He looks just as you would imagine him. Even more so.
Behind the door of his Goodwin Hotel suite across from the Hartford
Civic Center, Little Steven Van Zandt, 49, has his hair swept up in his
bandana, just as he has it onstage with the E Street Band.
The purple flowered cloth didn't quite match his purple paisley shirt.
And neither matched his pink pajama bottoms with yellow elephants.
Between two sold-out Bruce Springsteen shows at the Civic Center Monday,
Van Zandt found time to discuss a career that's exploded in the last
year.
After what he calls "seven years of walking the dog," he not only found
himself back on stage with the E Street Band for the first time in
nearly two decades but a star of one of television's biggest hits, the
HBO dramatic series "The Sopranos," in which he plays another beloved
Jersey mafia sidekick, Silvio Dante.
Arranging a half-dozen half-smoked Marlboro Lights in an ashtray
ominously ringed with tiny skulls, Van Zandt repeats his claim that he
has "the best two jobs in America."
The pace can be trying, though. During Springsteen's weeklong stint
playing Los Angeles last year, for example, he had to fly to New York
twice to film "Sopranos" episodes for the season that just finished.
"Other than that," he says, "it's not too bad."
Occasionally the two personas merge in an oddly surreal way - as when
Silvio appeared in a dream of his boss, Tony Soprano, in the series
finale, standing in front of a mural promoting Madam Marie, a boardwalk
fortune teller made famous in Springsteen's "4th of July, Asbury Park
(Sandy)."
"That was the only direct connection, I guess," Van Zandt says with a
laugh. But the audiences are beginning to merge, he add, "judging from
what people say on the street, or the reaction on stage when Bruce
mentions `The Sopranos.'"
Acting is a new world for Van Zandt, "and it's fun, man."
"I'd been a fan of the gangster genre," he says. "And growing up in New
Jersey, you see these characters around." But acting, he says, is "a lot
of work" - more than just replacing his bandana with the sky-high Silvio
wig.
"I felt the transformation had to be as complete as possible
physically," he says of Silvio. "But I also wrote a biography of this
guy, so I would know how he walked and talked, how he thought and what
his physical expressions would be."
How natural was Van Zandt for the role? When it came time to cast
Silvio's wife, the guitarist's own wife tried out for the role with 100
others and got the part. "She's the one who's actually studied acting,"
he says.
Between the two cultural juggernauts of Springsteen and "The Sopranos,"
Van Zandt hasn't had much time to promote his fifth solo album, "Born
Again Savage," a surprisingly hard-edged album he released through the
internet (on RenegadeNation.com and his own LittleSteven.com) before
putting it out in stores.
Written more than a decade ago and recorded four years ago with the
stellar band of bassist Adam Clayton of U2 and drummer Jason Bonham, the
album went through several mixes before Van Zandt released it late last
year. "I think I gave it a new mix every year," he says.
The result is a hard-charging blend of the progressive politics that
have fueled his solo career and a kind of no-compromise power rock that
harks to the Yardbirds, the Who and Cream.
"It's quite exciting to me to be able to be a part of a tradition I
respect and love so much," he says. Especially because "when I started in
the music business, I felt that all the great rock had been done. I couldn't
imagine finding my place in that."
"Born Again Savages" thematically completes a five-album series he
conceived 18 years ago, this one focusing on spirituality, or,
specifically, the political consequences of spiritual bankruptcy.
The issues of faith that emerge in the solo album only coincidentally
echo similar themes in the E Street Band tour. Both are strictly
nondenominational in their call for a spiritual renewal and revival of
faith.
Van Zandt says his flurry of activity in other fields will prevent him
from mounting a tour to support the solo album "for at least another two
years."
That he'll be busy with "The Sopranos" is to be expected, but is he also
expecting the E Street Band to go into the studio when the tour ends at
Madison Square Garden July 1?
"We haven't discussed it specifically," he says. "But I think it's the
inevitable next step in the reunion process."
The current tour goes beyond the kind of shows that have passed as
reunions, he says.
"We went to great lengths to keep things in the present tense," Van
Zandt says. "Nobody was interested in becoming a nostalgia act. So we're
doing songs we've never done, rearranged other songs, not playing a lot
of the big hits. ... And what we're saying is quite important: creating
a community."
Van Zandt is playing more mandolin in the show than before, in part
because there are so many different kinds of American music presented in
the show, from rock and rockabilly to country, R&B, gospel and folk.
As successful as the tour has been, there's still an underdog element to
it, he says.
"We're in an era now when rock is very much under siege," says Van
Zandt. "This is a bit of soldiering-on to keep the thing, to reconnect
for a new generation, or the same generation - that rock is still
important, still matters, is great and can add value to your life."
Further, fostering "community, hope and self empowerment in such a
cynical world is almost an underground idea. We need to go out there and
prove it."
To keep rock alive is no small campaign. And it engenders in Van Zandt
"the same attitude I had when I was 15 years old: to go on stage and put
on the best show I ever had."
