Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  All the big shows had them. The Alan Freed shows, Murray the K shows, Dick Clark shows, the Motown Motortown Revue. Even Soupy Sales emceed a revue show. Those revues needed bands, and they couldn’t use the labels’ house bands. There were exceptions. Booker T. & the M.G.’s did Stax tours, since they played on most of the records. And that had to be some Funk Brothers on the twelve-year-old Stevie Wonder’s live and incredible “Fingertips.” But if the house band was on the road, who was left to make the damn records?

  Beyond Rock, the Popular standards artists who toured—Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Jerry Vale, or in-betweeners like Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, and Engelbert Humperdinck—brought along a Music Director, and maybe a drummer, and then hired most of the musicians in each city as they went.

  The drummer was often there for shtick as much as for sticks.

  It was left to solo artists who lived in the Pop world but had Rock roots or unusual complexity to begin taking true session guys on the road. Artists like Paul Simon, Sting, Linda Ronstadt (half of her band was session guys; the other half turned into the Eagles!). Or even Jeff Beck these days, who requires supreme musical excellence to keep up with him.

  I took that path. I had drafted Marc Ribler to be Darlene’s Musical Director and brought in higher-level musicians to mix with a few of her old band and excellent singers, Ula Hedwig, Milton Vann, and Baritone Williams. When Leo Green asked me to throw together a band, I decided what the hell. This crazy gig might be fun.

  I could do some Paul Butterfield things with the horns, which nobody hears anymore. I could do some of Mike Bloomfield’s Electric Flag stuff, which nobody’s ever heard live. I could do regular Blues like Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf, and maybe even some blaxploitation for a jazzier change of pace.

  Suddenly, I was actually looking forward to this thing!

  I called Darlene. “Baby, I’ve got to borrow Marc back for a minute. I’m actually gonna do a gig!”

  “Of course!” She was the coolest.

  And it was only one gig. I thought.

  Marc put an excellent band together: Richie Mercurio on drums, Jack Daley on bass, and Andy Burton on keys. I added Eddie Manion and Stan Harrison, who went all the way back to the Jukes, on horns.

  At rehearsal, along with the Blues and covers, I threw in some of my own songs, which I hadn’t sung or even thought about since the ’80s.

  As I started to sing them, the strangest thing happened. I couldn’t make it through a song without beginning to cry. I had to stop for a minute and figure out why. I realized it had been so long since I’d sung them that there was no distance between the emotions that created the songs and the process of performing them. I was literally living the words as I sang them. Feeling the melody and the chord changes with no buffer.

  I had heard Maureen talk about the acting theory of “sense memory” from her classes in the old days, but it suddenly occurred to me that that theory may be built on a faulty assumption.

  Sense memory theory suggested that when actors needed to cry in a scene, they should think back to an incident in their life that made them cry and use it. But what I found out was if you’re really in the moment, you can’t use it. You can’t act. You can’t speak. You can’t sing. Your throat tightens up. You need a little distance.

  When I told Bruce about it, he had a deeper explanation, the result of his forty years of therapy, which was that I was feeling a combination of guilt and despair at having abandoned my children (my songs) for decades.

  He probably had a point. He always does.

  Either way, it took me a couple of weeks to be able to get through the songs.

  I got one of the great phone calls of all time in 2016.

  “Stevie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Chita Rivera.”

  Wow!

  “I’m doing my debut at Carnegie Hall and I want you to perform with me.”

  “Me?!?”

  “Yes, please, darling—you’ll make my show so cool!”

  Ha-ha! As if her show could be any cooler. Me and Maureen have been catching her show for years and it just gets better and better.

  She is the best part of show business personified, and not a bad résumé either—West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, Chicago, Sweet Charity, Pippin, The Rink, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and more.

  We sang a duet on James Taylor’s “Secret O’ Life.” I think that’s about as nervous as I’ve ever been onstage. But it worked out great.

