B &W Bowers & Wilkins

Steven Van Zandt
It’s no great surprise that Steven Van Zandt believes so passionately in the transforming power of real, unadulterated rock ‘n’ roll. After all, it’s the force that has shaped his life for nearly five decades, and saved his career more than once. Van Zandt’s long association with rock music began in the mid 1960s when he first met another young Italian-American called Bruce Springsteen.

They found that escape in the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion sweeping America at the time, particularly in the music of the Beatles and the Stones. Before long, Springsteen and Van Zandt had formed their own bands, and Van Zandt played guitar in both.

Van Zandt officially joined Springsteen’s E Street band just before the release of the breakthrough album Born to Run, and also played on the critically acclaimed follow-up Darkness on the Edge of Town. He quit the band in 1984, just before the multimillion-selling phenomenon Born in the USA exploded onto the public consciousness, and spent the rest of the eighties as a politically-minded solo artist, making music that was outspoken in its criticism of Reagan-era US foreign policy.

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He was praised by the United Nations for his involvement in the music industry activist group Artists United Against Apartheid, but the music was proving a commercial failure. By the nineties, Van Zandt’s time in the limelight seemed well and truly over.

But in the spring of 1997, Van Zandt had a stroke of luck. He had been invited to induct the sixties band the Rascals into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the television producer David Chase happened to be watching the show on VH1. Chase offered Van Zandt the role of Silvio Dante, the trusted lieutenant of a mob boss in his new HBO TV show, the Sopranos. Van Zandt was suddenly a huge star in one of the best American TV series in recent memory. At around the same time, Springsteen reformed the E Street band, and Van Zandt soon found himself balancing his new job as an actor with a revived career as a rock guitarist.

Van Zandt’s love of rock and garage music doesn’t end at performing it on albums and in stadiums. He now plays it on radio stations too, as a syndicated radio DJ. Little Steven’s Underground Garage was created by Van Zandt in 2000 as a new kind of radio programme to fill a gap in the market for honest, raw garage rock. The music is a mix of old and new, with the likes of Iggy and the Stooges and the Kinks sharing the bill with present-day garage bands like the Raconteurs. Today, the show is heard on over 200 radio stations by more than two million listeners in the US and around the world.

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