Born and raised in New Jersey, Steven Van Zandt grew up as a rock freak in what he still believes was rock's greatest era, when legends like The Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Byrds inspired teenagers across the country to start bands that could be just as great for any given three minutes. Van Zandt rose from the garage circuit to the Asbury Park bar scene, where he befriended the local players who later formed The E Street Band and Southside Johnny's band The Asbury Jukes. Van Zandt made the leap from the Dukes to the E Streeters after helping Bruce Springsteen with the arrangements on Born To Run, and his stint with the band corresponded with (and maybe prompted) Springsteen's shift from Bob Dylan-inspired boogie epics to the working-class retro-rock of his heyday.
Van Zandt left the band in the '80s to pursue a more political brand of global rock, embarking on a five-album cycle that began with 1982's intimate Men Without Women and ended with 1999's equally intimate Born Again Savage, with more expansive records (and a couple of minor hits) in between. He returned to touring with The E Street Band when Springsteen reconvened the group in the late '90s, but lately, he's been better known for two unexpectedly successful side projects: his recurring role on The Sopranos as the mobbed-up proprietor of a Jersey strip club, and his four-years-and-counting run as the programmer/host of the weekly syndicated radio show Little Steven's Underground Garage. Between hustling from TV sets to radio booths—and writing a weekly column on garage rock for Billboard—Van Zandt spoke with The A.V. Club about how his eclectic career fits into one long statement in favor of rock 'n' roll's power to bring people together.
The A.V. Club: Did you ever grab a stack of records and play DJ when you were a kid?
Steven Van Zandt: [Laughs.] Nope. It never occurred to me. Never did that. I never pretended I was an actor, either. [Laughs.] There's a lot of things you end up doing that you never figured on.
AVC: What did you think you were going to do?
SVZ: Well, from the age of 14, 13, I guess I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll star. And that was it. I wanted to make a living playing rock 'n' roll, and it was a ridiculously impossible dream at that time. But it was kind of all I ever wanted to do. It's nice to do it.
AVC: On the radio show, how much say do you have in the final playlist?
SVZ: One hundred percent.
AVC: Everything is your choice?
SVZ: Completely. Every single second of the show is me.
AVC: It's a wide, diverse collection of music, from old to new.
SVZ: Well, I think it's important that all 50 years of rock 'n' roll live in the same place, because it's all connected. I'm not pretending to be an academic, or to have this down to a science. It's strictly my taste. But there is a connection between everything I play and the sets I put together. The Ramones are the fulcrum. I play the Ramones, I play everyone who influenced the Ramones, and I play everyone the Ramones influenced. If you look at it that way, it sort of makes sense. [Laughs.]
Basically, it's what we call garage rock, which is traditional rock 'n' roll. I hear a very specific, obvious emotional connection, even if it's just in the spirit of the record. They're all connected in my mind.
AVC: You're unusually up to date for someone of your generation.
SVZ: I did this show for probably three or four reasons, and one of the main reasons was the impulse to support these new, very good rock 'n' roll bands that somehow ended up in the 21st century with no format. I don't know how we got here. Rock 'n' roll was the mainstream for 30 years, and now we've ended up in radio with formats for everything except rock 'n' roll. It's incredible, when you think about it. So I thought, "Well, we have to support these new bands too, in a way that keeps the relevance of the older bands."
If it's in a museum, it becomes an artifact, not emotionally connected to now. And that can't happen, because rock 'n' roll is a continuum, the way I see it. An emotional continuum, going back as far as you want to go, and leading into the future as far as you want to see. It has to stay connected in order to make that continuum effective, and you can't do that without playing new music. When you hear The Boss Martians or The Hives or The Strokes or Jet, whoever it may be, you can trace their roots back directly, and that keeps the old stuff fresh. We wanted to give these new bands a chance, and let the next generation of kids actually hear what rock 'n' roll is. When they hear it, they love it. We know that. I get e-mails from 11-year-olds and 61-year-olds. But if they never get a chance to hear it, we're gonna have a generation of kids never having heard the real thing. That's not acceptable.
AVC: Have you noticed any change in the past couple of years? It seems like there have been more inroads for rock 'n' roll at MTV and elsewhere.
