Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

“Can you hear me? Wake up! Where’s the voice of America?”

  Jackson Browne would cover it, much to my elation.

  “Justice” expressed my philosophy at the time, which has changed somewhat over the years. I now see a post-terrorism reason to have a worldwide military presence, which I didn’t then. What hasn’t changed is the need to give priority to the war at home, the lack of justice for our black, Latino, and Native populations.

  The centerpiece of the record was “Checkpoint Charlie,” about my trip behind the Iron Curtain. There was no better metaphor than the Berlin Wall to describe the way politics fucked with families, literally separating them.

  “Solidarity” and “Out of the Darkness” were examples of the we-are-all-connected theme running through all my work, one Reggae, one Rock/Dance/Pop. With “Solidarity,” I started embodying different characters’ perspectives to make my points more dramatically, taking the every-singer-is-an-actor thing to its next level.

  I sent “Solidarity” to Chris Blackwell, hoping he would release it on his Island Records label in Jamaica. Next time I heard from Chris, Black Uhuru had recorded it and had a hit!

  “Los Desaparecidos (The Disappeared Ones)” was the story of our government supporting Latin American dictatorships that used their militaries to enforce slave labor for the multinational corporations. The military would “disappear” the troublemakers, meaning anyone trying to unionize or ask for fair wages or better working conditions.

  My song was about a mother trying to explain to her young son why his father wouldn’t be coming home. That boy would grow up to be the singer of “Bitter Fruit,” a song on my next album. In addition to being one of my favorite songs, “Los Desaparecidos” was also one of my favorite records. Clearmountain’s mixes were always great. That one was transcendent.

  The album also included the most difficult song I’ve ever written, then or since.

  I had a title, “I Am a Patriot,” the subject of which was the disgust with political parties that George Washington expressed in his farewell address. I stared at that title for a year, knowing that my work in general would be criticizing our government, quite severely, and that I had to make it clear that it was coming from loyalty to our Founders’ ideals and my belief that America was still a work in progress.

  It was worth the effort. Jackson Browne, Eddie Vedder, and Kris Kristofferson, three writers I greatly admire, would cover it, much to my honored surprise.

  A few months later Bruce called me. “Knowing you, if I didn’t call you, we’d probably never speak again,” he said. “Let’s meet and get past this.”

  We reconciled.

  I played Voice of America for him.

  He was legitimately impressed.

  “You’ve just been born,” he said.

  He had new music for me too. In the two years since I was gone, they had recorded a bunch of things and kept three new songs.

  He played me one called “Dancing in the Dark” that was going on the record, and then “No Surrender,” which he said would be an outtake for a B-side. (He never played me “Bobby Jean.”)

  “Man,” I said. “You got it backwards! Throw that ‘Dancing’ thing in the trash and not only put ‘No Surrender’ on the record, but open with it! In fact, make it the damn title! No Retreat, No Surrender!”

  To me, “Dancing in the Dark” had the potential to destroy his long-fought-for credibility. He had thrown out dozens of classic Rock songs because they very vaguely resembled rapidly-being-forgotten British Invasion songs, and now he was going to release what could easily be interpreted as a Disco song to blatantly try and get a hit?

  A month or so later we had dinner. “This record is gonna be big,” he said. I guess they knew; preorders from retail must have been huge.

  “Good,” I said. “You deserve it.”

  But I sensed a little trepidation. Not quite as bad as being on Time and Newsweek at the same time, but in that same Am I losing control? ballpark.

  “I know you felt I’d stopped listening, but I’m listening now,” he said. “What do I do with this?”

  I thought about it. How could he separate himself from the pack once and for all?

  “You have this identity of a working-class hero. With a big record, it’s going to be a challenge to maintain that, even though I know that’s where your heart is. I’ll tell you what.” It’s funny how when you really need an idea, it comes. “You know how people do big events. Fundraisers. Shit like that? You know, once a year, once a tour?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what if you made every single show in every single city a fundraiser? Donate… I don’t know… some percentage, something. Not once in a while. Every single show.”

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s radical. Gotta think about that one.”

  “Just like you always used to sign every autograph while we waited for hours on the fucking bus, this would connect you intimately to every town.”

  While he contemplated, I celebrated.

  Waiter! More wine! I’m on a roll!

  He would do the charity-in-every-city thing, but, luckily, I lost the “Dancing in the Dark” argument.

  He not only put it on the album but released it as the first single! And not only released it as the first single, but filmed a stupid video! When I had been in the band, we’d had an understanding that we would never do a video. We had a reputation as the best live band around. If you wanted to see us, you’d have to come to the live show to see us!

  But just to prove even the world’s greatest consigliere can occasionally be wrong, that Rock Disco song and terrible video started the snowball that would roll to twenty million sales and pay my rent for quite a while.

  And for the fans, like me, he put “No Surrender” on the record also.

  Voice of America, the album of my birth, was suffocated in its crib by the Sony monster as it rolled out the marketing for Bruce’s album, now called Born in the USA, which was released just four weeks later.

