Rock’n’roll needs its sidemen, collaborators and co-writers. It needs its archivists and advocates, its arrangers and backing singers. There are endless positions other than megastar, and Steven Van Zandt has fulfilled most of them. Disciple, a sprawling biography of one of rock’s most likable veterans, is a document of several lives, all well lived by the same man.
Van Zandt was part of the New Jersey music scene of the early 1970s, which had its own signature sound: classic rock’n’roll beefed up with the punchy horns of Atlantic and Stax. Bruce Springsteen already had a record deal, but he kept coming back to play in Asbury Park’s sweat-soaked clubs. One day, when he felt one of the songs on his next album might need a bit of home-town grit, he called his old pal Steve. Van Zandt breezed into the studio, agreed that the track sucked, and 20 minutes later Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out had been revitalised, smothered in that loose Jersey brass. It was one of the highlights of Born to Run, Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough. After then, Van Zandt became a key member of Bruce’s backing group, the E Street Band.
