He’s known Bruce Springsteen since they were teenagers, and he’s played saxophone alongside him on and off for five decades. In fact, he’s on the road with the E Street Band right now. We talked to low-key sax legend eddiemanion.
To up the odds of that happening, he enrolled at the Berklee College of Music the next year. The experience sharpened his skills, but he grew weary of life as a struggling musician. “I got kind of tired of buying PA systems and trucks and having the band break up,” he says. “There’s not much money.”
I went to the Stone Pony and auditioned for Southside Johnny, and we got the job. It wasn’t much of an audition. We just brought our horns. The fact that we had horns seemed to be the qualifying factor. And so I joined Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes in January 1976, when the first album was being released,Did you remember Southside from the Upstage days?Tell me about the early days of the Jukes.
Yeah. I think they’re really great songs, but nothing that went over the edge like “Born To Run.” I think we were a little bit ahead of our time.I guess. I don’t know the business end of it. I’m just the guy on the bus that did all the gigs. When a business decision was made, it usually got to me last.You had Stevie Van Zandt producing and writing some great songs, some great songs Bruce wrote, like “Dedication.” And “This Little Girl” is just a great song. It’s a tremendous song.
That was the Memorial Day broadcast that went out to radio stations all over the country. It was for the release of. That was the official launch. Bruce, Clarence, and Max all came. Ronnie Spector played with us. Lee Dorsey played with us. Clarence played his normal parts and solos, and we complemented him with the horn section. Sometimes he would join us with the horn parts. Sometimes he’d stay out of it.Yeah. We were very close. We used to play poker up in his room every night. I think he owes me about 10 dollars.How did you wind up playing “Shake, Rattle and Roll” with Bob Dylan and Keith Richards?It was in Seville, Spain in 1991. It was a worldwide TV show.
It definitely was a hard sell for the States. But I think once they heard it the first time, they wanted to hear it again. Once you heard the band play live and you heard Bruce play those songs with that much energy and excitement, then you were hooked. The second time around in the States, they accepted it a lot more.It was a great band. Bruce can make anything sound great. He’s just a master at performing. He’s a master at getting the best out of anybody he works with.
It was hard on everybody. I was playing with Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at the time. I had to play a show that night after hearing about it on the radio. It was impossible. I pretty much broke down. And then I was asked to play “Jungleland” a few weeks later at a tribute to Clarence at the Stone Pony. That was hard. I’d never played “Jungleland” before. I probably never will play it again. But it was pretty emotional for me.
I think your presence helped a lot. The burden of playing the sax wasn’t 100 percent on his shoulders, because you were there too. There was that one night in Australia where Jake had that awful family tragedy and you suddenly had to play all the sax parts yourself. That’s very stressful. Sometimes we’d see a sign and Jake and I would look at each other and go, “Do you know that? No. Do you know that?” Then one of us would have to play it. We pretty much covered it all.
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