The music scene on the New Jersey shore in the late Sixties and early Seventies must have been a thing of wonder, a kind of Merseymania-on-Sea. Its mix of soul, R&B and primitive rock’n’roll fuelled countless groups, not least Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and eventually Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Stevie Van Zandt was a key member of both of those outfits.
While history has decreed that Springsteen’s vast shadow should eclipse everything, Bill Teck’s documentary (originally made for HBO) does a solid job of reminding us that maybe the Boss did need a little help, and he got plenty of it from his faithful right-hand man. “He became my rock’n’roll brother instantly,” Springsteen recalls of their earliest meetings. It was Springsteen who nicknamed Van Zandt “Miami Steve” after he returned from a job in Florida with the doo-wop band The Dovells dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and fedora hat, but you could never take New Jersey out of the boy (pictured below, Stevie and the Boss).
Van Zandt resembles a kind of psychedelic pirate in his bandanas, scarves, jewellery and diaphanous blouses, and makes a vivid, multi-faceted subject for Teck's film. His CV is that of a man of amazing energy and diverse interests. Before he became an intrinsic part of the Springsteen operation Van Zandt was already well known locally as songwriter, musician and producer, and his all-round talents were on display on Southside Johnny’s debut album I Don’t Want To Go Home, not least the brilliant title song (Van Zandt claims it was the first of his own compositions he actually liked). Indeed, he was integral to Southside’s first three albums, which were also boosted by some powerful songwriting contributions by Springsteen. Some of the best bits of this doc are grainy film clips from those days, including one from the Stone Pony club in Asbury Park featuring Van Zandt, Springsteen and Southside performing “We’re Gonna Have a Party”.
He didn’t officially join Springsteen’s outfit until 1975, when the Boss was about to take his career-defining album Born To Run on the road, but Bruce’s manager Jon Landau recalls how Van Zandt had already made his mark in the studio. Springsteen was struggling to find a convincing arrangement for the track "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", and sent for Stevie to help out. He obliged by creating the funky, horn-powered swagger which made it one of the album’s highlights.
Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder is one of the film’s most entertaining contributors, and he vividly describes the effect the E Street crew had on him. “They were such a gang, a group of men to be reckoned with. They scared me!”
Van Zandt would also play a key producing role on The River (1980) – Landau recalls how the making of it “was a lot of fun… some of the time” – but quit the E Street Band in 1984 after recording Born in the USA to pursue a solo career, now calling himself Little Steven. In one of several droll interpolations, Springsteen observes how “Stevie is an all-or-nothing person… When we first started out Stevie was no politics. Then he became all politics.” Van Zandt suddenly became a campaigner for social and racial justice, partly inspired by by Peter Gabriel’s song "Biko", a hymn to the South African anti-apartheid campaigner beaten to death in police custody.
Next thing you know, Van Zandt was organising Artists United Against Apartheid and masterminding the recording of the song “Sun City”, featuring an infinite list of superstar guests including Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, George Clinton, Pete Townshend, Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis and some bloke called Springsteen (pictured above, Van Zandt with Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond and Varnell Johnson). In 1987 his album Freedom – No Compromise continued his political trajectory, and he featured in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute at Wembley Stadium in 1988. The plight of Native Americans and latin American politics also fell within his purview, prompting Jackson Browne to declare him “nothing less than a revolutionary.”
The film dutifully covers all this at somewhat tedious length, and Van Zandt eventually got tired of it too. Having played a concert in Rome in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, he suddenly decided he didn’t want to be political any more – “I said man, that’s it, I’m done” – and took a lengthy furlough from everything. “I went into the wilderness and I walked my dog for seven years,” he reports.
But fate had more in store. Writer and producer David Chase saw something he liked in Van Zandt and tapped him up to play Silvio Dante in The Sopranos, and despite never having acted before he made himself an indispensable component in the much-garlanded drama. In 2011, he took a lead role in Netflix’s fanciful series Lilyhammer, about a mobster in witness protection who hides out in Norway (pictured above, Stevie and Marian Saastad Ottesen in Lilyhammer). Meanwhile he’d rejoined the E Street Band in 1999, where he currently resides, and wrote a memoir, Unrequited Infatuations. He still found time to become a radio host, with his weekly rock-archaeology show Little Steven’s Underground Garage.
To borrow from the Grateful Dead, what a long strange trip it’s been. If Stevie Van Zandt hadn’t existed, it wouldn’t have been possible for anyone to invent him.
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