Reinventing the dial: Van Zandt aims to restore radio's sense of purpose

Mark Brown
Rocky Mountain News, November 23, 2002

We've all done it. You listen to the radio and think,
"Hey, I can pick out better songs than that."

Steve Van Zandt is trying it out and has a warning
for all you radio-programmer wannabes: It's not as
easy as it sounds.

Doing a few months' worth of Little Steven's
Underground Garage has given him a healthy new
respect for radio programmers "and enormous
respect for DJs who in the old days literally did this
every day," he says.

The radio show was a concept he came up with a couple of years
back - the notion of playing garage-rock bands and showing how
they were all connected, drawing a straight line from the likes of
the Rolling Stones to The Clash to The Hives.

After starting on just a few stations, the show has received great
ratings and has expanded across the country, getting picked up
just a few weeks ago on KQMT-FM (99.5) (10 p.m. Sundays).

It took a couple of years to format, because Van Zandt knew he
wanted something that would last, not just some rock-star
dabbling. Besides, with his role on The Sopranos, recording The
Rising with Bruce Springsteen and an 18-month world tour with
the E Street Band, it wasn't like he was sitting on his hands.

"Yeah, things were getting a little slow," Van Zandt says with a
laugh from his home. "I didn't realize how much work this was
going to be."

He's still putting in 20 hours a week to program and record a
two-hour show, much of it done with portable studios on the road
with Springsteen. "There's a remarkable amount of stuff being
done for what sounds like a spontaneous two hours."

Like many music fans, he's dismayed that rock 'n' roll doesn't play
a bigger part in everyday life, the way it once did.

"People are taking radio for granted, they're taking live
performance for granted. People aren't participating as much as
they used to. It isn't as important in their lives as it used to be,"
he says. Along with the Hard Rock Café, his co-sponsor, Van
Zandt is trying to return that sense of purpose to the airwaves
and the concert stages.

"There's a reinventing of the infrastructure that needs to be
done," he says.

He's trying to do that with his show, with a focus strictly on music,
be it actually playing it or the commentary provided by himself and
guests.

"The bottom line to me, when I look at it - it's all about
personality, man," Van Zandt says. "That's what I see America as,
not just radio. We're attracted to personality. We relate to
people. That's just our nature, man. I'm just casually looking at
this stuff, but it looks to me that once radio pushed all the
personality into talk radio, that's where all the ratings went. Is
that just a coincidence? I don't think so."

Current trends need to be scaled back, he says.

"The answer up till now has been 'Let's do fewer records, more
commercials.' It's exactly the opposite of what needs to happen,"
Van Zandt says.

Certainly, radio formats used to be less tightly controlled than
they are now, but the idea of a long-ago anarchy on the airwaves
of commercial free-form radio is a fuzzy, glorified myth, Van Zandt
says.

"This fantasy - and that's what it is - of free-form, it never really
existed," Van Zandt says. "Well, very briefly it existed. Two
minutes after free-form started, someone was formatting it. But
yeah, things were more open in those days."

But there's no going back, he warns - just the opportunity to
make things a bit better.

"I don't think we can go back to those days. We were so innocent
and so open," he says. "It was all new at that point."

Mountain West Music 2002