Q&A: Steve Van Zandt

If you had to give a number of the percent odds of a Sopranos movie, what number is that?
I'd say you gotta one out of ten shot. And that's three years from now. Not likely, but slightly slightly slightly possible.

Good thing you survived.
Silvio's still breathing. So that's all I care about, but I don't really don't expect a movie.

The fans are always curious about the Nebraska sessions. Were any of them attempted with a full band? What happened there?
It was an interesting moment. If I recall correctly he started cutting them as demos for the band. This was before Born in the U.S.A. right?

Yeah.
I remember him playing them for me one day and said "Here's my new songs. We'll start rehearsing them as a band soon." And I listened to this thing and I thought to myself, "I gotta say there's something extraordinary about this." There was no intention of it being a record and no intention of it being released, but there was something just extraordinarily intimate about it. And I thought "What a wonderful moment has been captured here just accidentally." And I said to him, "Listen, I know this is a bit strange but I honestly think this is an album unto itself and I think you should release it." And he was like "What do you mean? It's just demos for the band." And I'm like "I know you didn't intended for this to be recorded but I just know greatness when I hear it, okay? It's my thing, it's why I'm a record producer and that's why I'm your friend and I'm just telling you I think your fans will just love this and I think it's actually an important piece of work. Because it captures this amazingly strange, weirdly cinematic kind of dreamlike mood. I don't know what it is. All I know is I know greatness when I hear it and this is it, okay? And this deserves to be heard I think people will love it and I think it's a unique opportunity to actually release something absurdly intimate."

So the band didn't even try to record them?
We may have cut one or two. I don't know if they ended up on Tracks. I think it just sort of became it's own thing and then he just wrote Born in the USA. I must say, again, the record company in that case, and I forget who it was, was very surprisingly and shockingly understanding about it. It was like "Well, we got this really cool electric album coming. So don't think we're gonna do this all the time. But we kind of want to put this thing out." I guess Bruce's manager Jon just managed to convince him that it was cool and then he went along with it.

I think "Trapped Again" is one of your few co-writing credit you had with Bruce.
There's a couple more. "Love on the Wrong Side of Town," from the second album. "This Time It's Real."

It would be great if you guys wrote together more often.
We really should have done more of that. We brought back Gary U.S. Bonds, which was an amazing success. It was totally Bruce's and he probably intended to produce it in the end, co-produce the single, then produce the rest of the album. I tried to convince him to buy the Power Station and start a record label. I really wish we had. Then we could have co-wrote and co-produced a bunch of legendary 60's cats. I thought we could build a whole label around that and just kind of have fun with it. I wish we had done that. But it was not the right time.

Do you think the tour is going to end here in New York as the last two tours have?
Jeez, I don't know. I have no idea. No idea. Really, I mean, I don't even know where we are this week.

I think you're playing in Nebraska in two days.
[Laughs] Oh, speaking of Nebraska! My life is on a need to know basis. I literally only get my schedule maybe the night before. So that's about as far in the future as I know.