Something to watch tonight: Friday 8 November

When I thought about cov­er­ing these two new (and related) music doc­u­ment­ar­ies, I assumed I would be fea­tur­ing the Springsteen and that the Van Zandt was going to be a bit more of a sideshow.

Then I watched them both back to back last night and I real­ised my mis­take. Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple (the name comes from his band the Disciples of Soul rather than any spir­itu­al inclin­a­tions) is a heavy­weight film about one of the most inter­est­ing people in the music busi­ness – someone whose influ­ence has been far great­er than his pro­file. He also seems like one of the nicest people in the world.

That’s not to say that the new Springsteen (Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band) isn’t good, but it dishes out its insights spar­ingly and feels like one for the fans – at least those fans that don’t already know this story in fine detail already.

Van Zandt and Springsteen go way back. They were in dif­fer­ent teen­age bands often on the same bills but while Bruce was put­ting togeth­er the early ver­sions of the E Street Band, Steve joined a road crew (lit­er­ally fix­ing roads not roady­ing for bands) and then headed off on an oldies tour with the Dovells where he paid his dues and learnt some show­man­ship from greats like Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In the film he talks about how angry those guys were that the British Invasion had effect­ively put them out to pas­ture when they should have been at the peak of their powers. And that there wouldn’t have even been a British Invasion if it hadn’t been for those pioneers.

Anyway, Van Zandt returned to New Jersey and hooked up again with Springsteen who was strug­gling to put the fin­ish­ing touches to Born to Run. Van Zandt com­pletely rearranged “10^th Avenue Freeze-Out” and one of the great part­ner­ships in rock and roll was (re)born. (In Road Diary, Van Zandt jokes that Springsteen recently offi­cially made him music dir­ect­or for the tour “about 40 years too late!”)

I shouldn’t go into any more detail here because the film is a packed two and a half hours and you should just find a way to see it, but I do want to touch on the extraordin­ary achieve­ment that was the Sun City pro­ject. Van Zandt had wanted to write some­thing about the par­al­lels between apartheid South Africa and Native Americans but the suc­cess of Live Aid and We Are the World promp­ted him and hip hop pro­du­cer Arthur Baker to think even bigger.

Artists United Against Apartheid made good use of the white super­stars of the time (Springsteen, Bono, etc.) but also pri­or­it­ised the par­ti­cip­a­tion of black artists like Run-DMC, Gil Scott-Heron and Miles Davis. I bought that album in 1985 and must still have it around here somewhere.

Watching the videos (shot by Jonathan Demme) for Sun City and think­ing about the star-studded Amnesty International tours in the 80s, I found myself won­der­ing wheth­er today’s pop stars play­ing two songs at a polit­ic­al rally or send­ing a single mes­sage to their fans on social media is really doing enough in these tough times. Van Zandt’s work helped free Nelson Mandela. What are Taylor Swift’s plans for ongo­ing res­ist­ance to the incom­ing gov­ern­ment, I wonder.

There are plenty of fun stor­ies – choos­ing Little Richard as his mar­riage cel­eb­rant is a good one – and, if you are at all inter­ested in the music of the era, you’ll enjoy spend­ing time in Van Zandt’s company.

As I men­tioned before, he also fea­tures in Thom Zimny’s film about the E Street Band’s first tour in six years, Road Diary. We all know that Springsteen nev­er misses an oppor­tun­ity to tell you stuff – the Springsteen on Broadway show one Netflix is well worth a look – but he restricts him­self to a few voi­ceovers and lets the band speak for them­selves for a change.

They’re all amazed that they’ve been on this ride togeth­er for so long and there’s plenty of oppor­tun­ity taken to remem­ber the fallen ones – Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici – as well as intro­duce us to some of the happy new members.

As we dis­covered in the film of the mak­ing of Springsteen’s last album, Letter to You, mor­tal­ity is much on the Boss’s mind these days and the film points out how he struc­tures the set­l­ist for the 2023 tour in order to make some points on that sub­ject, avoid­ing the usu­al impro­vis­at­ory pro­gram­ming or audi­ence requests that have been a fea­ture of past tours.

Where to watch Steve Van Zandt: Disciple

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia, Canada, India: Not cur­rently available

Ireland & UK: Streaming on NowTV

USA: Streaming on Max

Where to watch Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

Worldwide (except USA): Streaming on Disney+

USA: Streaming on Hulu and Disney+