SVZ: Yeah, yeah. A little bit. When we started five years ago, there wasn't a single rock 'n' roll group signed to a major label. It was horrifying. Now there's about 12, which is progress. Five of them went gold or platinum in the last couple of years, which is remarkable, really. But there's still no format to play them other than mine. The alternative formats will play The White Stripes for a couple of weeks, or The Hives for a week or two, but they can't play them regularly, because they don't really fit. It's a different format. Different genre. It's garage rock. We finally had that officially recognized by Billboard magazine in the last month. There's finally a garage-rock chart, up in the front, connected to my column. For the first time, people have started to realize, "These things don't fit in anywhere else, really. They're different." So it's a beginning of recognition, and in one sense, it's fucking slow motion. But it's progress.
AVC: You were touring with The E Street Band at the time that the Ramones and other early punk bands were emerging in the New York clubs. Did you get to see those guys, or were you on the road too much?
SVZ: The '80s is what I missed. I was on the road with my solo records—in Europe, mostly—in the '80s. In the '70s, I caught some things. The Ramones, people like that. The Dictators, you know. Compared to what happened later, there weren't that many really important bands to catch in the '70s. It wasn't like there were a million bands. It was a relatively small number, and we all kind of knew each other.
AVC: Did you and the other members of The E Street Band have much connection to the mainstream of rock 'n' roll in the '70s? The early Springsteen records, before you joined, kind of shadowed what bands like The Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan were doing, only more organic and not as studio-slick, but the records after you joined sound more like "Springsteen music."
SVZ: Bruce and I were friends from way back, but I didn't really officially join the band until the third record was coming out, and I was only there for three albums, really. I started producing on The River and Born In The U.S.A., and I arranged Darkness On The Edge Of Town. So really, it was those three records, and the tail end of Born to Run. Even then, it was completely out of the mainstream. I don't remember Bruce ever being anywhere near the mainstream. Which was why it was so remarkable that Born In The U.S.A. ended up having seven top-10 singles. Just absurd. If you listen to those singles now, you'd think the same thing I thought back then, which is, "They don't fit."
It's like there was a cumulative effect of us playing so effectively live, and having such a loyal audience. Building it up that way, it almost forced radio to play us, because radio was a lot looser than it is now. They had to respond to the community, which they don't do anymore. It was just an odd moment, where Bruce became the mainstream for five minutes. It was ridiculously, completely out of character. [Laughs.] He didn't fit in, so he kind of made his own way.
I don't really see even the Steely Dan or Doobie Brothers. I don't quite see that. Bruce had a bunch of different influences on his first couple of records. You could hear a little bit of this guy, little bit of that guy.
AVC: But he shared that loose, boogie style that other early-'70s bands employed. The difference was, those guys were more studio-bound and insular, while Springsteen was looser.
SVZ: More jammy, almost? Kind of instrumentally based? I could see that, yeah. When I got involved with the arrangements on Darkness On The Edge Of Town… My thing has always been not just band-oriented, but three-minute-song oriented. That's my personal taste, obviously, as you can hear on the radio show. I kind of brought that with me. And that's the direction Bruce wanted to go at that moment, so that's what happened. But I think you're right. We came out of the '60s, where there was a lot of jamming going on. A lot. And we had to be good musicians, to a certain extent, but I just was never into it. I was never into five-minute guitar solos and that kind of stuff, personally. Those first two Bruce records, I think, cover a lot of ground. A lot of influences from the '60s, from folk music to jazz, and everything in between, including some jamming and extended instrumental passages and things like that, which were fun. Still, looking back on it, it just didn't fit in anywhere.
AVC: What was the attitude of the band in those days, knowing you could blow anybody else off the stage? Were you cocky about it?
SVZ: Yeah. [Laughs.] I'm not sure "cocky" is exactly the right word. Certainly confident. It was one of those things. We had to be good before we got into the music business. Locally, we just had to be good. You had to be good to pay the rent. So we came up that way, and learned how to be good. Learned how to get audiences going, and what worked and didn't work, and stuff like that. By the time we got to the music business, it was seven, eight, nine, 10 years later, after we were making our living playing live. It became easy. It's the only place I really feel comfortable, onstage. That's where I get a chance to relax.
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