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strugglin’ to achieve my lifelong goal of
breaking even,” he half-jokes. (He’s par-
ticularly excited about having recruited
former Youngbloods keyboardist Low-
ell “Banana” Levinger, charmingly as-
suming he’s a household name: “Did you
see Banana?”)
In the past few months, that missing
verse to the doo-wop song at last came
to Van Zandt (“You told me you’d pray
for me,” it begins, capturing the Fifties
innocence he’d sought), just in time for
him to record the song for Soulfi re, his
first solo album in 18 years. “The City
Weeps Tonight” isn’t the only genre ex-
ercise on Soulfi re, which is largely drawn
from songs Van Zandt wrote for other
artists over the years. Most prominent-
ly, there’s the fi rst real song he ever
wrote, the dead-on Drifters homage
“I Don’t Want to Go Home”, which
he used to introduce as an actual
Drifters song in early performanc-
es. “We always have to establish our
identit y in some orig inal way,” he says.
“But just as challenging, or just below
it, is a real genre song that holds up
in that genre. I’m always proud when
that happens.”
But Van Zandt has come to realise
that he does have a genre all his own, a
brand of soul rock once known as the
Jersey Shore sound. He helped create
the style – where Stax-Volt horn-sec-
tion blasts collide with power chords
and Motown hooks – as songwriter,
producer and guitarist for Southside
Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, a role
he mostly maintained in the studio
for a few years even after joining the
E Street Band. The sound – which
also creeps in and out of Springsteen’s
own records – reached its apotheosis
on Southside’s 1978 classic, Hearts
of Stone, and on Van Zandt’s own
debut, 1982’s Men Without Women.
He and Springsteen both took sty-
listic cues from Jersey shows by Sam and
Dave, of “Soul Man” fame. “I said, ‘Aha!
Me and Southside will be the white Sam
and Dave’,” says Van Zandt. “The great
thing about rock & roll, in terms of iden-
tity, was it’s white guys trying to be black.
And failing gloriously, right? So we took
the Sam and Dave thing, but I wanted to
keep the rock-guitar part of it.”
But aside from helming Southside’s 1991
comeback, Better Days, Van Zandt had
mostly put that style aside, veering be-
tween various sounds – reggae, Eighties
synth anthems, hard rock – on his solo
albums. “I didn’t worry about consisten-
cy,” he says. “Of course, if I was someone’s
manager or producer, I would never allow
them to do that. That’s career suicide be-
fore it starts. You can’t have fi ve diff erent
identities musically, OK?”His musical success, he says, “wasn’t
out of determination or courage or per-
sistence, it was because I was a complete
fuck-up at everything else. That’s true of
Bruce too. That’s the one thing we had in
common. When chances came, everybody
took them. College, military, job, what-
ever. The only two left standing from New
Jersey was me and him. Why? Because we
were complete freaks, misfits, outcasts,
that’s why! There was no place else where
we fi t.”
By 1983 or so, Van Zandt didn’t even
feel at home in the E Street Band any-
more, thanks to now-resolved tensions
with Springsteen and manager Jon Lan-
dau. (In his autobiography, Springsteen
writes about playing the two men off each
other to yield creative sparks.) Van
Zandt left, pursuing an increasingly
political direction: “ ‘Does the world
really need a bunch of new love songs
from a sideman? I don’t think so.’ And
I started studying politics.”
He went to South A frica to research
a song, and was shaken by the brutali-
ties of apartheid. Van Zandt persua-
sively argues that the activism that
followed, most publicly with the all-
star “Sun City” song and album, was
a signifi cant factor in the fall of the
regime. That said, he couldn’t help
wondering if he had erred in leaving
Spring steen’s orbit right before the
Born in the U.S.A. tour thundered
through stadiums. “At some point I
just started to feel a little bit stupid,”
Van Zandt says, smiling a bit, “when
they’re all buying mansions and I’m
hiding under a blanket in Soweto. But
that’s how life goes, man.”
He’s convinced that labels black-
balled him after the fall of apartheid.
“They’re looking at me like, ‘Whoa,
this guy’s a little bit dangerous’, and
they just disappeared. So I just went
out into the desert, man, and just
thought about stuff .”
Before they got back together for good
in 1999, the E Street Band had a quick trial
reunion in ’95 – and Springsteen wrote
that Van Zandt more or less invited him-
self back into the band at that point. Van
Zandt has to think hard about that ac-
count before he nods. “I think I felt like,
‘Hey, there’s gonna be an E Street Band
reunion, I should be there.’ Right? I had as
much to do with that success as anybody.”
He smiles. “Maybe more. Some things
got left out of the book. But I’ll deal with
that later.”
Now, he wants to do solo work between
every Springsteen tour, along with more
acting and a long list of other ideas and
projects. “It might be kind of late,” says
Van Zandt, who turns 67 this year, “but I’m
hoping for a big fourth quarter.”school of 3,000 students, Van Zandt was,
as he tells it, the only kid with long hair.
He got thrown out of the school and his
own house for it, though he eventually
made his way back to both. “My father was
an ex-Marine Goldwater Republican,” he
says. “We were the generation gap. It was
rough. My identity was an embarrass-
ment to him. He fi gured ‘You’re just a gay
drug-addict criminal’, you know, whatever
the worst thing was in their heads.” Steve
actually wasn’t on drugs, at least until
“Nazi” local cops planted weed on him and
arrested him for it. “After that, I’m like,
‘Well, fuck this! If I’m gonna be punished,
might as well smoke dope!’ So I started
smoking dope.”ROCK & ROLL RELIGION
Springsteen and Van Zandt in 1975Soulfi re is Van Zandt’s fi rst album since
Men Without Women to embrace his sig-
nature style. “I was thinking, ‘Who do I
want to be?’ ” he says. “I’m like, ‘Who am I
really?’ And the thing most identifi ed with
me, and the thing that is most unique,
is that soul-meets-rock thing. So I went
back to that.”
Van Zandt started his career as a front-
man, covering the likes of Paul Revere and
the Raiders with his high school band,
the Shadows, in Middletown, New Jersey,
just a bit to the east of Springsteen’s Free-
hold. He never had the prettiest voice in
the world, but he’s a compelling vocalist:
“The emotional commitment carries you
along,” says Southside, always the best
pure singer on the Shore scene. In a high