Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  On top of that, the music never stopped, for three solid hours. Prince wrote various pieces, or covered Jazz, as interstitial transitions for those moments when the stage was shifting or the musicians were changing clothes. At one point, he even had a craps game break out, which made me laugh—it brought me back to Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom and our onstage Monopoly games.

  They captured it pretty well on film, but it can’t compare. When you’re watching a movie, your mind is used to scene changes, different sets and lighting. Live, it’s something else. That kind of legerdemain before your eyes is mind-boggling.

  And the show was only the beginning of the night for him. He would do the show, then play into the early morning at a local club. At one of the after-show gigs in Munich, he called me up onstage to jam. Me and his dad! We did a Blues, “Stormy Monday” or something. All I remember is twiddling knobs and stepping on pedals, trying to find a tone before the song ended!

  I begged him to take the show to the States, but he was in his pissed-off-at-the-record-company period and wouldn’t do it.

  The show brought me back to the ballet and the Met. There is nothing quite as thrilling as a live event, especially one I could imagine writing, directing, and producing. Music, dancing, acting, set design, lighting—I loved it all. It took me all those years to realize I didn’t want to be Jeff Beck or Miles Davis or even Nureyev or Nijinsky.

  I wanted to be Diaghilev!

  Jerome Robbins!

  Bob Fosse!

  Fokine! Massine! Bakst!

  Back on Planet Earth, I was still leading a band of my own, and a great one. My Rock-meets-Soul formula had evolved into Rock-meets-Funk. Pat Thrall, who had come from Hughes/Thrall and Pat Travers, was one of the great guitar players of all time. I had a bass player, T. M. Stevens, who could compete with Bootsy Collins and Larry Graham. Mark Alexander was a powerhouse on keyboards, and drummer Leslie Ming had both the technique for the Funk and the power for four-on-the-floor straight-ahead Rock.

  We also had an occasional appearance on the “Zobo,” an oboe fed through a phaser and fuzz tone and played by my most excellent and versatile assistant, Zoë Yanakis. Zoë married Pat Thrall, and manages the recording studio at the Palms in Vegas, while Pat engineers and produces. Only time in my life two of my best friends married each other! Nice.

  When I see concert footage from that time, it baffles me that we weren’t huge. If I had a time machine… well, I’d do a lot of things, but one of them would be to go back to 1987, slow down my hundred-miles-an-hour-to-nowhere pace, and hire the first good Manager who came through the door.

  We could feel success coming, especially in Europe, where we had built up lots of momentum since that first Rockpalast.

  But we were still losing money on the road, so we had to reluctantly come home every now and then. Frank Barsalona had us open for the Who on our first tour, and in late 1987 we joined U2’s Joshua Tree Tour on the East Coast of the United States. The normal hazards of being an opening act applied. Opening accomplished very little.

  While I was home, I was asked to endorse Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. An empty endorsement didn’t interest me, but I said that if Jesse would meet with me to see how much our platforms had in common, I’d consider it. To my surprise, he said yes. We had a long conversation about our political ideas, which were very similar, and I ended up redoing “Vote! (That Mutha Out)” as “Vote Jesse In!” (It’s in the 2019 RocknRoll Rebel box set.) I traveled with Jesse, spending time in black churches for the first time in my life, greatly adding to my education and to my understanding of the community. He ran a strong campaign, won eleven states—including Michigan—and was even the front-runner for a while, but he was beaten at the wire by Michael Dukakis.

  Peter Gabriel, or maybe Jim Kerr from Simple Minds, called to tell me they were doing a Free Nelson Mandela Concert at Wembley Stadium, disguised as a seventieth birthday tribute to reach the maximum broadcast audience. Wise move, as it ended up being shown in sixty-seven countries to six hundred million people.

  I was surprised an American network picked up on it at all. The consensus among the mainstream media was that Mandela was a terrorist and a Communist. And not just among the right wing. Famous liberal Paul Simon once cornered me at a party and asked how I could be supporting this Mandela character when he was obviously a Communist.

  “Really, Paulie?” I said. “You sure?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My friend Henry Kissinger explained it all to me. Just follow the money!”

  “Well, Paul, I know you and Henry are students of revolution, but I have news for the both of you. People fighting for freedom outnumbered by a better-supplied enemy don’t really care where the money comes from. And by the way, your buddy Kissinger is not only an unindicted war criminal but was with the Dulles brothers in the early fifties overthrowing Mosaddegh in Iran and installing the shah. That’s the direct cause of half of the real terrorism on the planet to this day. So when you see him, please tell your friend Henry to stick his Nobel Peace Prize up his fuckin’ ass.”

  To be fair, Paul denies the conversation took place. But it did.

  Wembley was a blast, except for one unfortunate moment. I happened to be in the office with the promoter, Jim Kerr, and Peter Gabriel when Whitney Houston’s Manager came in. “We thought this was about celebrating a birthday, but we’re hearing lots of politics from the stage. We don’t want any part of it. We want the Free Nelson Mandela posters covered up or Whitney doesn’t go on!” He stormed out.

  We looked at each other in shock. I spoke first. “Throw that bitch the fuck off this show right now!”

