He answers to Miami, Silvio, and probably "Hey you" — if it's shouted with
the right accent, that is. But now that the E Street Band reunion tour is
wrapped until sometime in early 2000, guitarist Steve Van Zandt is adopting
his other alter ego, Little Steven, the bandana-wearing, ax-slinging solo
artist who stepped out of the Springsteen fold with 1982's Men Without Women
and has released four other albums of pointed, well-researched social and
political commentary and observation, plus the celebrated anti-apartheid Sun
City project in 1985. His fifth release, Born Again Savage, just hit stores
after being available via the Internet; recorded a decade ago, it finds Van
Zandt laying down base tracks with U2's Adam Clayton playing bass and Jason
Bonham, the son of Led Zeppelin's late John Bonham, pounding the skins. It's
a high-adrenaline rock affair, in other words, with a lyrical focus on
religion — although Van Zandt carefully weaves in the ideas he presented on
the other albums to make it a broader-reaching treatise. He's still got his
day jobs with E Street and on HBO's The Sopranos, but when time permits,
Little Steven is forwarding his particular mission too.
It's been a decade since the last Little Steven record [Revolution]. Have
you been working on Born Again Savage all that time?
I wrote it 10 years ago and kind of demo'd it pretty lazily over the next
year, and then put it aside; then recorded it a few years later, and put it
aside again; then mixed it every couple of years. And that was the result of
a number of things, part of which was my alienation from the music business
and culture in general. Once this Web thing started, it seemed like a good
opportunity to stay involved in music but avoid the music business.
So you didn't feel the pressure to publish or perish, as they say.
Nah. I tend to live in artistic chaos [laughs]. I never looked at my stuff
like a career. I never looked at it like a money earner. Maybe that was a
little bit stupid or naive, but I didn't relate to it that way. Which is not
to belittle the music — obviously it's very important to me. It's hard to
describe, really. I'm a performer; I'm very comfortable on stage. I'm a
writer. But at the same time, I was never particularly thrilled with the
idea of fronting a band and taking it to the top and being successful and
all that. So I basically found another way to make a living, which is … put
out records every year or two and whoever buys 'em buys 'em. It doesn't
matter how many people buy 'em. It's like a very serious hobby in a way
[laughs].
Since Men Without Women, your solo albums have dealt with social issues,
politics, and other serious matters, very different from the things you'd
done with Bruce or even Southside Johnny. What set you off in that
direction?
It was simple in a way; I decided I needed to learn about who I was, and to
do that, I wanted to find out what was going on in the world, of which I
didn't have a clue. I figured if I could learn that, then I could maybe
learn something about myself. I decided I just couldn't see writing love
songs at the time. I couldn't justify it. I felt that to justify my
existence as an artist, I had to do something unique, and nobody was
particularly political at that time — certainly not in the rock world, and
certainly not in their work. So I thought maybe that would be my particular
thing.
How did you decide to work with Adam [Clayton] and Jason [Bonham] on this
record?
Jason was kind of obvious in the sense of I was writing specifically a '60s
hard rock record, and I'd heard him play and he certainly inherited a lot of
what his father and Keith Moon were doing. He grew up with those guys and
with some sense of tradition in that hard rock world. So he just felt
perfect. And Adam was just a crazy thought. I knew Adam and ran into him one
day and just asked him. I knew it would be something different than he'd
ever done, really. I felt he could do it, and I felt he could enjoy it. He
really had some fun and did a great job.
Is there a sixth Little Steven album in the works?
I wrote a whole other record, which I was just going to be the guitar player
for, so I was looking for a singer for a few years. I looked at hundreds of
singers and never found one I liked. So eventually I just came back to it.
It's conceptual in a way; it's sort of the music I liked before this record.
If this record represents the late '60s, my other record is more in the
mid-'60s style and kinda sums up things I liked. There's a bit of Chuck
Berry, Little Richard, a little bit of Otis Redding, a little bit of the
Stones, the Beatles, more in that early pop-rock era, I guess. And the songs
are basically love songs, more typical, normal-type lyrics [laughs].
It's nice that The Sopranos has worked things out so you can still be part
of the show even while you're on tour.
They've been just amazing, absolutely bending over backwards. And the truth
is, I don't have that big a part to begin with, so I really appreciate what
they're doing … scheduling my scenes on days off and that kind of thing. I'm
in it less than I would like now. It's a tough situation because of the
tour, so I'm keeping my hand in there — or gun in there, as the case may be.
Has the reception for the E Street Band reunion tour surprised you at all?
A little bit, yeah. I mean, I'm not surprised that it's successful, but I'm
a little surprised to find myself back there doing it. It seems like a long
time; it was a long time. It was 17 years. But we came back together very
naturally and easily. It was effortless; we pretty much fell into our old
roles, pretty much, with some adjustment 'cause it's a slightly different
band. But the enthusiasm was more than I expected — and I expected it to be
a pretty enthusiastic reception. But it's even a bit more.
So does this band have a future?
[Laughs.] Yeah, I think so. It's awfully good. And we made a decision,
consciously, to keep it from being a nostalgia act; we had 10 or 12 hit
singles, and we may play one or two each night, but mostly we don't play
them. And the quality is such that I don't think you just come back and do a
few gigs and walk away. It doesn't feel like that to me. It feels rather
permanent. But who knows; we'll see how it develops.
