Celebrating the Garage Spirit of Rock

Steven Van Zandt remembers buying the record that changed his life. “It would have to be the classic ‘Louie Louie,’” he said. “That’s where it all started.”

It all is Van Zandt’s singular career, most prominently as Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band guitarist-sidekick in the 1970s and ‘80s and again in the last two years with the band’s reunion, plus his role as writer and producer with his own Disciples of Soul, Southside Johnny and the anti-apartheid landmark “Sun City” project. Van Zandt has also achieved visibility in a different setting, playing the scowling mobster Silvio Dante in HBO’s “The Sopranos.”

Still, he’s also referring to a whole movement of American rock music that can be traced to the inspiration of the Kingsmen’s 1963 three-chord tour de force, which--with its mumbled vocals, fumbled notes and fuzzy guitars--sent Van Zandt and a generation of musicians to their garages to try to do it themselves. It’s a music and spirit that Van Zandt will be celebrating with a new syndicated radio show, “Little Steven’s Underground Garage.” The weekly two-hour program premieres this weekend, airing in Los Angeles on KLSX-FM (97.1) on Saturdays at 10 p.m.

“It’s one of those songs that before that time would have just been a local, crazy hit and then quietly die,” Van Zandt said. “But when those things break through, they have a profound effect on the national psyche: ‘Whoa! Anybody can do this?’”

Van Zandt took the initial inspiration to heart, starting his own first garage band (called the Source) in 1966 at age 16 in his working-class suburban New Jersey neighborhood. He was hardly alone. Kids around the country grabbed electric guitars and repaired to their respective garages, bashing out their own roughhewn echoes of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds and other British rockers--themselves influenced by American blues, rock and soul. And while Van Zandt’s teen band never had much impact outside its garage, others actually had hits.

After the Kingsmen emerged from the Pacific Northwest, garage rock reverberated from Boston (the Standells’ “Dirty Water”) to Chicago (the Shadows of Knight’s version of Van Morrison and Them’s “Gloria”) to Texas (the 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me”) to San Jose (Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction”).

“I use the [mid-’60s] British Invasion as the heart and soul of garage music,” he said of the show’s philosophy. “Everything before led to that invasion, and everything since came from it.”

Van Zandt is not the first to push a revival of this music. As early as 1973, Lenny Kaye, a rock critic and later guitarist for Patti Smith, compiled an anthology of the music titled “Nuggets,” which with its raucous spirit and do-it-yourself ethic proved a touchstone collection for the nascent punk of the Ramones and others. It continued in the ‘80s with such scenes as L.A.’s Paisley Underground led by bands including the Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade and the Bangles, and again to some extent with the ‘90s grunge of Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

In 1998, Rhino Records issued a four-CD “Nuggets” collection going deeper into the genre’s treasure chest--followed last year with four-CD “Nuggets II,” exploring the ‘60s phenomenon outside the U.S.

For the last year, Van Zandt has been one of the organizers of a weekly “Cave Stomp” night at a New York club, showcasing mostly new acts inspired by the original garage rockers. And around the world, new bands in that mode are cropping up--notably the White Stripes from Detroit, the Strokes from New York and the Hives from Sweden.

All of this will figure in the programming of the show. “It’s going to be a whole wide range of garage--as I define it,” said Van Zandt. “It’s completely subjective, but I’ll start with the British Invasion, go into the classic ‘Nuggets’ stuff of the later ‘60s. I’ll go into the punk stuff with Iggy Pop, and later the Ramones and the ‘70s stuff, then the first real wave of later garage started by [Bomp Records label owner] Greg Shaw, the ‘80s stuff of bands like the Vipers and Chesterfield Kings. It will be quite a range from the almost 40 years of garage.”

The garage spirit is also exemplified by the way Van Zandt approached the business side of the venture, handling most of the arrangements himself rather than farming the show out to a syndication firm to find stations around the country to carry it. For sponsorship, he lined up the Hard Rock Cafe chain, which had already been involved in the “Cave Stomp” shows, and gave the company a “Hard Rock presents” credit in the show’s title. Pepsi and Unilever also signed on as national sponsors.

“I’m completely hands-on,” he said. “It’s a do-it-yourself kind of thing, and we take it literally. It was such a longshot when we started that everyone was trying to be positive and supportive, but you could tell they thought, ‘No way.’ But the time has come for this, and I’m not taking no for an answer. I said, ‘We’ll find 25 or 35 cool stations that will put this on,’ and we’re finding them.”

In a time marked by prepackaged pop acts, Van Zandt believes that the underground resurgence of garage rock can again affect the national musical psyche with the kind of exposure he hopes to give it. Although he said the trend remains “very much under the radar,” it has already had a profound effect on him, spurring his return to music with his own “Born Again Savage” album released two years ago and his reteaming with Springsteen the same year after leaving the E Street Band in 1984.

“It really got me back into music,” he said. “Which I thought was impossible.”