Silvio Speaks

From Uncut magazine

An audience with Steven Van Zandt
The E Street Band’s gangster-playing guitarslinger refuses to endorse Hillary Clinton, but may make a deal with the Devil

Steven Van Zandt is late, but arrives armed with an excuse that he hopes will win Uncut over: “I’m right on a deadline”, he grins, “and you know how that is.” Among his many other occupations – guitarist, solo artist, activist, disc jockey, actor, producer, record company boss – Van Zandt, 57, is also a rock journalist, filling a regular column for American trade magazine Billboard. Uncut meets him a few hours before he’s due on stage at London’s O2 Arena with the rest of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. He’s already talking at several miles a minute when he bowls into the room, the face between the cowboy shirt and the iconic bandana illuminated by an immovable smile; his rare pauses for breath must be pounced upon by a questioner with the ruthless efficiency of a hawk.

There’s much to discuss, of course: his four decades of friendship and on-off musical association with Springsteen, his long-running weekly radio show (Little Steven’s Underground Garage), his role as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos, a long career as a fan, maker and champion of great rock’n’roll. He’s most enthusiastic, however, about a new project, the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, a serious attempt to make the tenets of rock music a part of America’s high school curriculum.

“Let’s hear it”, he grins, nodding at the print-out of Uncut readers’ questions, “and I’ll order some more coffee”. Like he needs it.

Q: What do you think happens after the screen goes blank in that final episode of The Sopranos? – William Dreyfuss, Aberdeen
A: The cheques stop. Really, it’s up to you. One of the ideas was that we come in and visit these people, then we move on, and they move on. It was left up to the imagination, I think. It wasn’t meant to be definitive.

Q: What’s underneath the bandana? – Pat Stokes, Manchester
A: The challenge of playing Silvio Dante, of course, was not the acting. The challenge was getting all that hair back under the bandana when I was off screen.

Q: You created the protest group, Artists United Against Apartheid. What do you think of those artists such as Rod Stewart and Queen who played Sun City? – Kevin Cochrane via email
A: We discussed this with them at the time. It was a complicated moment. Our organisation wanted to be the thread that connected everyone constructively. There were forces that wanted them to be punished forever, and I took the position that they did not know what was going on, so I defended them in very intense meetings with the UN, our own people, and people in South Africa who had these people on hit lists. We met with Queen, who agreed never to go back. Rod Stewart, just when we were mastering the record [“Sun City”], wanted to discuss being on the record, but it was too late. I think they were a bit naïve about things. My decision was to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, because I fully intended to bring down the government of South Africa, and I didn’t need to be distracted by getting into a pissing match in the press. Everybody was very righteous in the end.

Q: What did you think about Hillary Clinton spoofing The Sopranos to announce her candidacy? – Jane Meadows, New York
A: They asked me to be in that. I declined. I thought it was clever, and funny. I just didn’t feel comfortable endorsing her, or anyone else at this stage. I was hoping for a Gore/Obama ticket. I read Obama’s book, and the guy is frighteningly intelligent. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to try the other side of the coin, and actually have the smartest guy in the room be president?”

Q: Which do you prefer to be called: Little Steven, or Miami Steve? – Bert Epstein, Sacramento
A: Nicknames are a sort of a thing in New Jersey. And in the Mob. “Miami” was because I briefly went there in 1974 to play with Dion. I came back with all these Hawaiian shirts, and kept wearing them, even in January, with one of those straw hats, and Bruce just kept calling me Miami.

Q: What two or three songs in the Springsteen canon are your favourites, and why? – Keith Campbell via email
A: “Fade Away”, and a close equivalent we’ve been playing lately, “The River”. It’s for the same reason – I get to play acoustic 12-string, which comes 100 per cent from Keith Richards on “Good Times Bad Times” and “Congratulations”.

Q: In the first chapter of The Sopranos, when Tony walks in with his daughter after a volleyball match, Silvio Dante is talking to a student. What was her saying to her? – Victor Gutierrez, Mexico City
A: It was my daughter, not a student. The writers wrote into the character that Silvio was totally cool in life and death situations, but would totally lose it at sporting events. So I was there ‘cos my daughter was on the volleyball team.

Q: What was the last CD you bought? – Pete Whitefield, Manchester
A: I have a funny touring habit – usually I buy the same records every tour. I just bought [The Rolling Stones’] 12x5 for the 20th, 25th time, maybe. It’s a ritual. You want some things to be consistent in an inconsistent world.

Q: Did you ever regret leaving the E Street Band just before their greatest success? – Bryan Meng, Nashville
A: Almost immediately. I felt I had to do it at the time. I became obsessed with politics, and obsessed with guilt that American tax dollars were buying all these bullets that were killing people in Latin America. But, career move, not a good idea, and economically, not a good idea. And even thought I learned what little I know since I left the band, one of the things you learn is: don’t lose your power base. After 15 years of work, we start to make a living, and I walk away. Stupid. But it was an absolute compulsion.

