Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  This time I just snapped.

  “People have got to hear her do this song,” I said to Maureen.

  “Well, why don’t you do something about it?” she said. “You’ve been waiting for the right time to work with her. But there’s never gonna be a right time.”

  After the show I talked to Darlene backstage. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We’re going in the studio.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “We’re doing ‘Marvelous.’ The rest we’ll figure out as we go.”

  The next day I started calling every great songwriter I knew. “I’m doing Darlene Love’s debut album. Write her a song!”

  Elvis Costello sent me four songs in forty-eight hours, which was very encouraging. The legendary Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann wrote Darlene a great song. Bruce gave me two.

  I got a cool song from Joan Jett. One from Michael Des Barres. And Linda Perry wrote a great one.

  I had a good opener in mind. A song from my second solo album called “Among the Believers.” Never got much attention, but I knew it would resonate with Darlene’s faith.

  Jimmy Webb sent his song in, and it was great but not quite “MacArthur Park,” so I made up an instrumental middle section that made it more epic, which is what we needed.

  Darlene had always resented Phil Spector taking “River Deep, Mountain High” away from her and giving it to Tina Turner because they were fighting at the time. She wanted to do it. I was like, uh, Darlene, you know that’s known as Spector’s greatest record, right?

  “I don’t care,” she said. “We can beat him, Stevie!”

  Fuck me.

  Now I’m not big on remakes to begin with. As we discussed, a cover has to be either spectacularly different, or simply spectacular, and I wasn’t so sure we could be either one.

  I solved it with a West Side Story intro and by bringing out every riff you remembered and a few more. And then, oh yeah, there was the greatest singer in the world with fifty years of pissed off ready to explode.

  As the story goes, Phil quit the business when his greatest record wasn’t a hit. Ironically, if he had let Darlene sing it, it would have been. Darlene’s Gospel voice can handle the upper registers and smooth those notes out, where Tina’s Bluesy R&B voice breaks up in a way that scares little young teenage girls to death. And that was and is the Pop audience.

  I later played it for Jeff Barry. He gave me a look I’ll never forget.

  “I can’t believe you had the balls. But goddamn if you didn’t pull it off!”

  The last thing I did is what I always do when I produce an album. I wait until the end and see what else is needed. This one felt like it could use one more Gospel song. I stayed up late listening to the Soul Stirrers and woke up with “Jesus Is the Rock That Keeps Me Rolling.” Dave Clark happened to be in town just after we recorded it and flipped over that one. He said it was the greatest song I had ever written and would be the one that would “ironically live on forever in every church long after your atheist ass is gone!”

  I made an amazing deal with Rob Stringer at Sony. I’ll forever be thankful that he had so much belief in what he was hearing that he agreed to put out a seventy-three-year-old woman’s debut album.

  Once we signed with Sony, I figured that was it. The album, Introducing Darlene Love, would not only be nominated for Album of the Year but would win going away. I was quite sure no other album could touch it. And since everyone had seen 20 Feet from Stardom, the Oscar-winning documentary about background singers that featured Darlene, this album would complete the story. A perfect, beautiful, happy ending to an extraordinary career.

  We weren’t even nominated.

  Nobody heard it.

  With around three episodes left to shoot in our third season, I got the call from Ted.

  The business had gotten too complicated to continue. Was there anything I could do? No, he said, nothing we could do.

  Netflix had come a long way since my first promo tour where I promised to bring the stock price back from 47 to 100! I even did CNBC and explained to Maria Bartiromo what Netflix was, because I knew all the stock market freaks watched her. They’re creating content, I explained. Why? she asked.

  Knowing the show was ending gave me a chance to write in a bit of closure.

  In the third-season finale, the show that would be our last, Tony Sirico returned as my older brother Antonio the Priest. Maureen returned as Frank’s ex. And Bruce made his acting debut as Frank’s middle brother Giuseppe, a mortician and part-time hit man.

  For most of the run of the show, Eilif and Anne were only comfortable with me doing first drafts of the last show of each season. They were afraid I was going to hijack things into triple-X pornography. For the third season, not only did I write the first draft, but after seven seasons of Sopranos and three seasons of Lilyhammer, I finally got to direct.

  I had always thought directing TV was the job of a traffic cop. Very limited creativity as opposed to film because the show had to look the same every week. But there was more creativity than I expected, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. With the big picture taken care of by the writing, I enjoyed getting into the granular details, the nuances of the actors’ performances, timing, expressions, tone, and texture, all the more challenging since they were mostly speaking in Norwegian! And I was able to include more Lillehammer locations, which we should have been doing all along if the producer hadn’t been an asshole.

  I finally got back to the Godfather for inspiration, using Fredo’s execution as a model for Fridtjov’s. Next time you watch it, note that I did not show Fridtjov actually being shot. You just hear it. Just in case we got another year through some miracle, there was no way I was gonna lose one of our best actors.

  As we were packing up in Norway and heading for New York for the final few scenes, which would include Bruce’s scenes, the Producer,

  Anders Tangen, turned to me. “By the way,” he said, “we’re out of money. If you want to shoot the New York scenes, you’re going to have to pay for it.”