  “We can’t,” the promoter said. “We sold the show to the networks with her on it.”

  “Let ’em complain!” I said.

  Jim, or maybe Peter, spoke up. “She was the only request from Mandela personally. They had a poster of her in prison and all the prisoners… fell in love with her.”

  We let her perform. It makes me nauseous seeing the documentaries since then proclaiming her as a proud activist who fought against apartheid her whole life.

  The American network edited out everything I said onstage and trimmed whatever politics they could in general. Fox, of course. But the telecast was enormously successful and helped cement Mandela’s status as a world leader and one of the good guys.

  I continued to do favors for friends when I could. I wrote “While You Were Looking at Me,” my contemporary companion piece to Sonny Bono’s “Laugh at Me,” and cowrote two other songs for Not Fakin’ It, the solo debut of Michael Monroe. Michael, the former lead singer of Hanoi Rocks, was a star waiting to happen, but he was finding the solo path hard, especially without a Manager.

  I would make my own solo path even harder with Revolution in 1989. Bruce Lundvall was leaving EMI to go to Blue Note. I knew his dream gig was to be a Jazz guy, so I was happy for him. One of the last of the great gentlemen of the music business. But, for me, the corporate curtain had started to fall. You can feed people in Africa, but when you start bringing governments down, people get nervous.

  Lundvall had taken a lot of shit from EMI corporate for putting out Sun City. The powerful South African branch of EMI had tried to stop it, even calling the home office in London. Lundvall, to his credit and my undying gratitude, ignored them. That may have sped his departure from the label. Who knows? It sped up mine.

  Luckily for me, one of the EMI Germany executives, Heinz Henn, was a fan. He had taken over BMG and not gotten the memo that I was bad news, so I went there.

  At this point I really let my artistic vision dominate my common sense. I decided the deeper I got into international themes, the more universal the music needed to be. And I decided Rock wasn’t the international common ground anymore, that the true world music was either Reggae or dance music.

  I should have gone for Reggae, where my biggest successes had been. One song, “Leonard Peltier” was Reggae, but mostly I went deeper into the Funk. Double entendre i
ntended.

  I had already gone halfway to dance music on Freedom—No Compromise, where I used a drum machine for the first time and some bass synthesizers. It was Rock on top, dance on the bottom.

  With Revolution, I went all the way. My initial concept was a sci-fi dystopia with music that was all samples, the vocals the only human element crying out from a cold robotic world.

  The theme was the government’s relationship to the economy and humankind’s alienation, not just from its own labor, but from the Earth and all natural law itself.

  The main subtheme would be the way the media was increasingly controlling and manipulating all of our lives.

  Keyboard man Mark Alexander was the only link to the previous tour. I have no idea why I let the other guys go. They were fully capable of handling this new idea. But in came the very funky Warren McRae, who along with Mark helped with the production and played bass. For the tour we added the very cool Vini Miranda on guitar, and the great Perry Wilson on drums.

  I had made the partial transformation to front man for the Freedom Tour and was completely there for Revolution. I still did a token solo or two but had basically lost all interest in playing guitar onstage.

  The problem, of course, was asking the audience to redefine me yet one more time. It was weird enough that there was very little of what one would call pure Rock left in the set.

  The accumulated momentum of the first three albums hit a wall. Nobody understood Revolution. And while audiences enjoyed the show, for the first time they were smaller than on the tour before. We soldiered around Europe, doing better in some places than others.

  The tour ended in my best country at the time, Italy.

  BMG had given me a new publicist, the brilliant Arianna D’Aloja, a classic Italian beauty from a bygone era. Her husband, Giovanni Tamberi, was and is the handsomest man on earth, straight out of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. They remain good friends of mine and Maureen’s to this day.

  On tour, I met my doppelgänger, Adriano Celentano, a legendary Italian singer and character who occasionally hosted a TV show when he felt like it. We had a good time together.

  The final gig in Italy was a free show, a protest against the Chinese government for their actions in Tiananmen Square.

  Claudio Trotta, the Promoter, asked for a favor. He had a cousin in Sardinia with a band. “Could they…?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Who cares? It’s the last gig.”

  That was it, the entire bill. An unknown Sardinian garage band opening, and us.

  It was a beautiful June night in Rome. The band, Arianna, Giovanni, and I walked up to the side of the stage and looked out at an ocean of audience.

  It was startling.

  “Do you believe this?” Arianna asked, stunned.

  Nobody had ever seen so many people in one place before in Italy. It was a goombah Woodstock!

  Giovanni testified wildly in Italian, enthusiastically seconding his wife’s amazement. I somehow comprehended everything without understanding a single word.

  Some estimated the crowd at a quarter of a million, but let’s not get Trumpian here. It was a lot.

  We went on not knowing what to expect. I had a fabulous audience in Italy, but had 90 percent of this crowd ever heard of me?

  Everything came together that night. The new songs, the new show—which had been going over well in spite of being surprising—suddenly seemed to have been written for this event. The title track, “Revolution,” was preaching to the converted. Songs like “Love and Forgiveness” and “Sexy” had the crowd dancing and chanting along by the time the second choruses hit.

