| March 8, 2008
Little Steven makes the old brand-new on ‘Underground Garage’
About 20 minutes into the 304th episode of “Underground Garage,” the radio show’s host, Little Steven, gives his listeners a slice of history behind one of the songs he’d just played:
“… ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ was a B-side. You should live so long, right? Yeah. Nothing special about that. ‘Let’s throw it on the B-side.’ The first of two records we’ll be playing on the show recorded at Gold Star Studios. … Written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, Brian taking turns with various lyric writers and somehow managing to maintain an extraordinarily consistent identity of innocence …”
Little Steven, his fans know, is Steven Van Zandt, guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Until June he also was Silvio Dante, consigliore to mobster Tony Soprano in HBO’s “The Sopranos.”
In April, Van Zandt will celebrate his sixth anniversary as the creator and host of “Little Steven’s Underground Garage,” a two-hour syndicated radio show that strives to revive the glory days of radio and rock ’n’ roll.
The show reaches 1 million listeners in North America each week, according to Arbitron, including fans at KBLV (99.7 FM) — “The Boulevard”— which added the show Feb. 10.
Van Zandt, 57, started the show to resuscitate interest in the kind of music and the kind of radio he grew up with. The music is nuts-and-bolts rock ’n’ roll, blues and rock-pop, a spectrum that includes Iggy Pop, Sonny Boy Williamson, the Beach Boys, the Kinks and virtually any new band that fits the show’s format.
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Van Zandt Rolls Out Plan For Rock In Schools
USA Today
WASHINGTON — Steven Van Zandt says rock 'n' roll saved his life. Now he wants to return the favor.
The E Street Band guitarist and Sopranos star began sowing the seeds five years ago with the launch of Little Steven's Underground Garage, an internationally broadcast weekly radio show that celebrates his favorite genre — garage rock, a sound that evokes images of teens practicing in somebody's parents' suburban garage.
Last year, he created the non-profit Rock and Roll Forever Foundation as a vehicle to preserve the music that so shaped his life. |
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When he’s not playing music, Van Zandt is giving his listeners background on the bands and artists, and entertaining them with snippets of movie dialogue and other found sounds from the ’50s and ’60s, an era Van Zandt called “a pop-renaissance period.”
Van Zandt spoke to The Star recently about his radio show, the Springsteen tour and the infamous musical ending to his TV series.
It sure sounds like a lot of preparation goes into each show. How much time do you spend each week?
After 5 1/2 years, it now takes about 20 hours a show, with six other people helping me. We wanted to bring personality back in an old-school way. To do that, you’ve got to invest your own personality. You can’t let someone else do it. We set a high standard, and we did right away. Now we’ve got to maintain it. … The basic idea is to put so much work into it, it sounds spontaneous.
The film dialogue really adds flavor. Who finds those snippets?
We have a person dedicated to just that. In the early years, I literally picked them all myself. You know, B-movies are a big part of garage culture. We like to throw in some gangster stuff for fun, and some biker movies, some sci-fi and horror movies.
When you listen to the whole show, I hope listeners get a sense of being taken to a new place, a fun place that used to be called rock ’n’ roll. We also want to make the point that this stuff is not dead… We’ve introduced 175 new bands in five years.
We very much sort of reinvented the concept of rock ’n’ roll radio … where you play a record for no other reason than it’s great. It doesn’t have to have great sales or be on a chart or even be released in America. There’s a big international garage scene going on, and we are the flagship for it.
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