Q&A: Steve Van Zandt

Steve Van Zandt is so busy touring with Bruce Springsteen, running his own record label and hosting his "Underground Garage" radio show that he postponed his interview with Rolling Stone four separate times. When he finally did get on the phone, he more than made up for it. During the wide-ranging interview, the E Street Band guitarist discussed everything from the odds of a Sopranos movie to why he'll never cut a solo album to why the band never plays his favorite Springsteen song. Bruce has been dragging out some pretty rare songs on this leg of the tour so far.
You never know what's gonna pop out, you know? It's kind of fun to have so many songs to choose from.

What motivated him to open up the first show with something as random as "So Young and In Love"?
I don't know how many songs he has right now. Two hundred and fifty? Three hundred? He just flips through 'em, and says, "Heeeey, remember this one?" No particular reason other than just he hadn't done it very often, or hadn't done it for a long time. The wonderful... freedom... that our audience allows us is something that's fairly unique, We're able to do almost anything at any time and people seem to dig it.

Are they moments when he calls an audible — say "The Detroit Medley" and you guys just can't remember it?
We take a vote amongst us very quickly as to what key it's in. That happens. The nice thing about having so many people in the band is that no one person has to know everything. I might catch up on the second verse, you know what I'm saying?

You've played "Badlands," "Born to Run" and "Promised Land" at nearly every gig you've done over the past decade. Which one are you the most sick of?
We play those every time, huh?

Pretty much.
I know it sounds like an odd thing, because I used to think this about people in the theater: "They have to do exactly the same thing every night." There's not one single word different. I used to think, "How do you do that?" We probably change things more often than almost anybody. Maybe there's a jam band or two through history that maybe changed things more often than us, but I don't think it's very many. Even if you're playing the same song, if there's a different order or a different context, then it sort of changes a little bit because of what's before it or what's after it. And so it has a funny kind of "newness" every night.

I've heard you say before that your favorite Springsteen song is "Fade Away."
Yeah, that's one of 'em.

Why does Bruce never play it with the band?
I don't know! It's just one of those funny, lost little gems, you know?

Do you ever say to him, "Bruce, I'd like to play this song tonight?"
You know, I really should do that more often. I guess it's just kind of a slower one and we don't play that many slower ones anymore, so maybe it's just hard to fit it in. But I should bring that up. My other favorite is "Held Up Without a Gun." We never play that one, either.

You and Nils are singing a bit now on "Long Walk Home," which you didn't on the first leg of the tour. How'd that happen?
It just spontaneously happened one night. It was one of those songs I thought we weren't quite getting the most out of it somehow. Songs are funny. You record them one way and then sometimes live they need to be adjusted or expanded or changed slightly to capture the essence of it. Sometimes it doesn't quite translate literally when you do it precisely the same way. And that just struck me as we were playing it, you know. I thought, you know, it's not quite going to that place it needs to go to, which the lyrics in it suggest. Sometimes something is just great on record and never quite translates live for some reason. It can be a bit of a challenge and that's just one thing I love to do. I'm just a natural-born arranger and always have been. I just love it. I did a lot of the stuff on Darkness and, of course, The River and Born in the U.S.A., that was sort of my thing before I started co-producing with him.

You know, I was reading that you were almost a part of the 1992 tour. Could you tell me about that?
We were talking about doing something and I think we just decided to kind of wait on it or I got busy doing something. I honestly don't remember now. I think we just maybe decided to wait and get the E Street band back together.