Bruce, I Understand. I Just Don't Like It.

WHAT DO I WANT?
I want to see Bruce Springsteen tour with a stripped-down version of the E Street Band - bass, drums, 2 guitars including Bruce - and tour theaters playing rockabilly and western swing, roughly half originals and covers. He started talking about this in the late 90s before Patti started breaking his balls. C'mon, Boss...

Maybe this is a long overdue eulogy for the Big Man. When he passed, I was DJing a roller derby match in front of 5,000 people at a Key Arena in Seattle. My friend Geoff texted me, "sorry about the big man." I knew C had suffered a stroke six days prior, and the reports were all hopeful, but Geoff gave me the news.

You're here, which means you're aware I am a Springsteen fan, appreciator, historian, aficionado. His music catalog is probably my favorite, in an exclusive category that also includes Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Sam & Dave, and Elvis Costello.

Back in June, the Big Man Clarence Clemons died of complications from a stroke at the age of 69. The Boss' muse since 1971, the image of an E Street Band without him is, well, unimaginable.

While they've remained active as recently as a 2009 album and world tour, for the first time in 40 years, The E Street Band is releasing an album and going on tour without the Big Man.

This is not the first death on E Street. Organist Danny Federici, whose musical companionship with Springsteen goes back even further to the late 60s - he actually hired The Boss for his band Child, and then they formed Steel Mill together, and Dr. Zoom & the Sonic Boom, before the 1971 formation of the Bruce Springsteen Band - lost a battle with melanoma in 2008. Federici's organ, accordion, and glockenspiel were at least as essential to the E Street sound as the Big Man's saxophone. In fact, nothing brought the Jersey Shore to life more than the squeeze box on "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)", his organ as the centerpiece on Bruce's only pre-Born in the U.S.A. Top Ten hit, "Hungry Heart" and if you're wondering what makes "Born to Run" so otherworldly... it's the glock.

But this is different. The Big Man's importance far transcended his solos on "Jungleland", "Badlands" and "Prove It All Night." He was Bruce's on-stage muse, his partner in crime in all the fun in-concert shenanigans, and a fan favorite. Most fans will admit, for 3-4 hours every night, you may have your good eye on the Boss, but your other is on the Big Man.

We've seen Springsteen play without E Street and We've Loved It. There was the '92-93 Lucky Town tour with an entirely different band (save for E Streeter Roy Bittan on piano). The solo acoustic tours for The Ghost of Tom Joad in '95 and Devils & Dust in '05. In '06, he assembled the Sessions Band for an album and tour of ragtime and gospel arrangements of traditional songs previously recorded by Pete Seeger. But those were not E Street projects, they were aptly named and great in their own ways.

WHY RECORD AND TOUR AS THE E STREET BAND? 2 THEORIES:
1. 2005 RECORD DEAL:
In '05, Springsteen re-upped with Columbia, his label of 40 years, in a deal that gave him $110MM for seven albums. Excluding live albums, best-of retrospectives, boxed sets and DVDs, Bruce has released four titles of new music since inking that deal: two with E Street, one solo, and one with the Sessions Band. It's entirely possible that the clock is ticking, and pure speculation makes me wonder if that deal holds Bruce to release a certain number of E Street titles among the seven. It's also possible he was held to certain promotional efforts. While the Boss gave very few interviews and was not particularly accessible for off-stage activities throughout his artistic heyday, since '05 we've seen him playing the Super Bowl halftime show, the Today Show, Good Morning America, giving extensive interviews and access for the DVD documentaries on the making of back catalog classics Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. At a time when E Street may as well be renamed Park Avenue... why bother?

2. THERAPY?
Do the remaining six E Streeters - four of whom have been there since the early 70s (Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, Roy Bittan and Steven Van Zandt) with "new guys" Nils Lofgren and Patti Scialfa having joined just yesterday, in 1984 - simply need to carry on as they normally have all these years, despite the loss or to honor it? Perhaps this is simply what these guys do, and they're simply not quite ready to stop doing it.

WHY NOT TO DO IT? 2 THEORIES:
1. CIRCUMSTANCES ARE DIFFERENT
Danny Federici, who went home mid-tour in late 2007 and passed away a few months later, was replaced by the great Charlie Giordano, who was part of Bruce's Sessions Band on the previous album and tour. In '07-08, the band was on the road, had to keep working, and there was a certain familiarity with Charlie. Clarence died at a moment when the band had nothing in motion, on relative vacation between albums and tours. From a timing perspective, calling it a day is as easy as embarking on a new project.
2. CAN YOU REALLY CALL IT E STREET WITHOUT CLARENCE?
I just don't think you can. I could write for days on this, but if you're reading this, we'll hopefully agree that I don't have to.