Even my jaded children were singing and dancing.  It was great. In the end, it was more fun than I can express. But it started out with heaviness and loss, and it ended up with singing and dancing. People easily say the words, “It was like a religious experience.” But isn’t this what a “religious experience” IS?

                Toward the very end of the show—in the encore—Bruce sang “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” and when he got to the part where “the Big Man joined the band,” he stopped and there was a little slideshow tribute to Clarence Clemons, with some very nice photos. It was fitting. I believe everyone was left feeling like we had honored Clemons’ memory, and acknowledged his ongoing presence with us, in the form of his spirit and his music and his nephew rocking out right there with us. You could feel both time passing and the also the cold reality of mortality, but it was okay. It was comforting. It was like church.

                Photo by Sean Roome