  I had caught Anders overspending on various things over the previous two years, building unnecessarily elaborate temporary sets and overpaying for locations, and ratted him out regularly to the heads of the production company to no avail. This was his revenge, I suppose.

  “I hope you are joking.”

  “No, we’re broke.”

  I called my Agent. He may have been completely incompetent until then, but I was sure he would rise to the occasion and finally use the muscle of his major agency to put Anders in his place!

  “What do you want me to do about it?” he said.

  Those were his actual words.

  As if I could make that up.

  “Sorry for bothering you.”

  I hung up.

  He was so fucking fired.

  I paid the $180,000 to film the New York scenes, because without them the show would’ve made no fucking sense. Plus, nobody involved seemed to have the intelligence level to recognize that after years of being pursued by every major Director and Producer, Bruce Springsteen, arguably the biggest star in the world, was giving us his acting debut.

  Unfortunately, his appearance would barely be noticed, never mind publicized, because by the time the episode was broadcast, the show had been canceled.

  For those New York scenes, I needed someone to play Pasquale, the son of the Mob boss Uncle Sal. Maureen suggested a young actor she’d directed in a play, Nicky Cordero, and I proudly got him his Screen Actors Guild card. Nick would go on to star on Broadway in Rock of Ages, Waitress, Bullets Over Broadway, and A Bronx Tale, and he would be our most personal loss to the COVID pandemic, murdered by a scumbag ex-president and a political party that doesn’t believe in science.

  The last piece of the finale was the music. I used a Procol Harum song, not “The Devil Came from Kansas,” which I’d suggested for the Sopranos finale, but the melancholy “A Salty Dog,�
�� which summed up my feelings of leaving both Norway and Netflix, two relationships that would mean so much to my life and that still feel as though they have been only temporarily interrupted.

  And I ended the series with another Sopranos suggestion, Bruce’s “Loose Ends,” which also gave the episode its title.

  I don’t know what lies ahead, but don’t forget about me, Norway. We’re not done yet.

  Ironically and incredibly, that third season of Lilyhammer won the Golden Nymph for the second year in a row for both Best Comedy Series and Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series. That had never happened in the thirty years of the award’s existence.

  This time, I felt it necessary to apologize to Sir Ian McKellen for beating him. His performance in Amadeus remains my most memorable Broadway experience among the rest of his extraordinary life’s work.

  All the other shows congratulated us. Producers offered me guest spots on everything. But the one group I wanted to see was missing again. Where was Netflix?

  Even if they didn’t want to continue because of the vast business complications and unscrupulous nature of the partners of the show, I still wish the man who made it all possible would have been there to take a bow.

  What balls to gamble on a first show with one American actor and subtitles.

  Not only would the meeting with Ted Sarandos forever be my best business meeting of all time (the meeting with Susie Buffett wasn’t business), but he was one of the few truly courageous, visionary leaders in a cowardly, myopic business.

  He deserves every bit of Netflix’s success.

  It hurt me to my soul that he wasn’t there.

  thirty-one

  Ambassador to the Court of Ronald McDonald

  (2016–2017)

  Write, Act, Paint, Play, Perform, Work, Think, Speak, Live with Purpose. Or hide under the bed until checkout time.

  —THE UNWRITTEN BOOK

  Thanksgiving of 2015 Bruce announced there would be no E Street Band tour in 2016.

  We were onstage in January.

  As any Tour Manager doing arena tours or bigger knows, that is a physical, mental, and spiritual impossibility.

  For George Travis, our Tour Manager, the impossible took only six weeks in this case. That’s six fucking weeks, if you’re keeping score.

  Find fifty or sixty crew members that aren’t booked. Find venues that aren’t already booked. Contact the band and the rest of the touring party and inform them that whatever they thought they were doing, they are not doing. Hotels. Planes. Trucks. Buses. Flights. Customs. Staging. Sound. Lights. Screens.

  In six weeks. Try it.

  George started as a truck driver. Depending on how long the drive was to the next show, drivers would often work during the show as riggers and spotlight operators.

  George was a rigger. They’re the crazy mamajamas that climb up high to secure hanging points for lights and sound and screens. Real high. With no net.

  He worked his way up, or down in this case, to being the flashlight guy as the band walked on the stage. Might not seem like much, but it put him in contact with humans—well, the band anyway—for the first time, which was a risky move for his immediate superior, in this case Marc Brickman, our light man and production head.

  Suppose George said the wrong thing to the wrong guy at the wrong time? Suppose the Boss didn’t like his face? Or the shirt he was wearing? A bad flashlight guy could fuck up an entire show! “I like him,” I told Marc. “I think he’s destined for bigger things.”

  “Ain’t we all,” he mumbled with his typical sincere cynicism.

  George eventually became Tour Manager, one of the very best.

  The River Revisited was my second favorite tour ever, after the original River Tour, because that album has my favorite material. It’s also got Bruce’s best singing. He is one of the greatest white Soul singers of all time, but since that’s not his favorite part of his identity, he only becomes that guy every once in a while. Much to my eternal aggravation, he takes that gift totally for granted.