Q: What sort of reaction did you receive from the rest of the Sopranos cast as a famous musician – i.e., a rookie actor – being given a prominent role in the show? – Andy Michael, Beaconsfield
A: I was concerned about that, but they couldn’t have been nicer. My idea was to transform myself physically, so they wouldn’t be looking at me thinking: “I saw him play in Cleveland, why is he saying these things?” So I gained 50 or 60 pounds, changed the walk and the clothes and the hair, and hoped the guy would appear from the inside, and that they would believe it.

Q: As a friend of Bruce’s since you were teenagers, to your mind what is the funniest thing Bruce has ever done? – Bryan S. Friesth via email
A: He is quite funny. To this day, he makes me laugh. One day, around 1966, 1967, for no apparent reason, he took up surfing, which was a bizarre thing to do in New Jersey – surfing wasn’t cool at this point. The Beach Boys weren’t cool. So we went to the beach, so he could demonstrate it to me. He goes out, first wave, he gets up on it, falls off it, surfboard comes up and knocks out his front teeth, he comes in dragging the board, bleeding like he’s had his throat cut. I told him I’d take a raincheck on it.

Q: What do you do in your spare time? – Linda Gilder, London
A: I play shows with the E Street Band.

Q If you had the chance to spend one day with someone who was a great influence on you professionally, who is no longer with us, who would that be? And what would you ask them? – David Pilvelait, Kilmarnock VA
A: Robert Johnson. I’d ask: did you really make that deal with the Devil, and if so, where do I sign?

Q: With your support of garage music and new bands, how do you think the record industry should work with getting new music out there? Do you agree with Radiohead releasing their album for a buyer-determined price? – Blair Morgan, Wellington
A: The industry is in the biggest transition since the LP was invented. What concerns me, and we’ll have to find a way to deal with it, is the idea that music isn’t valuable enough to pay for. I don’t like the fact that we’re enabling that attitude to exist – though I don’t think that was Radiohead’s intention. I’ve written many Billboard columns on this… Any suggestion that music is free, and falls off trees, that ain’t cool. It’s a lot of work. Art is not inevitable. Great art is done for the most crass and obnoxious reasons – money, sex, rent, food, ego, power. Take those away and the culture will suffer. It already is.

Nils Lofgren: What’s your favourite live show?
A: Aw, tell Nils to get a life. Uh. The Dave Clark Five, The Who, The Byrds, The Jeff Beck Group introducing this kid called Rod Stewart. The Beatles at Shea Stadium, 1966. They sounded extraordinarily good, and the tapes prove that. No monitors, and the harmonies were spot on. Amazing!

Nick Hornby: I love the idea of your Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, which aims to encourage the study of proper music in US schools. But do you worry that, in attempting to make rock’n’roll part of the curriculum, you might kill it off altogether?
A: A legitimate concern. But, since it couldn’t be more dead, I don’t have much to worry about, do I? Rock’n’roll is a funny thing. You can watch it, but you can’t contain it. It’s a free-flowing virus and I want to make sure the essential bacteria survive [transcriber notes biologically wrong mixed metaphor]. We have a plan that’s going to every middle and high school, to make sure future generations know about pioneers of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Right now, rock’n’roll is an endangered species. Five years on, I could be the only DJ in America playing The Beatles.

Franz Nicolay, The Hold Steady: With so many guitar players in the band, how do solos get shared out? Rock, paper, scissors? Or are certain songs associated with certain players?
A: Drawing the short straw. And Nils is the shortest, so he usually wins. Bruce is the boss, so he gets most of them, and from there, me and Nils… it’s dice, usually.

Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers: Is there a chance of another record with the Disciples of Soul?
A: Probably not. I outlined five solo LPs and did them – kind of said what I wanted to say and learnt what I wanted to learn. I’m just too busy, and I don’t have any burning need. Though I’d like to do another record only because, after listening to 20 albums a day for seven years for the radio show, it could be pretty good.

Ed Harcourt: if the sleeve credits are correct, you didn’t feature very much on Born to Run – only backing vocals on one track, no guitar. If not, why not?
A: I wasn’t in the band. Me and Bruce go back 10 years earlier than that – we’ve been friends for over 40 years. At that point, I wasn’t in the band, but I was invited to the sessions to hang around. At the end of the sessions, he said, “We have a few gigs left.” Basically, his career was over – he had seven gigs booked and that was it, back to Asbury Park. So he said come on out for seven gigs. And somewhere in the middle of that we ended up on the cover of Time and Newsweek, which was just ridiculous. To this day, nobody can quite believe what happened.