  At around the same time, my friend Kenny Schulman, who had been involved with the New York Ronald McDonald House for years, asked for my support.

  There are many reasons I’m quite sure there is no such thing as an anthropomorphic white guy with a beard up in the sky looking down personally on all eight billion of us, especially football players that score a touchdown, but the main one is kids with cancer.

  “It’s God’s will,” say the religious extremists that make up way too much of our country.

  Really?

  I feel sick whenever I see them. They wear bandanas when they get chemo, so many years ago I thought it would be nice if wearing the bandana wasn’t an embarrassment but a badge of coolness.

  So we created very colorful “Little Steven’s Magic Bandanas” and told the kids that wearing one made them Rock stars.

  I called John Varvatos, who called Tommy Hilfiger, and they also designed bandanas, which was supercool. Every celebrity and clothing designer could and probably would design a bandana if approached. It really makes the kids feel better psychologically.

  Kenny loved the idea, and so did the executives at the Ronald McDonald House, and they made me the first Ambassador of Ronald McDonald House in New York to promote the whole thing.

  Made it, Ma! Top of the world!

  Maybe they’ll make it a national campaign eventually.

  If it makes these kids feel 1 percent better, it’s worth it. All it takes is our will. Not that of God, who is busy making sure Rappers win Grammys.

  Leo’s Blues Festival gig was at a joint called the Indigo at the O2, part of the O2 Arena complex, which has the coolest configuration of a theater I’ve ever seen. Nice big stage, big dance floor, but then it has a huge, steeply raked balcony much closer to the stage than any I’ve ever seen. It made a 2,500-capacity theater feel very intimate.

  Our best friends in London, Karl and Anita Sydow, brought Dave Clark, who emceed the evening for us, and the response from the eight hundred or so punters was fabulous.

  Doing my own music after all those years was quite emotional for me, and I’ll never forget that evening.

  Richie Sambora was playing next door at the arena, so I joined him onstage and he joined me. He’s one of my best friends, and I don’t get a chance to see him often enough.

  We went to watch Jeff Beck, who was also playing and was his usual amazing self. It was interesting to see Jimmy Page, not so bad himself, in as much awe as we were.

  Backstage, I asked Jeff if he knew how annoying it was that he never missed, no matter how crazy a lick he was going for.

  “That’s what you think,” he said. “I’ve just learned to cover it up well!” He was lying, I’m sure, to keep me from jumping off London Bridge.

  As Richie and I were leaving, Leo stopped us. “Come say hi to Van Morrison,” he said.

  I’d never met him, but I’d heard… things. And I never like to take chances meeting my heroes.

  “Thanks, Leo,” I said, “but no thanks. I’ve heard he can be a bit… well, shy. And so am I.”

  “You don’t understand,” Leo said. “He asked for you. He wants to meet you.” Richie and I went into his dressing room. Van was in a great mood. A sweetheart really. He talked about getting off the road and going back to his roots. Just grabbing a residency at some local pub and living the rest of his life that way.

  After a few minutes our mutual shyness started to take over.

  There happened to be a vacuum cleaner sitting there.

 
“Van,” I said, “I don’t know any better way to show my gratitude for all the pleasure your music has brought me through the years, so I’m just gonna clean up a bit for you.” I started vacuuming his room.

  His Tour Manager said it was the most he had seen Van laugh in ten years.

  Bill Wyman’s eightieth birthday party was filled with Rock celebs: Robert Plant, Bob Geldof, and Mark Knopfler, among others. Mark and I talked about our mutual friend Lance Freed, who had administered Mark’s publishing along with mine for years. Lance had left Rondor to venture off on his own.

  “Have you heard anything yet?” Mark asked me, as anxious as all of Lance’s friends were to be back with him. Quite a compliment, considering that Dire Straits had been among the biggest bands in the history of European Rock. Mark hadn’t needed a publisher for forty years. But like the rest of us, he was perfectly willing to give up an administration fee just to hang out with Lance. That’s how cool Lance is.

