bruce springsteen :: Blog
Monday, June 20: 7:45 a.m.
Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen.
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The music world lost one of its finest artists over the weekend. Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons died on Saturday at a hospital in Palm Beach, Florida. His death was caused by complications from a stroke he had suffered on June 12th at his home in Florida. Best-known as the saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Clemons was a great musician and a dramatic stage performer. In addition to being a member of the E Street Band, Clemons played with numerous other artists, including Aretha Franklin, Ringo Starr, Jackson Browne and, most recently, Lady Gaga.
Clemons was born on January 11, 1942, in Norfolk, Virginia. He began playing sax as a child, after his father gave him an alto saxophone for Christmas. His father made him practice in a room at his fish store, annoying Clarence, who wanted to be out playing with the other kids. Then, when he was a teenager, he got turned onto the music of King Curtis and other R&B musicians and he switched to tenor sax. He got a music and football scholarship to Maryland State College. In the mid-Sixties, he was going to try out for the Cleveland Browns, but an ...
Monday, February 28: 4:24 p.m.
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On the last day of the Rock Hall's From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen exhibit run, Bruce himself paid a surprise visit to the Museum to see the exhibit in its final hours and meet and greet with fans on February 27, 2011.
Click the slideshow below for this behind-the-scenes tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum with Bruce Springsteen!
Thursday, January 20: 5:51 p.m.
Lauren Onkey interviews Thom Zimny at the Rock Hall on Friday, January 14, 2011.
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Last Friday we hosted a special screening of Darkness on the Edge of Town, a film by Emmy and Grammy-award winning filmmaker Thom Zimny. The Darkness on the Edge of Town film is part of Bruce Springsteen's remarkable new box set, 'The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story released this past November. It includes a remastered version of the album, two cds of outtakes, a documentary about the making of the album, a full concert from 1978, and the film we screened. In Zimny’s film, Springsteen and The E Street Band perform their 1978 album in sequence at the Paramount Theater in Asbury Park, but with no audience present. The result is a stark and intense interpretation of the album.
The film brilliantly creates a sense of an album, not just a set of songs: there is no spoken introduction, no interviews, no content for the album itself. It begins with some haunting black-and-white footage of the amusement park buildings in Asbury Park shot in the late 70s, followed by a few shots of the band arriving at the theater. Then the band launches into “Badlands,” and it never lets up. In between songs, the ...
Thursday, January 28: 12 p.m.
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Guest blogger Caryn Rose shares her thoughts with us about her visit to see the Rock Hall’s special exhibit From Asbury Park to the Promised Land and her first tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
It’s a funny thing to have watched Bruce Springsteen sitting at the Kennedy Center, with his rainbow ribbon award around his neck, and find yourself standing in front of that very award just a few weeks later, in his exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s even odder that that ribbon is in a room along with the legendary Esquire, and that you can get close enough to the guitar (inside its case, of course!) that you can see that the legend is true, that there’s more glue than wood in some places. It’s in a room with the very jeans that adorned the very ass that graced the cover of Born In The USA, the original handwritten lyrics to “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” (with the “freeze out” written in wriggly letters I assume was meant to convey ice), the very flannel shirt that was on the cover of The River (the cuffs so ...
Friday, November 6: 12 p.m.
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I made a vacation out of this event. Really, I mean, I could have worked, but that meant that at some point during the concerts, I would not have been watching the performances. Not a chance. Going into this I knew that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary concerts were going to be an event for the ages.
Opening with remarks from event producer Tom Hanks, the music started with the Killer himself, Jerry Lee Lewis, a 1986 inductee, pounding out “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.” He was followed by Crosby, Stills and Nash. The trio and their band were clearly psyched up for the show and hit the stage with an energetic “Woodstock.” Each of the night’s billed acts had a slate of special guests and CSN first brought out Bonnie Raitt. Possessing one of the greatest voices in rock, Raitt sang a moving “Love Has No Pride” with Crosby and Nash adding harmonies. Stills rejoined them and Raitt pulled out the bottleneck slide for a take on Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider.” Next up was “The Pretender” performed with its author, Jackson Browne. James Taylor was next with versions of “Mexico,” “Love the ...
Thursday, September 17: 5 p.m.
Springsteen's 1960 Corvette is on display at the Rock Hall
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Chief Curator Jim Henke talks to Bruce Springsteen
This is the sixth clip in a series of eight interview audio clips with Springsteen that we will post over the next few weeks.
In this segment of my interview, Bruce Springsteen talks about the making of Born to Run. In short, when he had finished the album, he was not really happy with the results. “There was a sound I heard in my head that was not reproduceable,” he told me. By the time of the album’s 30th anniversary, however, Bruce had come around and appreciated the greatness of the album.
One section of the Rock Hall’s exhibit is devoted to Born to Run. It includes some of Bruce’s early notes about the album, which he refers to as “New Album #3.” He considered several other titles for the album, including Between Flesh. . .And Fantasy, A Love So Fine, Beyond the Palace, Of Love + Defiance and Gimme Action. His early track listing for the album included such titles as “Lonely Night at the Beach,” “Shootout in Chinatown,” “Born to Win” and “Thunderhill.” The exhibit also contains numerous handwritten drafts of the lyrics to “Born to Run,” as well ...
Thursday, September 10: 5:07 p.m.
Springsteen's Fender Esquire guitar
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Chief Curator Jim Henke talks to Bruce Springsteen
This is the fifth clip in a series of eight interview audio clips with Springsteen that we will post over the next several weeks.
In this portion of my interview, Bruce Springsteen talks about his most famous guitar, his Fender Esquire. Bruce purchased the guitar – which is a hybrid of a Fender Esquire neck and a Fender Telecaster body — shortly after he signed with Columbia Records in 1972. The became iconic after it was featured on the cover of Born to Run and, in recent years, fans would applaud when Springsteen put it on and played it in concert. The guitar was most recently played at the Super Bowl earlier this year. Much to the surprise of virtually everyone in his camp and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce himself thought the guitar should be included in our exhibit. One morning when I came into work, I got an e-mail from Toby Scott, Bruce’s recording engineer and the person in the Springsteen organization who was working to help me create the exhibit. “You’re not going to believe this, and we can’t believe it,” Toby wrote, “but ...
Thursday, September 3: 5:08 p.m.
Bruce Springsteen exhibit now open at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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Chief Curator Jim Henke talks to Bruce Springsteen
This is the fourth clip in a series of eight interview audio clips with Springsteen that we will post over the next several weeks.
In this portion of my interview, Bruce Springsteen talks about the recording session he did when he was auditioning for Columbia Records. The session took place on May 2, 1972. The “John” who Bruce refers to is the legendary A&R man John Hammond, who oversaw the session and, ultimately, signed Bruce to Columbia. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Hammond also signed Bob Dylan and played a major role in launching the careers of Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Stevie Ray Vaughan and countless others. The Springsteen exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum includes the original tapes and tape boxes from the audition session. In addition, a listening station in the exhibit enables visitors to listen to eight of the songs Bruce recorded that day.
Click here to listen to this clip of the Springsteen interview.
Check back next week for interview clip number five where Bruce Springsteen talks about his famed Fender Esquire guitar, which is currently on display at ...
