Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  Cut to 1998.

  Mark “Twig” Greenberg would, from time to time, mention he’d been in a band.

  You remember Twig? On our softball team, introduced me to Maureen, became one of my lifelong best friends.

  So out came this glorious new Rhino Records edition of Nuggets, not just a reissue but a mind-blowing expansion magnificently curated by my friend Gary Stewart that added sixty tracks to Lenny’s original double album.

  And would you believe it? One of the new tracks was a track from Richard and the Young Lions, which turned out to be Twig’s band from the ’60s!

  Holy Shit.

  At the same time, a guy named Jon Weiss, who had been the lead singer of a band called the Vipers in the ’80s, had been promoting a series of Garage Rock shows called Cavestomp! that both reassembled classic ’60s bands and booked new bands who fit the genre.

  He called Twig to reunite the Young Lions, and Twig invited me to the show. I had no idea what to expect. They hadn’t played together in like thirty years.

  When I got to the Westbeth Theatre on Bank Street, the joint was packed and the crowd was buzzing. Turns out Richard and the Young Lions had attained mythological Garage status, like the Sonics from Tacoma, the Moving Sidewalks from Houston, or Thee Midniters from East LA.

  The lights dimmed, the crowd rose up, the walls began to sweat, and on they came, blasting into one of their three singles, “Open Up Your Door!”

  Twig was on drums, Louie Vlahakes on guitar, Fred Randall on bass, and Rick Robinson on keyboards. In the center of the stage was a little old man straight out of Lord of the Rings, the legendary Richard Tepp, hunched over, mic clutched in his clawlike hands, looking like he was… not singing… more like summoning demons from hell, resembling not so much Richard the Lionheart as Shakespeare’s Richard III. He eloquently croaked out the lyrics, the palpable drama enhanced by the audience’s uncertainty of whether or not he would expire before the end of each song.

  It was fucking glorious!

  I fell in love instantly with the unlikeliest front man in history. He was Johnny Rotten as a three-hundred-year-old sorcerer! Amazing.

  Jon Weiss had been struggling with Cavestomp!, so I became his partner to help keep the idea alive. He had been going from one venue to another like a floating craps game staying one step ahead of the cops. We needed a more stable location where our particular audience of freaks, misfits, and outcasts could find us.

  I hooked Weiss up with Steve Weitzman, who booked Tramps and had a new venue I thought would be perfect, the Village Underground on Third Street.

  Weiss would be at least partly responsible for bringing back the Zombies and the Music Machine, front men like Mark Lindsay from Paul Revere and the Raiders, and many others.

  But we never quite jelled. No bad blood, no arguments. It was simply that the longer I knew him, the less I liked him. So after a year or so of monthly shows—and loaning him money he did not pay back—we parted company.

  For the first time in a long while I started listening to the radio, and I was underwhelmed by what I heard.

  Classic Rock was now a narrow subgenre that consisted of the same five hundred songs. They were great records, but even great records start to lose their luster when repeated that often. And nothing new was allowed into the format to update the repertoire. I mean nothing. If the same artist that was played every two hours released a new record, Classic Rock wouldn’t play it.

  And on top of all that, “oldies” stations were now playing songs from the ’70s and ’80s!

  Uh-oh, I thought. “Oldies” was never meant to be a chronological term. It meant the music of the ’50s and early ’60s, the original pioneers through their progeny, the Naissance and Renaissance! Worse, sliding the category later and later in time began to erase the ’60s themselves, the peak, the pinnacle, the summit of the Artform.

  Rock radio disregarding the ’50s and ’60s because they were too old was the equivalent of a classical music format disregarding Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky because they were too old.

  The DJs had become as homogenized as the playlists. Their hands were tied. Out of the thousands of DJs playing Rock music in America, I knew of only two, Vin Scelsa in New York and Jim Ladd in LA, who kept playing whatever they wanted. They are both off the air as I write this, though Ladd is forever immortalized by Tom Petty’s The Last DJ.

