Sad news about Clarence Clemons passing away at age 69, one week after suffering a severe stroke. Bruce Springsteen’s E Street myth-building wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without his sideman’s accompaniment on sax, a rueful and romantic spin on King Curtis.

Whenever someone dies, I always prefer to look at film and photos of them that are grainy, dark and damaged. I’m alarmed by the HD, 3-D age we live in, the need to pretend that we’re seeing everything clearer, as if our world, our minds, are objective. It’s all a lie. I think the lo-fi aesthetic is more honest. It has gaps and imperfections and we have to fill them in and correct them, using our memories and dreams. Being handed some sort of phony, flawless truth is meaningless; it’s assimilating inchoate information that makes us human.

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In 1978 in Passaic, Clemons delivers one of the most famous sax solos in rock, two-and-a-half minutes of power, beginning at the four-minute mark: