"That Road Is All Mine"

By JAY COCKS

It depends on what you call him. That's what tells Steven Van Zandt how long you've been a fan.

Admittedly, the flurry of nicknames, second names and stage names can get a bit confusing, especially since Van Zandt is the kind of rock star people just enjoy shouting out to. Walking around Times Square ("my office"), near his home base in Manhattan, he cuts a striking figure in fringed leather, high boots and a trademark bandanna wrapped around his head, an urban swashbuckler whose frigate just got towed away for double parking. "Hey, Miami!" yell a | couple of citizens cruising by in a Chevy convertible. He waves and shouts back as the car runs a light at Broadway. "Miami," Van Zandt sighs. "That means they still know me from Bruce."

That also means they have not heard his new album yet. But after May 15, when Freedom -- No Compromise is released by Manhattan Records, any confusion will be banished. Until then, some lingering uncertainty is understandable. Frustrating, maybe, but understandable.

Van Zandt, after all, did spend a formative and formidable nine years as Miami Steve, the driving force and antic soul man of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. His guitar was the band's bedrock, and his harmonies with Springsteen were communions of friendship with the audience and with Bruce. He was at Springsteen's side during the first days of major glory in the mid-' 70s, when stardom broke so heavily, and he was there for the years of uncertainty and renewed triumph that followed. Van Zandt did some outside record producing during that time too, calling himself Sugar Miami Steve on one of his albums for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. By the time he officially left Springsteen in 1984, he had taken another name, Little Steven, and was trying to stand in his own light. Bruce, however, cast a heavy shadow.

Van Zandt had helped produce three of Springsteen's hottest-selling albums. Tunes he wrote for the Jukes and Gary "U.S." Bonds, like Daddy's Come Home, showed high-end gifts for songwriting, even though he insists, "I hate all ballads, including my own." Still, it was impossible to flourish on his own and hang in with the gang. "I felt," he says, "a more urgent necessity pulling me. Like, 'Hey, it's time to find out if you got something else to contribute here on this planet.' " Men Without Women, his first Little Steven album, released in 1982, was a New York song cycle about hard life on the city streets. The songs were fervent, and the Disciples of Soul blasted behind Van Zandt like a garage band concertizing on top of a pizza oven. Voice of America, released in 1984, was a startling change-up, an album full of impassioned and informed political songs. Neither record sold well, though. It took Sun City for Van Zandt to get a little commercial territory he could call his own.

Sun City was not only the boldest political anthem of the '80s, it was also the funkiest. Besides writing the song, Van Zandt was the main man behind the album, the video and the documentary about Sun City, which brought hard rock together with hard facts about South African politics. Freedom -- No Compromise continues that same tough tradition of humanist ideology and high steppin'. "The trickiest part is not to be rhetorical," Van Zandt says, "but to make the songs into an emotional, human communication."

The new album features another wizard song about South Africa, Pretoria, with a lovely chorus in Zulu that translates, "Life is for living -- life is ours/ We will not wait -- we dance forward." Like this song, Freedom -- No Compromise has a more spacious sound. "I produced the album the way I would produce somebody else," Van Zandt says. "I stepped away from that strictly live garage thing I had done most of my life." Van Zandt's vocals on the album are more limber, his lyrics a little less insistent. With tunes like Can't You Feel the Fire? and Native American (on which he swaps vocals with a visiting guest star named Springsteen), Van Zandt has made a political record that does not stint on passion, does not let up on the conscience and does not speechify, either. It bears down hard as it boogies, but it does not weigh heavy.

"I wasn't active in the '60s," Little Steven, 36, says now. "I was just trying to make a living, fighting to get the rent paid. I was fighting my own war, because rock 'n' roll was not a take-it-for-granted business. It was a real long shot making ends meet." Born in Boston and raised on the New Jersey Shore, Van Zandt gigged in a series of bar bands with names like Steel Mill, which is where he first played with Springsteen. The music was lively, but the living was dodgy. After some gentle advice from his stepfather, Van Zandt took a highway-construction job. It was bruising all-weather work, but the "pay was phenomenal! Six dollars an hour! We repaved the Jersey Turnpike and practically built Route 287. That road is all mine."

The job lasted until a weekend football buddy announced he was putting a band together to tour the oldies circuit. Van Zandt enlisted immediately as "sound man, light man, truck driver and piano player." That band became the wellspring of the Asbury Jukes, which formed, with Van Zandt on guitar, in 1975. Later that year he hooked up with Springsteen for a hot-rod ride to rock Olympus and a decade's worth of free-form band fellowship that was, in his words, a "sort of family foundation."

Van Zandt is still strong on family ties. He and his wife Maureen frequently drive down from Manhattan to check out the folks at the Jersey Shore, and the fervor of his music comes not just from conscience, but also out of an emotional quest for a kind of familial stability within the turbulence of world politics. Freedom -- No Compromise takes a hard stand. And one thing, anyway, is sure to follow. Pretty soon everyone will call Little Steven by his rightful name -- guys in Chevy convertibles too.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York