  Personality vanished too. Most of the educated, experienced, passionate, and interesting voices went to talk and sports radio or were unceremoniously retired. The audience and ratings went with it, but nobody in the boardroom seems to have noted this “coincidence.”

  Rock radio had shaped my life, saved my life, inspired me, motivated me, given me a reason to live every day when I had nothing to relate to, nothing to do, nothing to hope for. First AM radio, with WABC and WMCA, then FM with WNEW, and oldies with WCBS-FM.

  What the fuck happened? For a detailed account, I suggest Richard Neer’s book FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio, which remains the most accurate explanation of the tragic story.

  I don’t know why exactly, but I’m attracted to gaps and injustice and have a missionary conversion complex that refuses to tolerate the bland, the banal, and the boring. I have some bizarre flaw that wants the world to be perfect. And colorful. And interesting. And fun.

  Suddenly I felt it was time to start a new radio format. Or two.

  OK. So if I had the power to create any format I wanted, what would it be?

  I knew I had to start with the center of my universe, the British Invasion, which had changed my life and affected virtually everyone else’s.

  That meant 1964–1967, roughly.

  What it also meant was bands.

  The British bands were more or less divided between Pop- and Rock-oriented bands, mostly from the north, and the Blues- and Soul-oriented bands, mostly out of London but stretching all the way to Birmingham and Newcastle.

  The bands from the north were led by the Beatles and included the Searchers, the Hollies, Herman’s Hermits, and Gerry and the Pacemakers from Liverpool and Manchester, along with the Dave Clark Five from Tottenham.

  The Blues and R&B groups, mostly from the south, were led by the Rolling Stones and included the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Spencer Davis Group, the Moody Blues, the Who, and Manfred Mann.

  I included a few solo artists and duos: Billy Fury, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, Petula Clark, Donovan, Billy J. Kramer (the “J.” was suggested by John Lennon to toughen him up!), Georgie Fame, Peter and Gordon, and Chad and Jeremy.

  And the more obscure but important bands that never invaded: the Pretty Things, the Creation, the Move, the Birds, the Eyes, the Action, and others.

  That would be the basis of my format. Along with those core groups, I’d add everybody that influenced the British Invasion, and everybody the British Invasion influenced.

  I combined all fifty years of the Rock era (it’s now seventy!), and divided my favorite records into categories:

  — Blues (Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, etc.)

  — Pioneers (Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.)

  — Doo-Wop (Dubs, Chantels, Little Anthony and the Imperials, etc.)

  — R&B (Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, etc.)

  — Girl Groups (the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Shangri-Las, etc.)

  — Surf and surf instrumentals (Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the Ventures, etc.)

  — Soul (the Miracles, the Impressions, Sam and Dave, etc.)

  — British Invasion (those already named, obviously, along with those from the second half of the ’60s, including Them, Procol Harum, Traffic, etc.)

  — Folk Rock (Bob Dylan, the Byrds, the Lovin’ Spoonful, etc.)

  — Country Rock (the Youngbloods, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, etc.)

  — Psychedelic (the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, etc.)

  — Blues Rock (Cream, the Jeff Beck Group, Led Zep
pelin, etc.)

  — Southern Soul (Delaney and Bonnie, the Band, Leon Russell, etc.)

  — Nuggets (the bands on the original compilation and the reissue, the Blues Magoos, Count Five, the Standells, etc.)

  Beyond that, I gave each decade from the ’70s its own category and added New Garage.

  I then decided how often each category would appear in radio rotation. The Beatles and Stones every hour, Girl Groups every other hour, pioneers every third, and so on.

  We might play some of the same bands as Classic Rock radio, but never the same songs. They’d play “Brown Sugar”; we’d play “Confessing the Blues.” They’d play “Hey Jude”; we’d play “Doctor Robert.” They’d play “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; we’d play “The Good’s Gone.”

  Voilà! A new format!

  DJ Dan Neer, the brother of DJ Richard, learned how to engineer as I learned how to DJ. We worked hard on the pilot over a couple of months, and sent out 350 copies to every radio station.

  It landed on their desks on September 11, 2001.

  Yeah—that 9/11.

