Little Steven Van Zandt sits in a Lincoln Towncar on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, waiting to go to lunch. "We're not going far," he says, rubbing his hands for warmth. "But we might as well drive. It's too cold out today." The car travels half a block, turns a corner and stops at the back door of an Italian restaurant. Steven exits in true rock-star style: walking briskly with his head down, not looking up or stopping until he's safely inside. The restaurant is one of Van Zandt's favorites, and he is soon at a quiet table in the back warming up with some soup, antipasto and a slice of high-grade parmigiano cheese. Staffers come by to offer congrats on his career renaissance as the man recounts his first dry spell: the Nineties.

"I literally spent years walking my dog, wondering, 'What am I going to do for work?' " he says in his nasal New Jersey tongue. "I had no place in the world. I knew something was over, and I didn't know what was next. 'Do I cease to exist? Am I dead now?' Feeling that way really makes you check yourself. You second-guess every decision you have ever made. And, man, I was feeling kinda stupid to be in that place. How did I get to a place where I couldn't work? I'm a working guy -- I love to work."

Since the late Sixties, Van Zandt had been working nonstop. The Boston-born, Jersey-bred, Italian-American guitar player started out on the Garden State club circuit, playing bars with his friends Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny Lyon. In the mid-Seventies, he joined up with Springsteen's E Street Band, helping to shape Born to Run and one of the most beloved rock & roll outfits still rocking.

In the mid-Eighties, he moved away from E Street to pursue a solo career and become a freedom fighter: In 1985, Van Zandt co-produced the Sun City album, a scathing indictment of South African apartheid. The project transformed him into an activist, and Van Zandt spent the following years as an emissary, frequently risking his life to meet with revolutionaries in South Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and raising awareness of U.S. military involvement in Central America. All the while, Van Zandt produced a variety of bands and put out a series of highly political, uncompromising solo records that, by the early Nineties, had alienated him from the record industry. He spent the rest of the decade continuing his activism and struggling with an unfinished rock-musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, an unfinished book on politics and mixes of his fifth album, Born Again Savage. And then, just when he was ready for the unemployment line, he landed two jobs: Bruce Springsteen reunited the E Street Band, and David Chase cast Van Zandt as an old-school hitman in a new-school mob world on HBO's The Sopranos.

"I'm living proof of 'It ain't over till it's over,'" he says, laughing. "It was a strange convergence. If it didn't happen to me, I wouldn't believe it." Actors are discovered in many ways, but never on an awards show: "I was inducting the Rascals into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which I initially refused to do -- I told them to get a real celebrity. But the months went by, and they kept asking me, so I did it. David Chase happened to be watching." Chase contacted Van Zandt, who had no previous acting experience, and had him come out to L.A. for a screen test.

"They had to make sure that I could act, that I could memorize lines, that I could put three words together in a row," he says. "That first season was a big investment for HBO -- they thought David was crazy for even considering me." Chase stood behind his decision, and Van Zandt was added to the roster. It is easy to see what Chase spotted: Van Zandt's soft-spoken but direct manner and shuffling, animated gestures are like a wiseguy's without the wisecracks -- like a good fella who's actually good.

Van Zandt and Chase thought up the family-values hitman Silvio Dante together. "He's a friend of Tony Soprano's, a trusted lieutenant and a bit of a throwback," Van Zandt says. "He thinks the heyday is over and they missed it. He and Tony see a romanticized vision of the good old days, when everyone could be trusted. And I wanted Silvio to look like that -- Fifties hair, the whole thing."

Like Silvio Dante, Van Zandt is a throwback whose values are steeped in another time, one that he pines for. He's been married to his wife, Maureen, for seventeen years. Where Silvio misses the honor of the old days, Steven misses rock & roll's glory days. "The only thing Silvio and I have in common is that we're both alienated from modern culture," he says. "I kept remixing my album partly to fight the whole digital thing. It's a disaster. CDs are the most outrageous scam that has ever been perpetrated on the public. The sampling rate on them was established in the Fifties or something -- basically you're hearing one-third of what was actually recorded."

Though his new album is available on CD (in stores and through the Web site for his record label, Renegade Nation, RenegadeNation.com), Van Zandt took great pains to defeat the medium's limitations. "I kept everything analog right up to the last moment," he says. "My record is bigger and healthier and fatter than almost any record you'll hear. I think that has a serious effect on how the music affects you -- and partly why music touches people less now."

Van Zandt's album signals the end of a cycle he began in 1982, when he thematically conceived five albums, each dedicated to a different subject: the individual, the family, the state, economics and religion. The first four albums -- Men Without Women, Voice of America, Freedom -- No Compromise and Revolution -- ranged musically from the soulful rock of the Jukes to world and dance music. "I knew they would all be political records that were truthful, artistic adventures, rather than smart career moves," he says. "I knew their musical inconsistency would kill the possibility of a career -- you can't ask that much of an audience. Looking back, you could say it was stupid, and I might agree with you. It was a bit naive, because I forgot to think about how I was going to make a living. But I was compelled to do what I had to do." Born Again Savage, the fifth album, is the end of the cycle and, fittingly, reflects the religion that Steven has followed all his life: rock & roll. "After the other albums, I just came out the other side and really missed rock music," he says. "I actually wrote this album as world music that would have a lot of religious, ritual music in it."

Though he's glad to finally release the album, Van Zandt realizes it will be his last solo effort for some time. "I don't know if I'll ever do another one," he says, watching the afternoon outside grow darker. "I'll have to find the time and energy and discipline to get back to Little Steven. On the spectrum of my personalities -- and I've got four or five -- Silvio Dante is the extreme right, Little Steven is the extreme left and the guy in the E Street Band is somewhere in the middle. Right now, Little Steven has to take a back seat, as important as he is to me." Certainly for now -- there are Sopranos to film and a Springsteen tour to do.

"Bruce hasn't talked about doing a record yet, but I hope we will," Van Zandt says. "It seems like the last logical step in the whole reunion process. First we have to finish the cities we missed. We only did half the country."

The tour, which grossed $53 million last year, will continue through May and end in the summer, leaving Van Zandt more time for his other family. For the second season, he taped his Sopranos parts on his days off, flying in from around the country to make his 5 a.m. calls and sometimes flying out evenings to play with the band. "I could make the transition between the two, but it was a little unsettling," he says. "I couldn't have done it if I didn't love both."

Judging from the acting skills he has recently discovered, the Little Steven slice of Little Steven may find himself even further on the back burner, obscured by a pile of scripts with names like Silvio Dante's Inferno and GoodFellas 2001. "If I don't do any other acting in my life besides The Sopranos," Van Zandt says, lighting an apres-antipasto Marlboro Light, "that's fine with me. If a great director hands me something, of course I'd consider it. But I know how lucky I am." He exhales some smoke. "How often are you going to get a situation where you like everyone you work with? I'm still adjusting to just working. And I have three jobs."

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