“There are no second acts in American lives,” said Scott Fitzgerald, but he obviously never met Stevie Van Zandt. As this intimate and epic HBO documentary makes clear, he’s currently on his fourth or fifth incarnation and showing no signs of stopping any time soon.
Born Steven Joseph Malafronte, in Massachusetts in 1950, he became Stevie Van Zandt after his mother remarried when he was seven and the family moved to New Jersey. Growing up, like many Italian American self-mythologiser, he felt his options were the “priesthood or the Mob”, but found himself transformed by the mid-sixties revelations of the Beatles and then the Stones (the first made being in a band seem glorious, the second made it seem possible).
Falling in with the Jersey Shore scene coalescing around the Hullabaloo, the Stone Pony and the Upstage clubs, with his preternatural musical facility, his encyclopedic knowledge of old soul and blues and his whole-hearted dedication to the vocation of rock ‘n roll, he became a key architect of the Sound of Asbury Park – Steel Mill, the Asbury Jukes and eventually the E Street Band – and trusted consigliere to Bruce Springsteen. By now he was onto his third name, “Miami Steve” (after touring through Florida he decided to “fuck winter – I’m tropical from now on”. It was a rock ‘n roll Ratpack: “I was Dean, Bruce was Frank and Clare was Sammy,” he laughs. This material is rich enough for a whole documentary series by itself.
The rise seems unstoppable, until by sometime in the mid-‘80s a rival consigliere has Bruce’s ear. As Bruce tells it, he had two songs, “No Surrender” and “Dancing In The Dark”, but only one of them could go on Born In The USA. Steve counselled that he should drop the later, but Bruce’s manager Jon Landau insisted it was the lead single. Bruce kept both songs, but it was clear whose party was in the ascendant.
Van Zandt had a solo deal since the early ‘80s and now threw all his energy into his new venture – no more Miami, now he was Little Stevie and the Disciples of Soul. Commercially, he had chosen precisely the wrong moment to leave the E Street Band and even Van Zandt realises this: a few years later, talking to ANC activists in Soweto and trying to persuade them of the futility of violent struggle, he feels no fear. “What could they do to me?” he says. “I’d blown my life.”
There’s abundant, astonishing documentation of the recording of “Sun City”, the song that lead to the formation of Artists United Against Apartheid: Melle Mel, Lou Reed, Keith Richards and Miles Davis, among others make for the most thrilling all-star protest single ever recorded. Van Zandt is in his element, part circus ringmaster, part rock and roll statesman. Though claims that “brought down apartheid”, admittedly rooted in the genuine lobbying success of overturning Reagan’s veto on sanctions, have a whole lot of white saviour vainglory.
And we’re not even up to his implausible third act as Silvio Dante in Sopranos, his burgeoning media empire and his eventual heart-warming reunion with the Boss. Through the turning decades and his shifting fortunes, Van Zandt remains a steadfast true believer in rock ‘n roll in all its awesome absurdity, and a stream of A-listers, from Bruce to McCartney and Bono to bear ample testament to his inspirational character. And it’s not without a certain knowing self-mockery: there’s something about the Blue Steel pose he’s still pulling in the documentary promo shots that indicates that Ben Stiller could create a really magnificent American equivalent to 24 Hour Party People from this material. Inspirational, exhausting, heartbreaking, insane and frequently transcendent, it’s hard to think of another life that captures the last seventy years of rock and roll quite so vividly.