  On this tour he was that guy every night, which was awesome to behold. As a Student Prince advertisement from 1971 said, he was “That Sensational Soul Man.”

  Featuring the “Hoochi-koochi Guitar Player Steve VanZadt”! And “Pro-Football in Color”!

  Bruce managed to ruin my personal fun a little bit by deciding not to do the full River album in Europe.

  “Why?” I asked, disappointed that some of our greatest audiences wouldn’t be seeing one of our greatest shows.

  Too many slow songs for stadiums, was the answer.

  Now Bruce has to sing the songs, so if he doesn’t feel like singing that many slow songs, that’s that. But the implication that the audience wouldn’t like it was simply incorrect.

  I was in in LA having dinner with the very cool Game of Thrones guys David Benioff and D. B. Weiss sometime in 2015. They asked if I wanted to go with them to see the Rolling Stones, who happened to be doing the entire Sticky Fingers album. “I don’t know,” I said. “Let me think about it.” As if! It was phenomenal, and afterward I told Charlie Watts, “This will be the greatest tour you’ve done since Exile in ’72!”

  “No it won’t,” he said in his famous deadpan delivery. “What you just saw was the only time we’re doing the whole album. Mick says it’s too many slow songs for stadiums. Maybe you can talk to him.”

  No thanks.

  The thing was, I’d spent the entire ’80s in Europe, seeing dozens of shows, and half of the biggest Rock acts did nothing but slow songs. The Eurovision Song Contest, the single biggest event in Europe, is nothing but slow songs.

  Yes, Sticky Fingers has a lot of slow songs. But look at what they are! “I Got the Blues,” “Sister Morphine,” “Moonlight Mile,” “You Gotta Move.” Not to mention “Wild Horses.”

  And yes, The River has lots of slow songs, but they are “Independence Day,” “I Wanna Marry You,” “The River,” “Point Blank,” “Fade Away,” “Drive All Night,” and… well, maybe they had a point.

  Anyway, if those two front guys feel the same way about something…

  I felt really bad the River Revisited Tour had to skip one of my favorite parts of America, North Carolina. For some reason the audiences in the Carolinas are among the most enthusiastic audiences for us in the country. I think they saw our brand of northern bar band as something slightly exotic. It was almost like playing Europe.

  But North Carolina had just passed their ridiculous bathroom bill, the first of the Orwellian-titled religious freedom bills. The legislation that had nothing to do with religious freedom and everything to do with imposing extremist religious ideas on a rapidly disappearing Separation of Church and State society.

  As soon as they passed the bill, we decided we had to show solidarity with the LGBTQ community and so couldn’t play the state. We helped lead a boycott of artists, athletes, and professional organizations to make the point that the North Carolina political leadership was living in the past and needed to be voted out. The boycott worked, to some degree—they adjusted the law without quite fixing it—but within a few months it became impossible to stay away from states that were imposing fanatical anti-LGBTQ legislation. There were just too many.

  When the River Tour hit London, Maureen came over. It was her favorite town in her favorite country. She could live there permanently, and I’ve been promising her at least an apartment there for years, but I keep blowing it. The festival was one apartment. The Rascals show was another. Maybe we’ll get there eventually, but between me and you—come here a little closer; I have to whisper—I like visiting and living in hotels better.

  We had tea with Bill and Suzanne Wyman, and they invited us to his eightieth birthday party. They are the original odd couple, Bill quietly bemused by much of the modern world and Suzanne as wild and kinetic as can be.

  A couple nights later I went to see the soul singer Madeline Bell at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club with Leo Green, one of our Promoters from Live Nati
on. “When you coming back to London?” Leo asked.

  “We come every year for Maureen’s birthday in November and sometimes stay through Christmas, but Bill Wyman just invited us to his birthday party in October.”

  His eyes lit up. “That’s the same week as my Blues Festival. Why don’t you throw a band together and headline one of the nights?”

  Wow… I had to think about that one.

  I hadn’t fronted a band since the ’80s, but doing the Darlene Love album and the Lilyhammer score had given me a whole new set of musician friends.

  There are two kinds of musicians in the world, band guys and session guys. Band guys are the ones you grow up with and start out playing with, and if you’re lucky, you hit on some magical chemical combination.

  Session guys are professionals. They play in time, and they play in tune.

  The members of the Rolling Stones (and almost every other important band you can name) could not find work as session musicians if their lives depended on it. You’re more likely to be overqualified for Rock than underqualified.

  What bands have is personality. And chemistry. Alchemy. Every great band is a matter of individual eccentricities blending in different ways with unpredictable, inconsistent, occasionally glorious results.

  Session guys generally don’t have strong musical personalities. They are trained to take on the personality of the Artist they’re working with. That’s what makes them valuable. A session guy may be (and often is) the craziest mofo you’d ever want to meet in real life. But at a session he’s going to adapt.

  In recent years, I had started meeting more of a third type, a hybrid of the first two—session guys that perform live.

  There was some precedent. When Rock and Soul began, the revue-type shows used session guys because there were multiple acts, and the band had to read the charts, be great, fast, and consistent. There was no performance requirement per se. They were in the background and just played.