Little Steven Uncut

Little Steven - or, as he's credited on the cover, Miami Steve Van Zandt - authored the cover story in the new issue of the British music magazine Uncut. It's all about his budy Bruce Springsteen - "From Asbury Park To The Promised Land." You know, the guy that he's playing the Spectrum with for two nights, starting tonight. The story itself is not online - you'll have to hunt it down at Borders or Barnes & Noble magazine rack - but there's a link to the magazine's site here.

My interview with Van Zandt at last month's SXSW music festival in Austin, is in today's Inquirer. Read it here. The Underground Garage poobah also said a few things that didn't make the cut into the newspaper. He bellyaches quite a bit about the state of contemporary music, but he's got some vaild points. I asked him if it wasn't sometimes good for bands to be ignorant of self-imposed limitations, and he said:  "I don't know, I see things differently now. I see greatness within limitations. It's easy to be original, to be perfectly honest. It's not easy to be genre specific, and be great. Try writing a hit song. Try writing a hit song in the old sense of the word. Write a Beach Boys song. Write a Chuck Berry song. Not easy. Not easy."

It's not easy, either, to write songs that bring together a wide range of people, like the Beatles and other '60s bands were able to do were Van Zandt and Springsteen were coming of age near the central Jersey shore. "There's that, too," he said. "We will never see a day again where the best music being made was also the most commercial. But I think within the sphere of what's happening now, there's no way you can be happy. Where's the inspiration? Where's the development? Where's the greatness?" The entirety of the talk he gave at SXSW the day after I interviewed him is here.

Van Zandt has built up his own bully pulpit to proselytize abut where be believes the greatness can be found. Along with the wondrous Underground Garage Sirius XM satellite radio channel, and his own two hour show which is heard on WMGK on Sunday nights - which you can listen to here - he's got his Wicked Cool label up and running. The video for "St. Valentine's Day Massacre," a song by Danish grage band girl-group the Cocktail Slippers that Van Zandt wrote and produced, is below. And this just in: Van Zandt will also guest DJ on WMGK (102.9-FM), from 3 to 4 on Wednesday afternoon.