Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  The first solo album would look at how the government and various social forces affect the individual in society. It would also allow me to introduce myself as an Artist.

  Then the next four albums would investigate how government affects and separates the human Family, how government manipulates various international States, the effect of that on Economy and how it needed to be transformed, and finally the political consequence of spiritual bankruptcy and the role of Religion. That would complete the circle, returning to the individual, but this time from the inside out.

  Hopefully, I’d learn something about myself in the process. Who was I? What happened to those of us who grew up in the ’60s? Was all that idealism just talk? I would mix in what little I knew about myself, what I believed, my responsibilities as both an American and a global citizen, my loves, my fears, etc.

  These were big questions I had never even thought about. By fully embracing the Artist part of my identity, I could start to answer them.

  Musically, for my first record, I decided to go back to the sound I had created with the Jukes: ’60s R&B-based Rock with a five-piece horn section.

  But I didn’t continue in a linear fashion, which would have meant starting up where Hearts of Stone left off.

  Instead I went for something rootsier. I thought the less produced the record was, the more open and honest, and the more direct my route would be to discovering my own identity.

  Being a bit of an extremist back then, I recorded the whole album live in one day. I put the band in a semicircle, used the studio monitors hanging from the ceiling instead of headphones, and let it happen. Horns blowing into the drums, monitors blasting the whole mix back into all the microphones—I didn’t care.

  I used one of the greatest rhythm sections in the world, E Street’s Garry Tallent and Max Weinberg. Dino Danelli from the Rascals and Jean Beauvoir from the Plasmatics came in near the end of the recording and became Disciples of Soul on the road. Bruce sang harmonies, though I couldn’t credit him because Yetnikoff was on the warpath about something or other.

  It worked pretty well, actually, thanks largely to my Engineer Bob Clearmountain, who probably thought I was nuts but was always game. We came back the next day and did the whole album again to see if we could get better takes. We may have used one or two takes from the second day.

  I then spent a couple of weeks messing around, mostly to make sure I idiotically spent every penny of the record budget.

  I put acoustic guitar on a couple of songs, did my double tribute to Ry Cooder as I added mandolin and slide on “Princess of Little Italy.” Added the double guitar solo to “Angel Eyes.” Resang the vocals where Bruce sang harmony live with Bruce because I wanted them spontaneous and loose and not Everly Brothers perfect.

  If I had it to do over again, I would double some guitars and add some harmonies. Most of the album is one live rhythm guitar! But it holds up as an honest representation of where I was at the time.

  There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend. Solo guys and band guys.

  I’m a band guy, but in 1982 I was a band guy on the brink of a solo career. It’s a paradox I learned to live with but never quite resolved.

  The first time your name and picture are about to be put on an album cover, it makes you think. Being a person who’d rather be doing than thinking, I started to wonder what I’d gotten myself into.

  It’s a big job asking an audience to redefine you. In the world of showbiz you’re lucky if an audience even finds you. If and when they do, they define you forever the way they first discovered you. And you’re one in a million lucky it happened at all.

  E Street fans knew me as Miami Steve, the always-in-a-good-mood party-guy sidekick. If I’d stayed in that role in my solo career, and written music to fit, I probably would have been very successful.

  But that was one part of me, and that part had no time for Art. He was too busy fucking and drinking and fucking and drugging and fucking. He had to go.

  It was time to introduce a guy the audience hadn’t met yet. Well, unless they had been carefully reading the credits on the Jukes records.

  This guy wasn’t going to be as sure of himself as the other guy.

  This guy would be taking a journey into the unknown, alone, to learn about how the world works, and finally learn about himself.

  I knew I needed a new identity. But rather than use my own name, I decided to pick another nickname, for several reasons.

  First, it suggests that no matter how serious you take the work, you’re never going to be too self-righteous about yourself.

  Second, it kept me connected to tradition, which I would need as I found my way through this adventure into the mystic.

  And third, I believed in the fantasy aspect of show business. I have never related to the regular-guy look that John Fogerty started and Neil Young and Bruce adopted later. I’m not putting it down. It just never worked for me.

  Maureen and I went to see the final Cream reunion. Apart from the fact that three-piece bands are by definition fraudulent since they don’t record that way, they wore T-shirts and dungarees. For $350 a ticket, maybe you could put a fucking shirt on? If I go see Cream, I want to see the Disraeli Gears album cover, goddamn it!

  What we do onstage is a complex, complete communication—songs, performance, clothes, lights, production. At its most effective, a great performance can not only transport an audience but transform it, taking them from tearful catharsis to blissful enlightenment. All in the same show. Nothing less. There is an essential element of Fantasy. Of Mystery. Of Masquerade. Theater!

  And so I became Little Steven.

  Little Anthony was one of my favorite Doo-Wop singers. “Tears on My Pillow” was the first record I ever bought and Little Anthony and the Imperials was the first live Rock show I ever saw. Toms River Roller Rink.

  Little Walter was my favorite Blues guy and the greatest harmonica player ever.