  It never occurred to me that that would be his title. Or that the cover and marketing ads would have stars and stripes all over the place, just like my album.

  The DJs’ attitudes were, Why play an E Streeter when we can play the Boss! No thought at all that both records might have value.

  The ’80s caught the zenith of what had started as a teenage novelty distraction. We saw Rock record sales no one ever dreamed of and no one would ever see again.

  One after the other. Ten, twelve, fifteen million. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Prince, even Phil Collins—each averaging four or five hit singles per album, with each single bringing an additional three million more in album sales.

  The era would last until Guns N’ Roses’s Appetite for Destruction, more or less, before slowing down, but it was a wild ride for those fortunate enough to be at the amusement park at the time.

  I, once again, was not allowed in. My pirates were not in the Caribbean. They were busy attending the funeral of my very political, very invisible second album.

  Still, we hit the road hard. We did Rockpalast again, and killed again.

  That fall, with the presidential election looming, Ronald Reagan attempted to co-opt “Born in the USA” as a campaign song. Bruce stopped him, but Ronnie was probably responsible for another five, ten million in sales. Misinterpretation can be profitable.

  I released another one-off political single with little room for misinterpretation called “Vote! (That Mutha Out),” backed by my only Rap composition so far, “After World War Three.” I tried to find Melle Mel to do it, but we wouldn’t meet until two years later, so I became Grandmaster Cobra Jones, and rapped it myself.

  My research into America’s role in the world’s problems continued, but I had also started to feel that books weren’t enough. I wanted to be there and see things firsthand. Feel them. Taste them. Absorb what was going on down in my bones.

  I decided the third album, Freedom—No Compromise would use three ex
amples to explore the theme of government’s relationships with the people. The three would be Latin America, Native America, and South Africa.

  First stop was Nicaragua with Jackson Browne, who had been everywhere years before I was even aware of these issues. Daryl Hannah came with us, and there were some congressmen down there at the same time.

  Nicaragua was at a critical point. The Sandinistas, the rebel group that had overthrown the brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza, the US government’s good buddy, had been legitimately elected to run the new government. In response, the Reagan administration’s security apparatus and “off the book” friends had organized, funded, and trained the biggest group of terrorists ever assembled by a Western power, the Contras. There were about ten thousand of them at their peak. Literally the largest organized terror group until the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) thirty years later.

  The purpose of the Contras was to murder, terrorize, burn villages, and otherwise create as much havoc as possible against the people of Nicaragua.

  It’s important to keep this history in mind when you hear so many refer back to the universally revered, happy-go-lucky semisenile grandfatherly cowboy, Ronald Reagan.

  Nicaragua had been the only country in the area since Cuba to free itself of the outrageous oppression in the region, and now our government was trying to illegally overthrow their internationally monitored elected government.

  Regardless of what I thought about the Sandinistas, I decided I had to do everything possible to stop the terrorism against the Nicaraguan people by my government and try to head off the increasingly likely prospect of a military invasion, which would be justified under the pretense of preventing Nicaragua from supplying arms to rebels in El Salvador, who were trying to overthrow their own brutal military dictatorship.

  So when Jackson mentioned he was going and invited me, I immediately said yes.

  Reagan and his people were also trying to use Costa Rica as a staging area through bribery and threats as a southern front in this illegal war. This in spite of the fact that Costa Rica was the only country in Central or South America that was truly peaceful because they had completely disbanded their military years earlier.

  On our trip, we met with various ministers and central committee members who took us around, showing us the improvements they were making and the plans they had.

  I pissed off the agriculture minister immediately. He was explaining with great pride that the land was completely liberated, that people and entrepreneurs were free to do anything they wanted with it.

  “Anything?” I said. “It is important that we are very clear about what is going on here.”

  “Yes,” he said, “total freedom.”

  “So I can buy this land right now,” I said, “and put a McDonald’s up?”

  “Well, not exactly, señor.” He laughed and tried to change the subject.

  I took him aside. “Look,” I said. “I’m sure you have a good plan, and it’s none of my business, but just be accurate with us. We’re going to be reporting back to America, so it’s important to be clear. When we say total freedom in America, we mean it literally. You don’t. So let’s not allow our cultural communication differences to turn us into bullshitters.”

  Now he was pissed. Discussion over.

  Like most governments in the world, about half the Sandinista Directorate were OK and about half were incompetents, ideologues, or idiots. We were told we would meet the president, Daniel Ortega. “Fine,” I said, but I really wanted to meet his wife. In politics, as in life, the wife is usually where the real policy action is.

  We set up a meeting with Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, ostensibly to talk about culture. I asked Jackson if I could meet with her alone because I had an idea that was a little delicate that I wanted to try out. He agreed. I told her Jackson wasn’t feeling well, which turned out to be true. Everybody got sick except me. Whenever I took a research trip I would fast to keep my mind clear. If the trip was too long to fast, I would eat as little as possible and never any meat.

