Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  They agreed that the secular state, rather than an Islamic state, was what they wanted, which was as important to me then as it is now. I believe everyone who wants a country should have one, but my dedication to human rights will never allow me to endorse Sharia law, which is the problem with Hamas running half of Palestine right now. And the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement assholes aren’t going to fix it. As I write this, there’s Hamas on one side and Benjamin Netanyahu on the other, a perfect storm of neither one wanting the obviously correct two-state solution.

  I tried to sleep, but my adrenaline was flowing nonstop, and the caffeine and whatever else was in that tea had me hallucinating.

  I walked out into the desert night.

  I concentrated and really listened.

  Nothing.

  I had never heard quiet like that. The silence seemed to elevate whatever North African drug was coursing through my veins.

  The sky was ridiculous. An infinite array of galaxies on a vast canvas that only seemed real because of the moving meteors and vibrating constellations.

  This must be how astronauts feel as they look out from the moon, I thought.

  I had never felt so small, and at the same time so much a part of the universe.

  I had read Joseph Campbell’s work growing up, including The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I’d penciled in as the title to my fifth album. The experience I was having was the bliss he was talking about.

  It felt like the power of all those stars had nowhere to go and nothing to connect to—except me.

  I walked until I couldn’t see the camp anymore and took off my clothes.

  I didn’t want anything between me and eternity.

  If there was any doubt before, there wasn’t now. I was definitely tripping!

  I lay down and looked up as my entire body experienced an electric tingling.

  I felt like a lightning rod experiencing all of time at the same time.

  I could feel the rumbling of the Earth’s past and the iridescent buzz of the future.

  It left me with an odd sensation. Something I wasn’t used to feeling. It took me a while to recognize it. The feeling was… hope.

  I hadn’t felt it so clearly since my first epiphany back in Middletown thirty years earlier. Only now the Angels’ Eyes were stars.

  If the sky had opened up and invited me in, I would have gone. I had to force myself to return to the planet on which I felt I was mistakenly born.

  It was what we would have referred to back in the psychedelic days as a good trip.

  By the third day the obvious leader, Abdelaziz or not, was warming up a little. I told him I’d contact his rep at the United Nations and speak to a few congressmen about pulling our support and encouraging a cease-fire, at the very least.

  I also suggested teaching the kids English in the camps, which would help them interact with the world community and would someday help their cause. I told him I’d arrange for books to be sent. He liked the idea and said he’d discuss it with the others.

  By the third night of communing with the universe, I was clear about what I would do next. I knew my adventure was coming to an end, and I wanted closure. I wouldn’t tour again. But I would go out big, creating a postapocalyptic, cinematic, down-and-dirty setting for my fifth, final, and most personal album. The political consequence of spiritual bankruptcy. And I’d throw in the connection between sexual bliss and spiritual enlightenment for a little yin and yang.

  The best part? For the first time in many years I suddenly felt like playing guitar again.

  I haven’t begun to understand it all, but even a quick glance at the mystics of all the different religions—the shamans, the yogis, the saints, the sages, the Lotus Sutra Buddhists, the Kabbalists, the Sufis, the Taoist seers—suggests they have all had their own personal vision of the same immutable, eternal Truth.

  One Truth, many names.

  Early on in the process of learning about others to learn about myself, I found that religion was the key element in getting to the roots of a culture’s identity. It helped me reexamine my own ever-evolving thoughts on the subject as well, which is worth doing every now and then.

  When it came time for my fifth album, I knew I was in for the challenge of my artistic life. I had dug deeper and deeper, thought and tested myself, and eventually walked out into the desert and let the universe take me where it wanted to go.

  My starting point for the album was recognizing that the essence of spirituality is a connection to something bigger than ourselves. It could be each other, society, the Earth, the metaphysical energy somewhere out there (as Captain Kirk likes to put it), or the ocean of all souls deep inside each of us. There resides the foundation of faith, optimism, brotherhood, society, law, ethics, and whatever else you want to add to the list.

  For me, that connection was revealed in the 1960s, which marked the birth of consciousness. Our minds expanded on a mass scale like never before.

  Civil rights for minorities, women’s rights, gay rights; a politically active youth movement; the belief that questioning your government was a patriotic responsibility; environmental awareness; expansion of Eastern thinking; the end of colonialism; psychoactive substances; and of course, the Renaissance in all the Arts.

  That consciousness was founded on a few basic spiritual principles.

  The first was our fundamental understanding of our relationship to the Earth, and the vast gap between Western and Semitic religious belief, on one side, and American Indian, African, and Asian belief, on the other.

  Genesis 1:28 says, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion.’”

  What “God” meant by “subdue” and “have dominion” can (and should) be debated, but Western religion took it to suggest man’s superiority over the Earth. Man the conqueror.

  The other tradition—American Indians, Africans, Asians—did not believe that humans were superior to the Earth; rather, they believed that they were meant to live in harmony with it. This difference affected how we viewed our most essential relationship and contributed to a fundamental sense of alienation. That alienation was the first component of our spiritual bankruptcy. That was the theme explored more deeply on Revolution, but it would overlap with this one.

