Steven Van Zandt Brings His New Project to SAG Conversations For Viewing and Q&A

I raced to SAG headquarters where they were having a screening of Steve Van Zandt's new series "Lilyhammer" on Netflix and a Q&A with the man himself. Lilyhammer was well-written and quite funny but I won't be recommending it to anyone because of the totally unnecessary scene where he kills a wolf. The wolf was only being a wolf and trying to survive. And we don't need any more people giving justification to the rich to have their sport of gunning down wolves from helicopters like the cowardly pseudo hunters they are.

But the talk with Stevie was fascinating. What an extraordinary life he's had. We all know about E Street Band and Sopranos but he is so much more than that. He took an 18 year hiatus from the E Street Band because he got heavily involved in political actions and didn't want to involve others in potentially career-ruining activities.

His political activities started on a rock-n-roll gig in Germany when a young boy came up and asked him why he was putting missiles in his country. Though he told the boy he was only a musician and wasn't responsible, the conversation stuck with him and he realized that he was also an American and responsible for what his country did. That led to him reading up on what our country was doing around the world and to his political activism for Native Americans and South Africa.

Having considered rock-n-roll dead when he left Bruce Springstein and the band, he then discovered garage rock and realized that they were getting no exposure on air. So he bought a bunch of stations and became a DJ to help get these garage bands exposure. He also bought a country station because the young country artists weren't getting heard either.

Sopranos came about in a weird way. He pushed to get the band 'The Young Rascals' into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. He ended up doing the induction speech and it was the first year they televised the event so he did a 5-minute schtick on New Jersey.

Apparently David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, was channel surfing, landed on it and watched it, loving all things New Jersey and the E Street Band and the Young Rascals. After that Chase approached him to not only be in The Sopranos but to play Tony Soprano. He came out to LA to do the audition but as far as Chase was concerned, Stevie had the role.

HBO didn't see it that way. They were investing 30 million dollars to get into the series business and they didn't want to chance it on a non-actor. He was fine with that because he never sought to be an actor -- his wife was the actor in the family.

Feeling bad, Chase offered him any other role in the series, but Stevie, having now done the table read with high caliber actors and having thought about it, didn't want to take a role from a real actor. So Chase offered to write him a new role so he didn't have to take one away from an actor. The character Silvio was based on a character that Stevie had written in a script, changed by Chase of course to fit Chase's needs.

So he was doing Sopranos and DJ'ing at the same time, since he could do that from his hotel room wherever, and then Bruce called, wanting to get the Band back together.

Chase said they'd work the character's shooting around the touring needs. And so he wound up doing Sopranos, DJ'ing and E Street all at the same time. The only thing he regrets about that is that Silvio got shortchanged in terms of the storylines. Since they couldn't count on him being back in time when they needed him, Silvio tended to be thrust to the side a lot, so it wouldn't ruin anything if Stevie didn't get back in time.

It was an awesome discussion with him.