Stevie Wanders: From E Street to Silvio (and Back Again)

Van Zandt's upcoming memoir traces his wild journey from Asbury to "Sin City" to "Lilyhammer," with a few regrets along the way.

I first met Steve Van Zandt while joining my Crawdaddy colleague Peter Knobler in the first major magazine interview with Springsteen at Bruce’s tiny apartment in Jersey in December 1972 (after meeting him at Sing Sing Prison, which is another story). This would lead to the famous 8000-word spread on the near-unknown a month or two later. Steve joined us around the kitchen table for a few minutes, then we all left for town and his gig in a small bar with pal Johnny Lyon as the duo “Southside and Steve.” The three of us made up about one-third of the “crowd.”

Among the many later, crazier, meetings: In the studio recording Southside’s first album (with Lee Dorsey, Bruce and Ronnie Spector, see below), at a Columbia University gig just after he joined E Street, at a Born to Run session, on the softball diamond for a doubleheader, and so on—then not for many years until backstage in NYC during Bruce’s “Tom Joad” tour. Now his new memoir is coming soon, and Rolling Stone has a lengthy excerpt today. It includes details of major fights with Bruce, his decision to leave the band, and his road to political protest and The Sopranos, among much else. And here’s my account of that Southside session. Don’t forget to share and subscribe, it’s free! My new, award-winning film here.

Stevie, Southside, Springsteen & Spector

It was early 1976. Bruce Springsteen’s pal, Southside Johnny, had just signed his own recording contract at Epic Records (with The Asbury Jukes), and since I was pals with both of them I was invited to a Sunday recording session at the Record Plant in NYC that would feature two legends, Ronnie Spector and Lee Dorsey, with “Miami Steve” Van Zandt producing.  Joe Cocker happened to be cutting an album in the next studio.

Joe, to say the least, was not at his best.

The scene:  A long couch in a corridor between the two studios.  I sat down at the far end.  Then Cocker and famed session drummer Bernard Purdie joined me, with Joe in the middle.  Joe appeared drunk or stoned, his hair a mop.   Purdie told him, flatly, “Joe, you’re a mess.”  Cocker replied, “I’m all right.” 

Purdie: “You’ve been ‘all right’ for years.”  One couldn’t  help but recall that one of Joe’s earliest hits was “Feelin’ All Right.”  Now he needed a little help from his friends. Still in a daze, and perhaps forgetting I was there, Cocker placed a finger on one side of his nose—apparently getting ready to snot lustily out of the nostril facing me. Well, you never saw someone jump off a couch so fast, and I escape unscathed.  

Just another day at the office.

Southside and Steve, who I had first met in December 1972, were a fun pair to interview about the Jukes. Steve claimed they were nothing like the E Streeters. “We have five horns, Bruce only has one,” he boasted. Johnny interjected: “Cause he’s cheap!” Then they reminisced about one of “the 48 bands” they were in with Bruce. In the Sundance Blues Band, Steve played lead guitar “and we only gave Bruce a lick once in awhile,” Johnny said. Steve added: “And I don’t think we let him sing one song.”

Then, a few minutes later, we all had the thrill of watching at close range the elfin Lee Dorsey, just up from New Orleans, croak out a Van Zandt tune,  “How Come You Treat Me So Bad?” Steve, behind the mixing board, screamed at the end, “I think I’m going to die!”  Dorsey, the voice behind “Working in a Coal Mine” and “Ride My Pony” and other NOLA classics, told me he hadn’t been in a studio for three years and recently sold his bar in NOLA after getting held up one too many times.  Now he was running a body shop with his son—and just the day before had found someone under the hood of one of the cars, trying to swipe a battery.

“Next legend!” Van Zandt ordered, and soon Ronnie Spector waltzed through the door.  Still her sassy self, Ronnie (then separated from crazed gun-toting husband Phil) arrived in painted-on jeans, suspenders and a tight red t-shirt.  She told me she was coaxed into the studio because the track, “You Mean So Much to Me,” was written by Springsteen.  Bruce was tinkling the ivories when she walked up and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Nice to see ya,” Bruce responded but, seemingly intimidated, he didn’t say a word to her the rest of the night. 

By now, Joe Cocker had staggered down the hall to watch.  After a terrific first vocal take by Ronnie, Steve announced, “We still need some whoah-oh-ohs at the beginning.”   Ronnie replied: “I know whoa-oh-ohs.” An understatement. “Whoa-oh-ohs are my life.”  When they recorded the take she threw in a “sock it to me,” sending Springsteen into convulsions.

Watching Ronnie, Steve and Southside huddled in a corner, I asked Bruce, now a star after Born to Run, if he’d ever imagined he’d one day survey this tableau.  “Nowadays,” he answered with a chuckle, “I believe anything.”

(A few years later, Stevie joined Southside for his classic from that Jukes album, below. Two of my several Bruce-related posts here and here.)

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

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