  A second principle was our changing relationship to time. It seemed like there just simply wasn’t enough of it anymore. This was true in the late ’80s, and it’s only gotten worse. Technology was supposed to give us more time, not less. But technology is being developed in ways that outpace the human mind. Information is great, but when we feel the need to know everything as quickly as possible, we can’t connect with any of it. We scratch the surface, hold nothing, and move on. Which inevitably leads to the key malady of the twenty-first century, time deficit disorder.

  Finally, I saw that we had demystified one of our greatest forces, our Art, and specifically our Rock music.

  Art, like Religion, needs mystery. That is how we participate in it. But our society demystifying that mystery has the same effect as music Engineers separating the frequencies with pillows and rugs.

  The advent of MTV was the beginning of the end of Rock’s importance. The accessibility of videos diluted and in many cases eliminated the experience of seeing a live Rock band. It has also allowed Rock bands to exist without the essential prerequisite of being great live performers. The corporatization of Rock radio dealt another severely damaging, if not lethal, blow. As did consultants, whose only job was to homogenize and eliminate interesting, unique personality. As did lazy, ignorant, short-sighted record companies.

  The result, of course, was the waning of the Rock era and the rise of a Pop era that was more vapid, meaningless, superficial, emotionless, soulless, unmemorable, and disposable than any previous era in the history of music.

  Most importantly, now that Pop was big business, bottom-line corporate control took precedence over the Art.


  Granted, I was a bit jaded, having lived through the Renaissance. But most Pop made after the ’60s was wallpaper, a short-term distraction for kids. You could make the argument that Pop was always so. You’d be wrong, but you could make that argument. In the past, though, there was a balance between Rock and Pop. When that balance went away, Pop ruled unchallenged, and Rock became an endangered species in a world where music no longer engaged our senses or our intellect and where there were few artists we could invest in emotionally.

  We don’t have many Artforms. We can’t afford to have one stolen from us, let alone one of the most powerful. Our spiritual nourishment depends upon it.

  As I headed into the fifth album, that was my thinking.

  I came home and went back to the Akai twelve-track in Zoë’s apartment. She engineered (being versatile has always been a prerequisite for working for me!) as I wrote and demoed the album, which I called Born Again Savage.

  My lifelong roadie Ben Newberry had been Zoë’s boyfriend before Pat Thrall. We tried to keep it all in the family! He had gotten a ’56 Les Paul for fifty dollars at a yard sale in the early ’60s, and I used it on the whole album through a mini-Marshall amp. The guitar was probably worth $250,000 by 1989—and if you’d played it, you’d know why.

  I decided to do the ’60s Hard Rock record I always wanted to do as a kid. A little Who, a touch of Kinks, a dollop of Cream, a hint of Zep, a spritz of Hendrix, and a lot of Jeff Beck.

  Not a keyboard in sight.

  It took me a few weeks to write and record, to get the all-important nod of approval from Zoë, and then put it on the shelf, closure accomplished.

  I was not into finding a way to tour or seeing if a record company was interested, so it would stay on the shelf for years. But the five albums I’d outlined when I started my artistic adventure of educating and discovering myself while figuring out how the world works were done.

  Now what?

  My career contemplation was interrupted happily by one of the most incredible events of my lifetime—one that, in spite of all my public bravado, I never thought I’d live to see.

  Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

  I watched awestruck as he walked out of Victor Verster prison, accompanied by his estranged but loyal wife Winnie. Geez, I thought, maybe Martin Luther King was right after all. Maybe with time the universe does bend toward justice.

  The Afrikaners who ran South Africa were smart, and lucky, to keep him alive all those years. It wasn’t the obvious move, since his existence gave the majority hope for an eventual overthrow of the government. But by keeping him alive, they avoided an inevitable bloodbath.

  And now they were promising a real democratic election to follow!

  I couldn’t help but feel some pride.

  We did it.

  Fifty artists, dozens of studio Engineers and assistants, dozens of unpaid musicians, seven songs, one album, the European unions, the United Nations, journalists, college-age protestors, the Wembley Stadium show broadcast to millions, every company that divested, and on and on. Forty-five years of struggle had led to that exhilarating moment.

  The South African government would have inevitably fallen. But we took years off their existence, saving who knows how many lives. Preventing how many more Sharpeville and Soweto massacres, how many more deaths in prison.

  When we played Johannesburg years later, I met with the ANC and they thanked me again, explaining that it had been critically important that we had acted when we did, because as the government began to anticipate the possibility of Mandela’s release, it began putting hallucinogens like LSD in his food to fry his brain. The ANC weren’t sure how long he could have survived it.

  Tears streamed down my face at my first sight of this new, grey-haired, distinguished Mandela. Looking very presidential already.

  Good luck, my friend, I thought. You are walking into a fucking hurricane.

