It may or may not have become evident during the three years I’ve throwing stuff at the wall here at the Consortium, but I do love me some saxophone. And every once in a while, I dig into one of the most interesting – to me, anyway – documents I’ve found in the years that I’ve been online.
About ten years ago, as I wandered through music blogs and forums, I chanced across a Word file: The History of Top 40 Saxophone Solos, 1955-2005 (updated as a pdf in 2011). Now 196 pages long, the file lists every American and British Top 40 hit during those years that had a saxophone solo or significant background saxophone part and then lists the individual player or players who crafted those solos or those parts.
Plenty of spots in the list of soloists are blank – the writers say research continues – but many of them are filled. And many of those that are filled, gratifyingly, are from the earlier years, when individual credits on records were few.
The familiar names pop up frequently: King Curtis, Herb Hardesty, Lee Allen, Sam Taylor, Plas Johnson, Steve Douglas, Junior Walker, Jim Horn, Bobby Keys, and on and on down to Clarence Clemons, Tom Scott and David Sanborn. The number of records listed gets more slender from the mid-1990s onward, but there’s still a lot to dig into.
And surprisingly, even though I mentioned his name in the previous paragraph, and even though he’s most likely my favorite saxophone player ever – or at least one of my top four – I’ve never sorted through the file to see how many times Clemons is listed. So, I looked today and found him credited on thirteen tracks, most of which are not at all surprising. The years listed are the years the records charted.
“Born To Run” by Bruce Springsteen, 1975
“He Can’t Love You” by the Michael Stanley Band, 1981
“This Little Girl” by Gary U.S. Bonds, 1981
“Out Of Work” by Gary U.S. Bonds, 1981
“Dancing In The Dark” by Bruce Springsteen, 1984
“Freeway Of Love” by Aretha Franklin, 1985
“I’m Goin’ Down” by Bruce Springsteen, 1985
“Who’s Zoomin’ Who” by Aretha Franklin, 1985
“You’re A Friend Of Mine” by Clarence Clemons &
Jackson Browne, 1986
“Born To Run (Live)” by Bruce Springsteen (British
release), 1987
“Unchain My Heart” by Joe Cocker (British release), 1992
“The Edge Of Glory” by Lady Gaga, 2011
“Hair” by Lady Gaga, 2011
The first of two listings there that caught me by surprise was “He Can’t Love You” by the Michael Stanley Band. I vaguely recall that Springsteen had some interaction with Stanley about that time, but I’d not known that Clemons played on any of Stanley’s records.
(I’ve seen Stanley mentioned as one of the lesser-known musicians in the 1980s “heartland rock” genre, along with Joe Grushecky and his band, the Iron City Houserockers. The most prominent in that ill-defined genre are, of course, Springsteen, John Mellencamp and Bob Seger. The entry on heartland rock at Wikipedia goes a little further afield and mentions Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Melissa Etheridge, John Hiatt and the BoDeans along with others as being part of the genre, which to me tends to blur at the edges into the later-defined genre of Americana.)
The other listing that surprised me was “Unchain My Heart” by Joe Cocker, a cover of the Bobby Sharp song first recorded by Ray Charles. I’ve known Cocker’s version since it came out in 1987, the title track of yet one more comeback album for the British singer. I found Unchain My Heart by accident in a record shop in Minneapolis when my lady of the time and I were in search of the soundtrack to the movie Dirty Dancing. We found the soundtrack, and I grabbed the Cocker album as well.
Either the Unchain My Heart jacket did not list the backing musicians, or I just never thought to check, but I was unaware until this morning that Clemons played the solo on “Unchain My Heart.” I’m guessing that I never thought to check, but I’m not sure, as the LP went out the door some years ago when I sold two-thirds of my collection, leaving me with only mp3s of the album’s ten tracks. And even though I like Cocker’s work on the title track, I’ve never listened a lot to the album. That will change this week.
Anyway, I listened again to the title track this morning
and thought, “Yep, that’s Clarence.” So, I went and found the video (and yeah, that’s the
Big Man in the video):
– whiteray
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