  And Little Richard was the embodiment and archetype of the philosophy of Rock and Roll freedom. My man. His flamboyant multisexual androgyny said you can be whoever you wanna be. He turned Rock into an Artform that not only tolerated reinvention but demanded it. He opened his mouth, and out came liberation.

  As Little Steven, I would become the Political Guy, and release and embody my inner ’60s gypsy forevermore.

  Would the E Street audience have a problem with my new persona?

  Yes.

  They never would show up.

  One of the books I’d been reading was a collection of short fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women. The stories were about bullfighters and soldiers and boxers and the relationship between identity and profession. I felt that if Ernie had written it in the ’60s or ’70s, it would have included a chapter about a Rock band, so I used it for the title of my album.

  It would be particularly appropriate since Hemingway had committed suicide and I would be committing career suicide with this record. I’m not whining or being morbid, just saying one has to die in order to be reborn.

  At the time, MTV had just started. Video budgets were rising every day. I figured that if we were going to spend a quarter of a million each on a few videos, we could make a real movie for the same money, couldn’t we? One of my heroes, Roger Corman, did it all the time. Then we could carve the videos out of the film.

  I called Jay Cocks and asked him what he thought. “Let’s go see a friend,” he said. We went to a hotel and took the elevator up, Jay knocked, and there stood John Cassavetes, wearing a tuxedo. Gena Rowlands flashed by in the background.

  “I only got a minute,” John said. “But the one-minute version of how to protect your work is this: get a script and make sure the Director sticks to it.” Highly ironic advice from the king of improvisation! “That’s why I direct all my own stuff. It’s the easiest way to control it.”

  What a cool guy.

  Why didn’t I go back and spend more time with him?

  Our script, by John Va
rnom, was more of a fluid outline describing our actual situation. It was a story about a band that didn’t have the money to tour and decided to make a movie instead.

  Because EMI didn’t want to pay for the whole thing, we shot few scenes for potential investors. Our husband-and-wife Director-Producer team, Derek and Kate Burbidge, did an amazing job with no budget and a tiny guerrilla crew, and actually shot an impressionistic Indie Film, much more than the outline we intended.

  We used crew members from E Street, Tony, Bubba G., and Tomasino; an actor friend, Sal Viscuso, who happened to be in town; and Maureen, who played my girlfriend Knuckles.

  She was already all over the album—“Forever,” “Save Me,” “I’ve Been Waiting,” the title track, and “Angel Eyes” with all the ballet imagery:

  She dances in shadows, she bleeds in tears,

  She turns into animals, she disappears,

  Surrounded by mirrors while the spirits watch,

  They look now, baby, but they can’t touch,

  The pain is intoxicating if the music is loud enough.

  We took our footage to Cannes, and the Disciples performed there, probably the first band to have done so, but the record company guy who was supposed to organize the investors’ meetings didn’t. It never got financed and never really got done.

  Almost forty years later, when I watched the footage for the first time, I was surprised we’d done as much as we had. The movie feels like a street version of early French New Wave, or like Cassavetes himself. It requires a bit of filling in the blanks, but it kind of makes sense. “A triumph of style and character over exposition!” a fantasy review might’ve read.

  Prince would do it the right way two years later, with Purple Rain.

  The Men Without Women album came out on October 1, 1982.

  Nebraska had come out the day before.

  Technically, two band guys making solo records, but in very different ways. For me it was just another band with me out front; for him it was a legit solo project.

  Anyway, it was a new adventure for both of us.

  An exciting moment.

  I was not the marrying kind.

  How many guys have said that? Possibly all of us.

  I loved the single life, answering to no one, no responsibilities, no guilt, no checking in, no schedule, no plans. Also, in the mid-’70s, I’d developed a temporary addiction to ménages à trois, which didn’t lend itself to marriage except maybe in Persia or somewhere.

  But then there was Maureen. I had pursued her since the infamous Bottom Line shows, but once I reached her I really reached her. Three, four, five times a day, for years!

  I took her to Venice and proposed under the Bridge of Sighs. If I was going to get married, I might as well do it right. We set a date for December 31, 1982, five years to the day since we had first gone out.

  Little Richard had left Rock and Roll to join the ministry, so we talked him into officiating. (Bruce Willis would steal the idea five years later with no credit—you’re welcome, pal!)

  Percy Sledge sang “When a Man Loves a Woman” as we came down the aisle at an old ballet studio on Manhattan’s East Side, Harkness House. Little Milton performed, along with the band from The Godfather movie. Unfortunately, Little Anthony was working a cruise ship and couldn’t get out if it, and Little Walter was long gone; otherwise I would have had all the “Littles.”

  Bruce was my best man, and the wedding party included (on my side) Jay Cocks, Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Jimmy Iovine, Gary Bonds, Jean and Monti from the first version of the Disciples, my brother Billy, my roadie Ben, our tour manager Harry Sandler, and LaBamba from the Jukes. Maureen had her four sisters (Gail, Lori, Maria, and Lynn), her two best friends (Michelle and Sari), my sister Kathi, and my assistant Obie. Jay’s wife, Verna, was there, and they brought Marty Scorsese, who kept our ongoing should-have-been-good-friends story line alive. The Chambers Brothers were there too. Maureen knew them from her New York days in the ’60s.

