Creativity Quote by Clarence Clemons

A rock-and-roll giant admitting, almost casually, that influence is something you find out about later. Clarence Clemons is talking about legacy the way musicians actually experience it: not as an award-show montage, but as a tap on the shoulder in some club or backstage corridor. The line opens with age as a plot twist. "Now that I am much older" isn’t just biography; it’s a reframing. When you’re building a sound in real time, you rarely get to see the ripples. Time turns style into lineage.

The phrasing is tellingly modest. He doesn’t claim to have invented anything, just that players have told him he was "responsible" for them picking up the horn. That word carries weight: it suggests a kind of creative accountability, the idea that making something visible and thrilling can change the demographic of a scene. Clemons wasn’t just a saxophonist; he was the proof-of-concept for sax as stadium-scale emotion, a bridge between R&B tradition and rock’s mass spectacle. If you came up in an era when guitars were the default hero, Clemons made the sax feel like a frontman.

Then comes the gentle sting: "Some of them I have admired over the years". Not all. Subtext: influence is messy, uncontrollable. Once your sound is in the wild, it gets borrowed, diluted, reinvented, sometimes improved. Clemons lets himself be proud without turning it into self-mythology. He’s describing the rare, satisfying feedback loop where inspiration comes back around as respect - and where aging doesn’t mean fading out, but finally seeing the architecture you accidentally built.