  So now I had to at least pretend to plan the rest of my life, knowing full well that’s not how my life had ever worked. Nobody was going to be interested in me producing the Hall of Fame show, or anything remotely as grandiose as my imagination, so I decided to go back to my smaller, more practical, first teenage dream.

  I would be the guitar player in a band.

  I’d write or cowrite and sing some backing vocals but mostly just play guitar. Start from scratch all over again.

  And I knew how it would happen. I would write my second-ever Rock album, Nobody Loves and Leaves Alive, by a fictitious new group I planned to assemble called the Lost Boys. If Born Again Savage had been late-’60s Hard Rock, Nobody Loves and Leaves Alive was mid-’60s Rock, early Stones, Them, or (English) Birds. Guitar playing was fun again, so I used a whole different style on this one. No pedals, no distortion, very clean, some slide.

  It was gonna be Steve Jordan on drums, a friend of mine named Jimmy on bass. I eventually relented and decided to have a keyboard, so I located my favorite Rock piano player, the legendary Nicky Hopkins. He was into it and told me to call back when we were further along. Tragically, he died a short time later.

  Now all I needed was a singer!

  I personally auditioned or heard the tapes of no less than four hundred singers. No one was quite right. One record company guy played me a song from a new record he wasn’t sure was going to get a release. “What about him?”

  “That’s the right idea, but what about his group?”

  “I don’t know. There’s trouble in the band, and half the company doesn’t know what to do with it.”

  I asked if I could take it with me.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s in the out pile.”

  I called him the next day. “Listen to me. This is a good album, and it should come out.”

  “You don’t want the guy?”

  “I like him, but I’m not breaking up this band. They’re good. I don’t take good bands for granted and neither should you. And besides, I like the name—the Black Crowes.”

  Long story short, I never found a singer, and the Lost Boys went on the shelf next to Born Again Savage.

  As the year ended, Rolling Stone named the Jukes’ Hearts of Stone one of the best albums of the previous twenty years and Sun City one of the best albums of the decade. We were having a good year with the critics. But truthfully, I’ve always had good luck with the critics.

  If only they had bigger families, I would have come closer to breaking even.

  Once again, either Peter Gabriel or Jim Kerr called me to perform at Wembley. This time it would be a fundraiser for Mandela’s ANC, with the man himself present!

  Meeting him was a trip.

  He had a vibe unlike anybody I’ve ever met before or since. He had an inner glow like I imagined the big religious icons had. I’m talking the Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad vibration.

  That’s how intense his quiet energy was.

  This would be the beginning of a fundraising trip that would eventually take him to the United States. Five American cities had pledged $500,000 each to Mandela’s ANC to help them compete in the first democratic election in South Africa’s history, as if they needed it.

  New York was one of them.

  Bill Lynch, New York mayor David Dinkins’s deputy mayor, organized a meeting to prepare for Mandela’s arrival.

  Suddenly every activist who ever lived laid claim to being intimately involved in the thinking, planning, and execution of the fall of apartheid. And suddenly, America’s own racial animus reared its ugly head.

  The meeting’s mission was to organize as many events as necessary to net the $500,000 pledge.

  Harry Belafonte, the legitimate godfather of activists, ran the show, and a lot of the other civil rights activists and community leaders assigned various people to various tasks.

  Bill Graham, the most famous Promoter in America, offered to put together a major concert for the event. He was asked a bunch of stupid, insulting questions, read the room, and left. They were working hard to ignore the other th
ree white people, Jennifer Davis, Danny Schechter, and me.

  We were an embarrassment to them.

  In their minds South Africa was a “black issue.”

  Only it wasn’t. In fact, no racial issue is a “black issue.” If there’s racial conflict, by definition it involves more than one race, no? Which means the solution must as well.

  In all fairness, there were a few in the room, like Harry, who had been vocal about South Africa. A few had protested. A few had signed petitions and cornered an occasional congressman. But there was no one in that room except me, Danny, and Jennifer who had actually done anything significant about it.

  Still, every time we brought something up we were patronized, condescended to, or ignored.

  Danny had to restrain me when somebody directed a disparaging remark toward Jennifer. She had been an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa until it became untenable and she went into exile in the States. Along with me, she was the only person who had actually been there.

  She had more courage than the whole room combined.

  So after a few hours of being insulted and watching the usual bullshit that goes down when a bunch of conflicting egos clash, watching defenses going up because they don’t know what they’re talking about, nobody really in charge, we gave up and left.

  It was fine with me. Our job was done. We got the legislation passed and got the man out of jail. Now the South Africans could speak for themselves.

  I didn’t even go down for Mandela’s inauguration. I was invited to travel on Air Force One or Two, whichever one went.

  I didn’t want any credit. I didn’t do what we did because I’m some kind of nice guy. I’m not. I did it because the idea that my government supported apartheid was an embarrassment to me. And to our American ideals. And I figured we were never gonna get around to the vast number of other human rights violations on the African continent until South Africa was dealt with.

  The meeting we walked out of was held a few months before Mandela came to New York.