  Maureen and I were living on Fifty-Seventh Street at the time. I woke up, put the TV on, and saw a plane sticking out of one of the World Trade Center towers. What the fuck? Had to be a pilot’s heart attack, I figured. Or some really drunken asshole…

  As I was saying to Maureen, “Baby, come here, you gotta see this. Some jerkoff…”

  Boom! I saw the second plane hit the other.

  I was stunned for a minute.

  Like the time the white cab driver tried to hit the black guy in Pretoria.

  You can’t quite put together what your eyes have just told your brain.

  Uh-oh. Two ain’t no accident.

  We were under motherfucking attack!

  “Holy shit,” Maureen said. “What do we do now? We are in the wrong town for World War III.”

  My mind was going a hundred miles an hour. No idea what to do. She was so right.

  Hearing that a third plane got as far as the Pentagon was not at all encouraging. How many hundreds of billions on defense every year? And some fucking cave dweller drove a plane into the fucking Pentagon?

  It understandably took a few weeks before things settled down and radio stations resumed reading their mail.

  They all passed.

  And I mean all: 350 stations.

  I analyzed the situation. I knew I was onto something good musically, but we were obviously going about it all wrong. We were sending the show to the Program Directors, but they didn’t run anything anymore. This was America. What’s America all about?

  Money.

  I asked Richie Russo, a radio advertising sales guy and avid record collector (and I mean avid; he has one house for himself and another for his records), “How does this radio racket work?”

  He told me they sold advertising by the week and sometimes by the month. I couldn’t believe it, but it turned out to be true. Why not by the year?

  I started talking to the General Managers. My basic rap was this: If I sell out my weekly two-hour show for a year, would you let your Program Director decide whether he wants it or not?

  “Sure,” they said.

  “OK,” I said. “Give me a list of your top ten sponsors.” I started calling them, occasionally flying to meet them in person, and got on my first twenty stations, all sold out for a year.

  At first, nobody thought that playing that range of music in one place could work, but we proved otherwise. It was just a matter of connecting the dots. And I knew which dots were connected. It’s not something an outsider would ever understand, but there was, and still is, a method to the madness.

  In the end, the Underground Garage show served three main purposes. It made the greatest Rock music in history accessible to future generations. It gave new Rock bands the only airplay they would ever get; we’ve introduced more than a thousand bands in the last twenty years. And it gave me a chance to say thank you to the greatest generation of Rock Artists. Not only do we play their best music, but if they kept making records (and many of them have—the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Dion, the Zombies, the Beach Boys, plus slightly younger artists like Joan Jett and Cheap Trick), there was at least one place that would play it.

  We brought in a friend of Dan Neer’s, Mark Felsot, to be our in-house syndicator, and off we went.

  We peaked at 130 affiliates in the United States alone, and although we’re off that peak now, we make up for it by being in a hundred countries on the American Forces Network.

  In our second year BBC Two offered me $20,000 per show before I got the chance to say they could have it for free! We shook hands, and I got on a plane. Tragically, by the time I landed, they’d changed their mind. They suddenly didn’t want it at any price and never told me why. But we belong there. BBC Two covers the entire UK. We play more great British music than they ever will!

  We had amazing ratings those first few years, with no promotion whatsoever.

  I was touring with the E Street Band during the first years of the format, so wherever I was, I made a point of visiting my affiliates and going in to record stores and asking if there were any local bands making records. We were checking out everything.

  Rock was at an all-time low when we started. We knew every Rock record that was being released worldwide. That’s how few there were then.

  It became a clear case of “If you build it, they will come.” Each band that heard themselves on the radio for the first time was motivated to improve. Every next record was always better.

  It had to be the same when Ronan O’Rahilly started Radio Caroline and changed history.

  Ronan was born in Dublin in 1940. He was the grandson of Michael O’Rahilly, a leader of the Easter Rising in the fight for Irish independence in 1916—so he had rebel’s blood.

  He came to London in 1957 to study acting. By 1963, he was running a club called the Scene and managing Georgie Fame and Alexis Korner.