  I’ve heard that Rosario Murillo has become controversial in her later years, but back then she was great. Most of the government officials just wanted rubber-stamp approval from whatever mindless liberal happened to come through town, but she gave the impression she really wanted to know what I thought. And I happened to have a few things on my mind.

  After a few drinks, I moved off the small talk and suddenly asked her if she loved her husband. She was taken a bit aback but said, Yes, señor, very much. “Well,” I said, “you should spend as much time with him as possible, because he’s a dead man walking. It’s just a matter of time and time is running out.”

  She knew I wasn’t kidding. The idea had probably crossed her mind more than once. She was a very smart woman married to a revolutionary. But she was expecting a pleasant conversation about the Arts, and the reality of what I was saying hit her hard.

  She reached across the table, put her hands on mine, looked deeply into my eyes and asked, “What can we do?”

  I suggested three things.

  “The first thing may sound silly,” I said, “but I sincerely believe there is only one way to save him, and to avoid an invasion by my country where a lot of innocent people will be killed. You have to get him out of those Castro fatigues and into a three-piece suit.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “… and for him to make a speech at the UN where everyone will see how wonderfully normal and presidential he looks. Television is everything, and image counts more than you can possibly imagine. This is critical. The other two things are not as important, so if you only remember one thing, remember that.”

  She nodded. I had her full attention.

  “OK,” I said. “Here’s something else.” I had read an early draft of the new Nicaraguan constitution and noticed a big problem. There was something in it about the Sandinista Party being the official party of the country and their flag being the official flag. “The rest of the document looks great,” I said, “but unless you separate party affiliation from national governance, you’re doomed.” Multiparty democracy, I explained, meant playing no favorites, regardless of how many war heroes or liberators a specific party had.

  “There have been many discussions about this,” she replied. I was guessing they hadn’t gone well.

  Finally, I asked her if she considered herself a Communist. If she had said yes, it wouldn’t have thrown me. I’d studied the subject enough to know that there were many strains of communism, some malevolent (China), some benevolent (Italy), some a combination of malice, corruption, and stupidity (Russia).

  “No,” she said.

  “Do any government officials?” She mentioned a few and explained that Fidel Castro was a big hero to the whole hemisphere because of his success in overthrowing Batista. The Nicaraguan Communists, she thought, would have their own party eventually, and they weren’t ideologically extreme enough to be a real factor in her husband’s plans.

  “OK,” I said. “It may be too politically complicated. You probably have to placate your extremists on both sides. But here’s the third thing. Get a New York lawyer, and the next time the New York Times calls you a Communist country or Communist government, sue them!”

  I explained to her that in the United States, the word meant something different than anywhere else in the world. “In our country,” I explained, “it is a license to kill. Literally. We will send soldiers down here and they will kill your husband and no one will be accused of a crime. Do you understand?”

  She nodded pensively, probably thinking she had no shot with the hard-liners on the second two points.

  But the first point? Sure enough, soon after we left, there was Daniel Ortega, on TV, addressing the United Nations, looking like he’d just been to James Bond’s tailor on Savile Row! I mean he was superfly, baby!

  Did it work? Who knows? All I know is we never invaded. Eventually the arch criminal Ollie North got caught, the Contras were dis
banded, and US-sponsored terrorism ended. The Sandinistas would go in and out of power, but I didn’t care.

  We got lucky. As long as innocent people weren’t dying or being terrorized with US involvement, I figured our work was done and moved on.

  After Nicaragua, Jackson helped set up trips to the Six Nations, Onondaga Reservation near Syracuse, New York, and the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the site of Wounded Knee, where I got a crash course in Indian politics, culture, and religion.

  The first thing that hit me was how much was going on, and how little attention it was getting from the general non-Indian public. There were (and still are) hundreds of land disputes, denial of access to sacred sites, the disappearing of native languages, grave robbing by museums, nothing less than a political prisoner named Leonard Peltier who remains in jail as I write this in spite of an outrageously unjust trial, and other issues resulting from the 370 treaties that have been broken by the US government.

  Not to mention the efforts to store nuclear waste on Indian land, led by Hazel O’Leary, later picked by President Bill Clinton to be secretary of energy!

  Many problems revolved around the Native American religion and its relationship to nature. The essence of Indian religion is that the Earth is sacred and all living and nonliving things are equally sacred, to be respected as separate but equal parts of an integrated universe.

  Native Americans are the original environmentalists, and issues like pollution and mining have been major issues since gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874.

  So first of all, why weren’t Native Americans and environmentalists working together?

  Those issues were intimately connected to the destruction of Native cultures through the “Americanization” of Indian people. Indian children were dragged to American schools, where their culture was literally beaten out of them. The most successfully Anglicized and co-opted were picked to run the US government-imposed “Indian” governments on the reservations, where these no-longer-Indians-except-in-bloodline would sign agreements allowing corporations to mine Indian land in direct violation of the most fundamental tenets of Indian religion.