  I don’t remember much else other than that our two hundred guests were augmented by another hundred or so crashing and stealing all the gifts. We had everything taken care of except security.

  Fun, though, I’m told.

  sixteen

  Voice of America

  (1982–1983)

  I’ve been fighting my whole life for the privilege to work.

  —“FOREVER,” MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

  Money and me, what can I say? We never got along too good.

  The pattern of my life is investing everything I have in what I believe in. Emotionally. All my time. All my talent. All my energy. And, yeah, usually all my money. Because I hate asking other people for money, and, until recently, never had anybody to do the asking for me. And we’ll see how long they last.

  In 1982, I proceeded to spend what little money I had left after making the movie, taking an eleven-piece band around the world for a year.

  Now, the Rock life isn’t for everybody. You’re basically packing your bags and unpacking them thirty years later. It’s a lifestyle that requires dedication, perseverance, patience, ambition, and, most of all, having no desire or ability to do anything else.

  People are always saying, Oh, how proud you must be! How righteous to have withstood the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune!

  But no. I’m sorry.

  I resist all accusations of nobility.

  We were bums. Profoundly unsuited for any legitimate type of work. We did have honor for our outlaw profession. And a work ethic. I’ll give us that.

  So here’s a few tips for keeping a band together.

  As soon as you can afford it, get separate rooms. This is the one and only rule you cannot follow from the Beatles, who never had their own rooms. Don’t ask.

  Make sure everybody gets a moment in the spotlight.

  Find out what each band member can do and find a way to use it.

  If it’s a real band with the same members all the time and one or two people are doing most of the writing, and you are successful, share a little bit of the publishing money. It won’t kill you.

  Try and keep girlfriends and wives—or if you are a Girl Group, boyfriends and husbands—off the road as much as possible. The band needs to bond, especially in the beginning. And the mates should be busy with their own lives anyway.

  Keep a diary! How I wish I’d kept a diary. This book is only the 10 percent I still remember!

  And I don’t mean the fourteen-year-old-girl’s Ooh-Joey-looked-at-me-in-math-class-today!-type stuff.

  I mean make notes about the towns. Keep track of details about hotels and venues. Restaurants, local promoters, local friends, local journalists.

  You’ll be coming back to the same towns for the next thirty or forty years, with a little bit of luck. So keep notes, and you will thank me in the morning.

  I guess I figured money was something that should be put to use and I could always make more. I don’t know where that comes from. We weren’t rich growing up. I had a paper route. I caddied, scraped boats in a marina, worked in a box factory, made a few bucks working at my grandfather’s shoe repair store.

  I didn’t waste it either. I got into gambling for a while, but when I realized that in the long run, you couldn’t win, I quit. I’ve always found people who worshipped money utterly repulsive. Still do. Which is why Wall Street doesn’t like me very much. And why I can’t relate to too many Managers or accountants.

  Even before the tour, I had decided our whole Disciples of Soul thing was going to be a concept. I had full-length leather coats made with a variation of the Hells Angels logo on the back. I got permission from the head of the Angels in New York at the time, Chuck Zito, but the coats got us into trouble in Europe, and I had to have a few sit-downs.

  I decided that we were going to be the ultimate Rock and Roll rebels—no drugs, no drinking—and that we’d get into amazing shape. To set a good example and prepare for the revolution to come.

  This was before hotels had
gyms. I had a personal trainer, Phil Dunphy, and we took his equipment out on the road, put it under the bus. When we got to a hotel Phil had the bellmen bring it to a room, which we would convert to a workout room.

  Swear to God.

  I’m not showing my age too much with all this, am I? I mean now that every Motel 6 has a five-thousand-square-foot gym?

  Did I mention milkmen once came to people’s houses every morning to personally bring you milk?

  Doctors made house calls.

  And a truck of the greatest junk food, the Entenmann’s of its day—a Dugan’s truck just flashed across my mind—would deliver daily ecstasy to your front door in the form of just-made cupcakes, Danishes, doughnuts. I’m not making this up. Let’s face it, Americans have never had a chance healthwise.

  In that first year, the Disciples did a couple of interesting gigs, like the US Festival, where we went on at 9 a.m.—Bo Diddley time—and the Reading Festival, where they threw bottles at us. We also opened for the Who and U2.

  People didn’t know what to make of us. Five horns, Rock guitar, a percussionist, multiracial. It was hard to categorize us, so we were better off playing our own gigs rather than trying to open for other bands.

  Opening acts work in the Hard Rock world, or any genre where the opener is very similar to the headliner. If you’re the least bit unique, you’re better off building your own audience from scratch if you can find a way to pay for it. I’m still trying to figure that part out. But I’d rather play to five hundred of my own fans than fifty thousand of somebody else’s. You sell more records with your own people, and they stay with you for life.

  Plus, all I was interested in was talking about politics, which America didn’t get at all and still hasn’t. Well, maybe they’re starting to get it now. So I started spending more and more time in Europe.