  The BBC didn’t play much Pop music at the time, so English fans had to try and dial in Radio Luxembourg; that was spotty at best, and the station’s broadcast time was legally bought by the major record companies.

  Out of frustration, Ronan bought a seven-hundred-ton Danish passenger ferry and anchored it in international waters, and Radio Caroline (named after President Kennedy’s daughter) broadcast the British Invasion back to Britain.

  England desperately needed it.

  In America, we had great AM radio from the mid-’50s until 1967 and great FM radio after that. The British depended on getting records from seagoing servicemen or ordering them through the mail (like the very enterprising, very young Mick Jagger).

  The historic significance of what Ronan did cannot be overstated.

  His grateful Nation considered him such a threat for having a direct connection to teenagers that—the rumor went—the government seriously considered having him assassinated.

  The rumor went on to say that it was his good taste that saved him. Half the Special Air Service listened to his station and refused to whack him!

  A similar thing happened to Frank Sinatra: The Mob helped Joe Kennedy get JFK elected and the first thing Bobby Kennedy did was go after organized crime. Sinatra had been the intermediary in the deal, so the Mob debated whether to take him out to teach the Kennedys a lesson. But Sam Giancana and several others supposedly said they liked Sinatra’s voice too much, so they let it go.

  The bottom line is, Art saves lives!

  After word of a possible hit leaked, the wrong kind of hit, Ronan became a paranoid recluse, relocating constantly for the rest of his life. After quite a search, I found him and actually got him out to see an E Street show in the early 2000s. Only time I met him. Great guy. A hero who deserves a statue in Trafalgar Square. Though he might have been more comfortable in SoHo.

  Meanwhile, back on The Sopranos, Jimmy Gandolfini wasn’t handling being a leading man very well. It just wasn’t his natural inclination. He was a character ac
tor, a great one, and that’s what he liked doing.

  He wasn’t used to the long dialogues he had to do regularly with Lorraine Bracco, who played his psychiatrist.

  In film, you might do two pages of script a day. In TV, you might do five or six or seven. And half or more of those were Jimmy! One paragraph is a lot to memorize. Try it.

  We’d work from six in the morning to nine or ten at night, and then he’d have to go home and learn the next day’s work.

  Your brain is like a muscle, so it does adapt, but at first the work seemed impossible. So he quit every day. Sometimes disappear for a few days.

  We’d take turns going out drinking with him. Sometimes it was me. Sometimes it was Michael Imperioli. Sometimes Stevie Schirripa once he came in, Bobby Funaro, a teamster or two.

  Jimmy wanted out.

  We’d have the same conversation at least once a month.

  “Look,” I’d say to him, “how many good movies you see last year?” He’d say, Like ten. “OK,” I’d say, “if you’re lucky, you’re gonna get one of those, right?” Right. “You’re not gonna get two, are you?” Probably not. “So you do that movie in between seasons. You don’t lose a thing.”

  “Yeah,” he’d say. “I guess.” Then skip out for a few days anyway.

  But he always came back.

  I talked to David about it after the third or fourth time. “David,” I said, “you have created like twelve interesting characters, every one of which could have their own spin-off series. Everyone would watch them. Can’t you lighten up on Jimmy a little bit?”

  Nope. David just fell in love with Jimmy. Could not get enough. And you really couldn’t blame him. Jimmy was playing an exaggerated version of David himself, complete with mother issues. The Sopranos was the most effective therapy David could get!

  During those first seasons, we were also watching Nancy Marchand battle the horror of emphysema. The minute a scene ended, they slapped an oxygen mask on her. I’m sure that helped me and Tony Sirico quit smoking. I had smoked from my teens until 1977, and then from 1982 on, to the point where I was up to three packs a day. Quitting was hard. Without smoking, I had no energy. I couldn’t concentrate. It used to be that you could give me a pot of coffee and a pack of cigarettes and I could write ten pages in a sitting. Suddenly, nothing. It panicked me for a while because I was writing a twenty-five-page script every week for my radio show. I literally could not write for weeks. Not a word. Slowly, my body worked it out.