  As the show ended, I stood there drained, thinking… This is it.

  Like the opening song of the album asked, “Where Do We Go from Here?”

  I was experiencing an existential crisis in real time.

  I knew I’d never be more popular than I was at that moment. But it was somehow not real. I could not generate revenue. Fuck, I couldn’t even achieve my lifelong goal of breaking even!

  The people in the crowd were having a great time, but they had nothing to do with my real life.

  They were never going to buy my records.

  They were never going to buy a ticket to a show.

  I had become a symbol of political activism. So now what? Run for mayor of Rome? I had no interest in politics as a career whatsoever.

  I soaked it in as long and as deeply as I could.

  I had one more record to make to explore the final theme I had outlined seven years and so many lifetimes ago. I needed to fulfill my promise to myself.

  But it was over.

  And I knew it.

  twenty-two

  The Hero with a Thousand Faces

  (1990)

  I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that’s sinful, then let me be damned for it!

  —MAUREEN VAN ZANDT AS BLANCHE DUBOIS, IN A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

  Rome finished off seven years of nonstop action, education, and evolution.

  Every important band ends up with one important member missing. I was that guy. Shouldn’t I have crashed in that plane in Zimbabwe? Wouldn’t that have made more Rock and Roll sense?

  I found myself at the outer reaches of the galaxy with my dilithium crystals depleted.

  It was time for one of my meditative trips to a metaphorical desert to contemplate, reassess, reevaluate, and reenergize.

  Only this time, the desert wouldn’t be metaphorical.

  I had arranged to meet in southern Algeria with the Polisario Front, the political representatives of the people of Western Sahara, the Sahrawi (sometimes Saharawi). They were camped in Tindouf, a semisafe distance from the war they were fighting against Morocco.

  Yet one more war we were on the wrong side of. Namely, the battle for Western Sahara, which Morocco was—and probably still is—trying to steal.

  The situation began with the end of the colonial era in the ’70s, when Spain and France withdrew from northern Africa, specifically the Sahara Desert region bordering Morocco, Mauritania, and Algeria. Spain made a deal with Morocco and Mauritania regarding Western Sahara, but they forgot to include the people of Western Sahara in the negotiations.

  The Sahrawi are a mix of Berber and Arab, and a bit of indigenous African, and had a history in the region. So began the war between Morocco and Polisario, which Mauritania quickly withdrew from. The United States and France—and, interestingly, Saudi Arabia—backed Morocco, which was dropping white phosphorus, similar to napalm, on the refugee camps. They sought to steal the indigenous people’s land and keep the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic from the autonomy the International Court of Justice declared they were entitled to.

  I wanted to bring attention to their situation, apologize for my country’s position, and let them know that there were Americans who cared about right and wrong.

  As always, there was a research component as well. My next album was partly about religion, and I wanted to get their views on spirituality. I’d heard they were moderate Muslims like my main interest in the Middle East, the Kurds, who have long deserved their own independent Kurdistan.

  I flew to Paris, where friends I had made at Libération, the newspaper started by Jean-Paul Sartre, had agreed to accompany me and write about the trip.

  We hoped to meet with Mohamed Abdelaziz, the secretary general of the Polisario Front and, again like the Kurds, a secular nationalist.

  The first flight stopped in Algiers, and man, was it weird. The Muslim extremists were in an on-again, off-again war with the moderate government, and the vibe was tense.

  First of all, there were no women in sight. Not even covered up. And not many cars driving around. Just a lot of guys: all in white, all with the same beards, fierce X-ray eyes, and scowling visages, all leaning against buildings, staring at us.

  I realized we were the
only entertainment they were going to get that day. Giving us dirty looks was their equivalent of going to a movie or having a drink in a bar or listening to a great record. They couldn’t do any of those things.

  So they just leaned and looked mean.

  It was creepy as fuck. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  The next flight landed in Tindouf, and we were driven hours out into the desert by jeep.

  The typical desert isn’t like the one in Lawrence of Arabia. No golden waves of sand. It’s hard and rocky. I couldn’t discern any roads or signs of any kind. Nothing. Two or three hours later, a camp appeared out of nowhere. No idea how they found it.

  They didn’t want us going into the refugee camp itself, so we stayed a distance away on our own.

  As we were led to our tent, my dedication to my craft was sorely tested. Not only am I as urban as it gets—Stevie don’t camp—but the one thing in the desert that nobody warns you about is… the flies. I hate all forms of bugs, and desert flies are relentless. Where the fuck do they come from? Thankfully they took a break at night.

  Our hosts served dinner. I followed my usual routine of fasting on a research trip. For three days, I only drank their tea, which was some powerful shit. I was simultaneously tripping and extremely focused.

  We met with five or six guys every day. They were never quite sure they could trust us, so they never identified themselves. And with the turbans and beards and shades, I couldn’t be sure if one of them was Abdelaziz or not.

  They spoke English very well and occasionally spoke French to my companions. I was very well-read in those days, and they were impressed by how much I knew about religion, especially the more mystical esoteric stuff like Sufism, Kabbalah, monasticism, even Wicca and Yoga. That stuff was my specialty.