“Little Steven” Van Zandt has a busy summer ahead, touring with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, hosting a radio show and judging a Hard Rock Cafe contest.

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Steven Van Zandt believes in rock ’n’ roll. As host of the popular syndicated radio show “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” (and now a Sirius satellite 24-hour-version of the show), Van Zandt spreads the gospel of rock ‘n’ roll every week. And, as a guitarist with the E Street Band and a solo artist, Van Zandt has made plenty of the stuff himself. Van Zandt isn’t about to take a summer vacation. He’s on tour with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, which will take him to Bonnaroo and to the Hard Rock Calling in London’s Hyde Park in June. He’s also head judge in the Hard Rock Cafe’s Ambassadors of Rock Battle of the Bands competition, which will climax with the winner performing at the Hard Rock Calling concerts, June 26-29.

“Hard Rock was our very first sponsor on the Underground Garage and they’re still our sponsor, and they came to me with this idea for the Battle of the Bands thing because we’re playing their gig in Hyde Park,” says Van Zandt. “They thought it might be a cool idea to get a little contest and see if we can have an unknown band actually appear on the show.”

That philosophy is keeping with Van Zandt’s idea for the “Underground Garage” (heard locally at 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday on WFIV, 105.3 FM), one of the few places where new bands playing classic-style rock ’n’ roll are given an audience — a really big audience.

“A lot of the young bands are used to being local and maybe only their immediate family heard their records!” Van Zandt laughs. “Then all of a sudden some little band in Portland, Ore., is being heard on a national station in Spain. It’s mind-boggling. And you’re being heard in Oslo and Stockholm and Helsinki and all of England and Miami. And it makes everybody better. Almost without exception, everybody who makes a second or third record since we’ve been on the air they improve greatly. Suddenly, they’re not making this record for their cousin Joe. It’s being heard worldwide and they rise to the occasion.”

Van Zandt’s “Coolest Song in the World This Week” is a weekly feature.

“We find one every single week, that’s 52 a year for seven years. With this Hard Rock thing we could be discovering a whole bunch of new ones. We’ll see.”

He says the basic criteria for putting a song on the air is it has to be “great.” That includes a mix of old and new music.

“How can you aspire to greatness if you’re not hearing greatness?” he says. “You listen to what’s typically going on today, it’s so mediocre, so diluted, so compromised, there’s no inspiration left in it. There’s nothing motivating people. We want to help you get through the day. Help you feel better about life and about yourself. Give you a little extra strength to fight your demons. If you can contribute to that, then we’re going to play you.”

Van Zandt says the musicians he champions aren’t copying classic-rock acts, but are informed by them.

“I honestly believe that period from around 1951 to 1971 was a renaissance period that will be studied for hundreds of years to come,” says Van Zandt. “It was when rock ’n’ roll got invented and evolved into this incredible thing in the 1960s. It’s proven to be timeless for at least 60 years and I think it will be forever — at least until they invent new instruments.”

Van Zandt says the E Street Band was regularly covering those artists when the group was honing its chops in little clubs — long before the world had heard of them. He says those days still inspire the act.

“I’m quite proud of the fact that we continue to go out there and turn arenas and stadiums into clubs,” says Van Zandt. “Lately, we’ve been taking requests from the audience. At first it was obscure Bruce songs, which was fun. But, lately, it’s been any kind of songs. Whether we’ve ever played them or not, we work it out on stage for a couple of minutes, find the right key and go for it. This week alone, we’ve played the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing,’ the Ramones’ ‘I Wanna Be Sedated,’ the Clash’s ‘London Calling,’ ‘96 Tears’ ...

And, he says, no matter what size of crowd the band is playing to the members hold tight to the attitude the group started with. “We’re just a working band and we go out there and play the best we can. Because we grew up in the ‘60s our standards are ridiculously high and we may never get there. We may never reach the standards of the bands we saw in their prime — the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Kinks, the Yardbirds, Dave Clark Five. We may never get there in our minds. We go out there every night trying to be better. That’s what keeps it so vital and so strong. Plus, Bruce is still writing his heart out. He’s writing great stuff. No one’s gonna accuse us of being a nostalgia act.”

Wayne Bledsoe may be reached at 865-342-6444 or bledsoe@knews.com. He is also the host of “All Over the Road” midnight Saturdays to 4 a.m. Sundays on WDVX-FM.

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel
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