You might know him as Miami Steve, Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist in the E Street Band and producer for folks like Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes, Darlene Love, Lone Justice, Gary U.S. Bonds and Lords Of The New Church. Or you might know him as Little Steven, solo artist (five albums since 1982, the most recent one being 1999’s Born Again Savage) and the political activist who spearheaded Artists United Against Apartheid (“Sun City”) in the mid-‘80s while helping make activism respectable for rock musicians. Or if you watch HBO on Sunday nights, you most definitely know him as Silvio Dante, suavely attired Jersey strip-club proprietor and Tony Soprano’s right-hand goombah.

But lately, music buffs have been calling him the garage-rock godfather, thanks to his hugely popular syndicated radio show, Little Steven’s Underground Garage, a Sunday-night FM tent-revival with amps, guitars and fuzztone pedals. For two hours, Van Zandt proselytizes like a snake-handling preacher—“the coolest stuff ever done,” he swears—and spins tunes from every era: ‘50s roots-rockers, ‘60s Brit Invasion and Nuggets-brand garage-psych pioneers, ‘70s garage punks and ‘80s revivalists and, of course, the contemporary crop of bands—the steamy indie underbelly of the “Rock Is Back!” brigade—you’ll find on cool labels like Estrus, Bomp!, Dionysus, Get Hip, In The Red, Fall Of Rome, Sympathy, etc.

In addition to his radio show’s success (he partnered early on with the Hard Rock Café chain, which provided the, um, “muscle,” and is currently heard in 77 different national markets), Van Zandt maintains an elaborate Web site: www.littlesteven.com is his main site and is fully loaded with musical ephemera, but www.littlestevensundergroundgarage.com is where the real fun begins. Trust us, it’s a site you won’t be able to refuse as you click through its maze of garage goodies, from lengthy essays on the genre to capsule bios of a wealth of combos old and new to crucial links to other Internet founts of garage info. Van Zandt is also affiliated with Cavestomp!, the NYC festival that has grown from an annual gathering of the garage tribes to an ongoing series of concerts held in different clubs around Manhattan; he’s a frequent MC at these bashes and a tireless supporter of the organization.

Which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Anyone remotely familiar with his activism will understand his passion for a righteous cause. And as we all know, there just ain’t no cause more righteous than good old, no-bullshit, straight-up rock ‘n’ roll, right?

During a short break in the E Streeters’ fall tour, Van Zandt agreed to a sit-down with MAGNET. (An excerpted version of our conversation appears in our current issue, #57.) Enthusiastic, outgoing and prone to massive bursts of laughter whenever he makes a point, he is clearly a man caught up in a life-long passion. You, good readers of MAGNET and, of course, the many garage hounds of the world, are lucky we’ve got someone like Van Zandt on our side.

MAGNET: I’ve been listening to some of your shows—nice to hear my all-time favorite song, “Shake Some Action” (by the Flamin’ Groovies) starting off one of your sets recently.
Van Zandt: You like that? I’ve been playing a lot of people’s favorite songs lately, it seems. We’re just in one of those weird periods of time where all the coolest songs are no longer on the radio.

You’ve been quoted as saying that there’s no real infrastructure for this music anymore, yet with the success of your show, you may ultimately be putting the lie to your own statement.
That’s what I’m trying to do! I’m trying to create that which is not there. And it wasn’t there three years ago when we started this. So yeah, Cavestomp!, this show ... these are the very beginnings of a new infrastructure that we’re consciously trying to build. I’m not just sitting around whining and complaining about the situation, I’m out there trying to do something about it. These are just the beginnings, obviously. I’m only on two hours a week. But I’m hoping somewhere, some radio station will say, ‘Hey, this is cool, let’s do it 24 hours a day!’ Then we’ll start getting somewhere.

Internet radio, with all its specialty programming, could hold out that potential—if the government and recording industry weren’t trying to kill it off even as we speak.
You know, I never really thought that was going to be the answer. It’s certainly nice and I hope it manages to stay alive but it doesn’t strike me as the way to get this done. See, it’s hard to change people’s habits. It takes decades when it comes to that kind of stuff. Can you get Internet radio in the car? No. If you can’t get it in the car, man—that’s radio to me!

Yeah—“Shake Some Action,” driving down the freeway, people in the cars next to you seeing this idiot hollering and playing air guitar with the steering wheel.
[long, conspiratorial laugh] Ain’t that the truth! And if you can’t get it in the car, that ain’t radio. I’m sorry, but it’s something else. Now, with this new satellite radio thing ... mmm, maybe. That might work. We can look at that in a year or two and see where we’re at. I talked to those cats awhile back. But right now, you know, it just is not a significant factor to me, so I gotta stay with the good old-fashioned terrestrial radio. That’s where people still are, you know? And I want to reach them in a mainstream way. I’m not looking to be “specialty programming.” That’s why the stations I’m on are mainstream stations, and that’s something we’re most proud of. Our syndication people, for the last four or five months, these cats are getting it done in-house. And it’s been a terrific mutually beneficial relationship with our sponsors, the Hard Rock Café folks, from day one, too. You gotta keep in mind that when we started, this was not something commercially viable. It was not fashionable or mainstream in any kind of way. Rock ‘n’ roll was simply a dead issue in terms of the mainstream culture. So I’m very proud that Rolling Stone put “Rock Is Back!” on the cover!

Is that one way of gauging, perhaps, that while we haven’t won the war, at least a few battles have been won?
Absolutely, yes. We have won a couple of key battles. We have a ways to go with the war. But Freddy, I’m telling you right now, the whole world has changed in the past year. It has completely changed. It’s a slow turnaround, like trying to turn the Queen Mary or something! We need to make a sharp left turn here, but we’re slowly turning around. Young people are not stupid. They know they oughta have more choices. We had a whole bunch of choices as far as the kind of music we could listen to.

I grew up near Charlotte, N.C., and the AM station there in the ‘60s played Motown next to Stones next to the latest one-hit-wonder garage band.
There you go. Exactly. So why shouldn’t every generation that comes along have more choices—not less! That ain’t right. And that’s what bothers me. I’m telling you right now. Half the Cavestomp! people are under 25.

So it’s not just a bunch of old record-collector geeks.
[laughs] No, no! It’s a wonderful combination, a combination of old geeks—and we love them, obviously—and a bunch of under-25 people that just want something new. Every single person that hears this radio show loves it. Every single radio programmer that didn’t want to put it on, once they put it on they are happy they did. Because we’re getting two and three times the usual audiences that would have been in that time slot, they’re making two and three times the amount of revenue they would have made, they’re getting all kinds of positive responses. It’s undeniable, this stuff.

And in terms of measuring ratings, traditionally Sunday nights are the ghetto time for radio programming. You have little local shows, a blues show ...
Right. It’s the end of the rainbow. The last time slot [of the week] that they even measure! They don’t measure after that. And that’s what I wanted: the worst time slot, where you make no money, you have no audience.

And you call your own shots as a result because there’s nothing to lose.
Ah yes. I knew I was asking to put on a completely freeform show in a very consulted world. And man, it’s just working great. They learned to trust me. They may not know the bands I’m putting on, but they know I’m gonna put on something that’s great. I’m very, very picky about the stuff I’m playing. I’m not just playing it because it’s cool—I’m playing it because it’s great. And that’s an important distinction, because I’m playing mostly to people who don’t have the stuff or haven’t been used to hearing unfamiliar stuff for many, many years. The whole radio world is based on familiarity, you know? And that’s OK. But there’s gotta be a place in radio for the new and the unfamiliar, a place for people to be turned on, man. Because that’s how it was when I grew up.

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