  After the party, it was time to get back to E Street, where the River (or at least River-ish) Tour would resume in Australia in January.

  But the gig felt so good and the band was so amazing that I couldn’t shake the experience. Something significant had taken place. “Hey,” I told Marc Ribler, “I’ve got a month or two off. Why don’t we make an album just for the hell of it? No heavy lifting. We can record a bunch of the songs I’ve written for others through the years.” The rehearsal alone had already sounded like an album.

  He was down. The band was into it. I talked to Bruce to see what he thought. He said it was a great idea. And that’s what we did.

  Every album I’ve ever done has a theme and a concept. In this case, the title said it all: Soulfire. A summation of the songs written for others that combined the raw power of Rock with the emotional depth of Soul, in the process creating something uncategorizable and uniquely uncommercial!

  I mostly picked songs that still had emotional resonance for me. There were two that Southside had recorded, “I’m Coming Back” from the ’90s, which obviously made sense, and “I Don’t Want to Go Home,” Johnny’s signature song, which I rearranged back to the way I’d originally pictured it for Ben E. King and the Drifters. I did an Ennio Morricone arrangement for “Standing in the Line of Fire” from the third Gary US Bonds album, and finally my own version of “St. Valentine’s Day” from both the Cocktail Slippers and David Chase’s Twylight Zones. I still hope to do it with Nancy Sinatra, who I wrote it for.

  I also did some new writing, finally finishing what had been going to be the first song on my first album forty years earlier, “The City Weeps Tonight.” My idea back then was to introduce myself as a new artist by going chronologically through the history of Rock and Soul genres, beginning with Doo-Wop. But then I decided to go political.

  The other new song on Soulfire was “I Saw the Light,” a song I’d written for Richie Sambora and his partner at the time, Orianthi. I had talked with Richie casually about producing them. I thought they were a great couple, and I wanted to make them the Delaney and Bonnie of Hard Rock. I could see it, hear it, clear as day.

  Richie was in New York with his daughter, who was going to NYU, and he was supposed to come over a dozen times to hear the song and discuss the album. He never made it.

  By the time Richie and I reconnected, they were doing an album with Bob Rock and had like thirty songs. I figured they didn’t need me or my song, put it on the shelf, and found it again just before I made Soulfire.

  I always wonder what would have happened if Richie had come over that day and we’d grabbed Orianthi and gone into my studio four blocks away and cut that song.

  I’d never recorded a cover on a solo album, but I happened to be listening to an Etta James record and heard “Blues Is My Business,” written by Kevin Bowe and Todd Cerney.

  “… and business is good.”

  Is that a classic fucking hook or what?

  I wanted to fill out the set with something Jazzy so the horn players could blow, and I also wanted to do my favorite blaxploitation song, Bodie Chandler and Barry De Vorzon’s “Down and Out in New York City,” the Black Caesar theme by the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown. I combined the two ideas by coming up with a cool Jazzy theme we could riff off of that fit right in.

  As I contemplated my return to the music business, I promised myself that I was going to do things right. I knew most of the problems of my professional life had come from not having a Manager.

  I called Scott Borchetta.

  I had met Scott at Jimmy’s wedding in 2016. I didn’t know much about him other than that he had started the Big Machine label in 2005 and almost immediately hit the lottery with Taylor Swift, but I liked the way he carried himself.

  Shortly after we met, Scott asked me to mentor on Idol again, where he had taken over from Jimmy. I had gotten away with it once and nobody had gotten hurt. A second time seemed risky. But Maureen made me do it again, and it was fine again. All I remember is La’Porsha Renae turning down my suggestion of Jerry Ragovoy’s “Stay with Me,” despite my encouragement. She would have won with it!

  The experience was uneventful except that Jennifer Lopez, who was one of the judges, didn’t have a clue who I was. Totally understandable; why should she? But Maureen felt she was being disrespectful and went after her on Twitter. That was entertaining for a minute. Luckily J-Lo remained clueless about me all over again when I did a commercial with her for the 2020 Super Bowl, so there was no bad blood. I even changed the script to subtly hype her latest movie.

