Today, we look at one of the more enigmatic entries in the Springsteen catalog: the instrumental Big Man spotlight, “Paradise by the ‘C’.”
By 1978, Bruce’s catalog had already grown far too large for his set lists to contain. When he and the E Street Band embarked on the Darkness on the Edge of Town Tour that year, Bruce knew that the only way he was going to be able to spotlight both his new material and older fan favorites was to split the show into two sets, with an intermission to give feet and bladders some relief.
That meant Bruce needed an opening song for the second set, something that would ease fans back into the show while late stragglers found their way back to their seats. Bruce found his solution in a “new” instrumental he debuted on the very first night of the tour.
The instrumental was sax-centric, providing Clarence Clemons with a song-length chance to shine. Always a fan favorite, Clarence commanded the audience’s attention, but since there were no lyrics, it wasn’t a big deal if conversations wrapped up around you or late arrivals clambered over you.
Clarence may have been the song’s focal point, but that didn’t mean he was the only featured player: Danny Federici’s organ is almost as prominent, and Max’s late-song extended drumroll tightly coiled both the band and the crowd’s energy for an explosive release that seemed to signal the true arrival of the second set.
“Paradise by the ‘C'” accomplished all this while also epitomizing the Jersey Shore sound. You might have been seeing the band in a theater or arena, but you felt like you were in a boardwalk bar.
The instrumental might have been new and untitled, but longtime fans might have been experiencing some serious deja vu, because that song sounded awfully familiar.
That’s because “Paradise by the ‘C'” was built on the same chassis as “A Love So Fine” (which Bruce played throughout 1974 and 1975) and “Action in the Streets” (a nightly staple on the 1977 tour).
All three songs were unreleased, and all sounded so similar that fans could be forgiven for assuming they were one and the same, not realizing that Bruce had completely dismantled and rebuilt the song from one tour to the next. (None of the three songs would see a studio release until 1998’s Tracks, and then it was in the form of fourth and fifth variants: “So Young and In Love” and “Give the Girl a Kiss.“)
For years, Bruce maddened bootleggers by never actually stating the name of the instrumental, introducing it only by way of acknowledging the featured soloist: “Coming direct from that paradise by the sea: The Big Man, Clarence Clemons!”
When the tour wrapped in 1979 and Dave Marsh published his first biography of Bruce, that’s how Marsh referred to the song: “Paradise by the Sea.”
The name stuck, at least until Bruce released his 1986 box set, Live 1975-85, where the title was revealed to be a clever pun. (“C” was one of Bruce’s nicknames for Clarence.)
The fact that it was included on the box set at all was a bit of a head-scratcher; by that time Bruce hadn’t played it in eight years. He resurrected it briefly on the Tunnel of Love Tour in 1988, however, where the song benefited from the full horn section that accompanied the E Street Band that year.
But as far as fans knew, no actual studio version of “Paradise by the ‘C'” had ever been recorded.
Flash forward to 2015, and the release of The Ties That Bind: The River Collection. Included with that revelatory box set was a disc of River-era studio outtakes, and among them was “Paradise by the ‘C’,” billed as a 1980 outtake.
That was a genuine surprise, as no record of such a recording previously existed. Brucebase suggests that this is not actually a studio recording but rather a multi-track live recording (likely a soundcheck) from Bruce’s 1978 show in Phoenix, but notes that this is “in some dispute.”
(It does sound like a live recording to my ears, but the band chatter sounds too staged (a la “Sherry Darling“) for it to be spontaneous, so I suspect that if nothing else, it was at least recorded for possible inclusion somewhere, someday.)
Live or canned, this was still the first time that “Paradise by the ‘C” was included on an official studio release, 27 years after the E Street Band last performed it.
That didn’t mean the song hadn’t been kept alive, though: Clarence reprised his E Street star turn with his own band over the years and released his own live cover in 2001.
To this day, “Paradise by the ‘C'” remains Bruce’s only officially released original instrumental, but that’s not why or how it will be remembered.
“Paradise by the ‘C'” holds a special place for E Street Nation for its power to conjure up an earlier, simpler time when The Big Man was at the height of his powers.
Bruce doesn’t need to (and almost certainly won’t) bring this one back in concert; The Big Man awaits his moment whenever we replay it.
Paradise by the “C”
Never recorded
Released: The River: Outtakes (2015)
First performed: May 23, 1978 (Buffalo, NY)
Last performed: August 2, 1988 (Madrid, Spain)
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