{"id":5290,"date":"2009-11-22T20:00:43","date_gmt":"2009-11-23T01:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5290"},"modified":"2011-11-06T15:48:31","modified_gmt":"2011-11-06T21:48:31","slug":"steven-van-zandt-wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5290","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, Miami Steve"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Steve Van Zandt’s 59th birthday today.<\/p>\n

So which Steve Van Zandt do you like best?<\/p>\n

The guitar player?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As “Miami Steve”, Van Zandt has served for a couple of decades, with a break from 1984 through the mid-nineties, as Bruce Springsteen’s onstage foil – sort of the quiet anti-Clarence-Clemons of the band.\u00a0 And while a lot of Bruuuuce fans have an awful lot of great memories locked into the E Street Band’s, Van-Zandt-less incarnations – Nils Lofgren is no slouch, and the ’84 and ’88 tours were pretty amazing experiences – the Miami years had a chemistry and interplay that changed into something else – not better, not worse, but different – on later years.\u00a0 Something I missed:
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Van Zandt had a knack for raw, on-the-sleeve background vocals that set off Springsteen’s throat-scraping roar, and a sloppy, leaky style on the Strat that, on a good night, sent songs like “Jungleland” into orbit.<\/p>\n

Van Zandt the singer?<\/p>\n

\"Men

Men Without Women, 1982<\/p><\/div>\n

Van Zandt’s solo debut, “Men Without Women”, was one of the ten best albums in the history of rock and roll.\u00a0 Van Zandt gathered a bunch of rock’s greatest journeymen – Max Weinberg and Dino Danelli on drums, the Plasmatics’ bassist Jean Bouvoir, Felix Cavaliere, Roy Bittan and Danny Federici on keyboards, and La Bamba’s Mambomen – better known today as most of “The Max Weinberg Seven’s horn section” – into a studio for a couple of frantic days, and ended up with an album that combined the raw emotion of Exile on Main Street<\/em>, the style of the best Stax\/Volt rock and soul, and the immediacy of a bunch of guys running on raw inspiration; most of the album was is first takes, all of it recorded “live” direct to tape (Van Zandt overdubbed only a few guitar parts; the rest of the album was recorded almost like a live album, with the band gathered in a big circle in the studio).<\/p>\n

And what an album it was.<\/p>\n

“Forever” was the song that intoduced me to the whole raw, passion-drenched world of Stax\/Volt soul:
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There wasn’t a weak cut on the album:<\/p>\n

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The album came and went pretty quickly in the eighties – although big chunks of it turned up in the first two seasons of “The Sopranos”.<\/p>\n

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He released four more albums – swerving through garage metal, dance music, worldbeat and fairly conventional rock, each louder and a little shriller and much more political; it seemed to me that he only had so many ideas that got more and more tapped out with repetition. But when they were all brand new?\u00a0 Men Without Women<\/em> was one amazing album.<\/p>\n

Steve the producer? Van Zandt was the brains behind the first several classic albums by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. You could see the Jukes as one of the great bar band in history…:
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…or as a prototype for Men Without Women<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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He also producer another of my favorite records of all time – the Iron City Houserockers’ Have A Good Time (But Get Out Alive)<\/em>, along with Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson.<\/p>\n

Which is not to say he was King Midas. He also presided over the decline and fall of the magnificent Lone Justice, producing Shelter<\/em>, perhaps the slumpiest sophomore effort of the eighties. Which isn’t to say it didn’t have redeeming value<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Steve the actor? \u00a0 Well, it’s been pretty much\u00a0The Sopranos <\/em>so far. \u00a0But I thought he was a pretty convincing sleazeball cub owner\/consiglieri<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The disc jockey? \u00a0That may be his great contribution these days; Little Steven’s Underground Garage<\/a> is the absolute last bastion of genuine cool rock and roll anywhere in radio today.<\/p>\n

Anyway – happy birthday, Steve Van Zandt!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s Steve Van Zandt’s 59th birthday today. So which Steve Van Zandt do you like best? The guitar player? As “Miami Steve”, Van Zandt has served for a couple of decades, with a break from 1984 through the mid-nineties, as Bruce Springsteen’s onstage foil – sort of the quiet anti-Clarence-Clemons of the band.\u00a0 And while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[172],"class_list":["post-5290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-springsteen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5290"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24251,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5290\/revisions\/24251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}