  When I called Scott Borchetta, we reminisced for a minute about Idol. Then I got to the point. “Hey, man, I’m kind of coming back into the business. I know you’re mostly a record company guy, but if you have a little time, do you want to be my Manager?”

  “Wow.” Not a call he was expecting. “Yeah! Sure! Let’s meet in Nashville.”

  In NashVegas, Scott brought in a guy named Ken Levitan and another guy. Scott explained he was busy with Big Machine but would get involved with anything important. Levitan, his management partner, would handle the day-to-day.

  Ken then introduced me to the other guy, who would actually be handling the day-to-day. Now I was two levels down from what I’d had in mind. But what the hell, everybody seemed enthusiastic.

  So they became my first real Managers. Great, I thought. I don’t have to say no to the many offers I get, most of which are from acquaintances. I can now send those people to management, who can be the bad guys and turn them down.

  I explained it was going to take me a minute to make the enormous adjustment to being a front man, so we needed to take it slow.

  Instead, they started saying yes to everything being offered. TV shows. Gigs. Record deals. Everything.

  It’s a typical management methodology to get some revenue on the books quickly to make everybody feel like the Managers are doing something, but it didn’t work for me.

  They made a record deal with Bruce Resnikoff at Universal that was the worst deal I’ve ever seen, but I was determined not to scare them away by interfering.

  They assured me it was a good deal for those days. I told them that just a year earlier I had made a fifty-fifty ownership/partnership deal for Darlene Love, a seventy-three-year-old legend releasing her debut album, which was the kind of thing you could do if you had already paid for the record, which I had also done with Soulfire. “Well,” they said. “This is the best Universal will do.”

  Long story short, Soulfire came out and it was obvious within three months that the management thing just wasn’t gonna work, so I let the Managers go.

  The first thing I did after they were gone was meet with Bruce Resnikoff. Incredibly, it was the first time anyone had met with Universal to discuss Soulfire. Again, this was three months after it came out, as opposed to six months before, when the marketing plan meeting should have happened.

  It took me all of sixty seconds to renegotiate the record deal to a fifty-fifty partnership.

  Which
reminded me why I didn’t have a Manager, but it was still depressing. Everybody else had one. I just wanted to be normal.

  Bruce would turn out to be a very important and loyal new friend. I had known him casually for years. I almost did the Darlene Love album with him. But what would be the most productive three years of my life were due directly to his faith and belief in my work. And I’ll never forget that.

  When the E Street Band returned from Australia, Bruce told me he had put together a small one-man biography-type show for the Obamas, which he planned to expand and take to Broadway.

  I figured it would be a good time to do a new TV show. I called whichever horse I was riding on the merry-go-round of Agents at the time to make a TV deal for one of my five scripts, and I also met with Chris Columbus and Joe Roth to see if they had anything for me.

  While that was going on, Maureen and I were put on the board of the Count Basie Theatre. The Basie had a special place in my heart because when I was a kid it had been my local movie theater, the Carlton (when I wasn’t at the drive-in in Holmdel). It was in Red Bank, the place where I bought my records and first guitar at Jack’s.

  Maureen was busy teaching acting to the dancers at American Ballet Theatre at that time, but she agreed to be on the board because she also had a special place in her heart for the Carlton/Basie from when she’d danced there as a kid with the New Jersey Ballet.

  The Basie was fundraising to expand the theater into a block-long Arts center. They had shown me the design, which I didn’t like. Why did it have to be so boring? Why not make something iconic like Gaudí’s apartment buildings or Saint Basil’s Cathedral or even the guitar-shaped hotel Jimmy Allen was building at the Hollywood, Florida, Hard Rock? Who wanted another fucking accountant’s office building?

  They had promised me a club in the complex, which would be the first Little Steven’s Underground Garage.