Dave Alvin enjoys the “magic” of playing guitar with his trusty 1964 Fender Stratocaster. Much of that wear was put on by Alvin, with the help of flying beer bottles. When the fretboard was nearly worn out, Alvin’s friend Drac Conley built him the replica that he takes on tour today.
Is Dave Alvin a guitarist or a medium? Listening to him play live, it’s hard to decide. Sure, there’s a custom copy of his beloved ’64 Strat in his hands, pumping loud and salty through an ’80s, Paul Rivera-made Fender Concert. But, rather than simply playing, he seems to be channeling every foundational 6-stringer from the 1940s through the 1960s.
As Alvin revisits songs from his catalog with the Blasters, or his two recent albums with his brother, Phil, or from his brief stint with the band X, or his own deep discography of nearly 20 albums, ghosts are audible in his aggressive thumbpicking. Amidst the cascading melodies, pointed accents, and transcendent dialog of his solos are flashes of everyone from Carl Hogan to Pete Cosey. Alvin explains it this way: “My playing is a combination of Sun Records, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, Chess Records, T-Bone Walker, and that kid with his first guitar in the garage. I try to approach it like that, because, to me, guitar is a magical thing.”
“My earliest memories are of sitting in my Mom’s Studebaker and spinning the dial. Southern California was wide open, musically.”
There’s more to Alvin’s magic than his ability to draw on history or haints to shape a style that shakes every centigram of meaning from each note. He’s also a profoundly good songwriter, in the North American tradition that extends from Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Jack Elliott to the original cowboy poets clustered around their campfires with guitars. Alvin’s songs evoke the open expanse of the old frontier and its modern landscape, as well as the heat and diesel of factory towns and the working-class people who occupy them. Just scrape the surface of the 67-year-old’s catalog—his recent releases, the compilation From an Old Guitar: Rare and Unreleased Tracks and the reissue Eleven Eleven, are a good place to start—and the American spirit resonates through what you’ll find. Over the decades he has written about the deaths of Hank Williams (the Blasters’ “Long White Cadillac”) and Johnny Ace (“Johnny Ace Is Dead”), the pain of love’s irrevocable loss (“Harlan County Line”), the wilds of the gold rush (“King of California”), the gilded age of labor unions (“Gary Indiana 1959”), life on the margins (“Thirty Dollar Room”), and the quiet desperation of hearts fading cold, in X’s most poignant song, “4th of July.”
Dave Alvin - Murrietta's Head
“The first songs that struck me when I was a kid were all stories,” Alvin explains. “‘El Paso’ by Marty Robbins, a lot of the Coasters’ records, Elvis, of course, and Carl Perkins’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ There was a plethora of story songs in the ’50s, in a variety of genres. Whether it’s ‘Saginaw, Michigan’ by Lefty Frizzell or ‘No Particular Place to Go’ or ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ by Chuck Berry. What attracted me to story songs is you can say a lot of stuff, without hitting people over the head. You don’t have to go, ‘I’m against this’ or ‘I’m for this,’ because then you become a one-dimensional songwriter. In a story, you kind of slip it into people subconsciously. It’s a little sneaky, but, since Aesop’s Fables, telling stories makes sense of the world. If you go back and listen to all the great folk songs—I mean real folk songs, like ‘Black Jack David’ and ‘Shenandoah’ … themes that have been around for centuries—they’re telling stories.”
Alvin ascribes his songwriting prowess to “trial and error. When I first started writing songs, I had to—unlike the average singer-songwriter—sell them to the Blasters, and they were very strict, because for them doing original material, like ‘Marie Marie’ and ‘Border Radio,’ was outside of their comfort zone. Bringing in original work was scary. My brother, Phil, and I would have big arguments over chord progressions. We had a couple of fisticuffs over minor chords, and so I’m reticent to this day about bringing in new songs. I still expect the Blasters’ reaction.”
The Alvin brothers grew up in Downey, California, just south of Los Angeles. “Nineteen-fifties Downey was different than ’60s Downey,” Alvin relates. “In the ’50s, before the freeways and all had taken over everything, it was semi-rural. There were a lot of orange groves and people were riding horses. There were areas around the San Diego River that were literally wild. And there was AM radio, which, of course, continued into the ’60s. My earliest memories are of sitting in my Mom’s Studebaker and spinning the dial. Southern California was wide open, musically. Whether it was on the radio, or on TV, or in the local restaurants, or lounges, or bars, you could hear everything from Western swing to rhythm and blues to rock ’n’ roll. There was a lot of surf music, and I don’t mean the Beach Boys variety. I mean the Fender Jaguar, a Fender Strat, a Fender Mustang, a Fender P bass, and a drummer kind of surf music—no vocals. I have really pleasant memories of waking up on Saturday mornings and hearing two or three surf bands in the neighborhood, all rehearsing in their garages.”
A close-up view of Alvin’s ’64 Strat. Although the guitar has a vibrato bridge, Alvin, who plays hard, prefers to eschew it onstage.
Photo by Chip Duden Photography
But Dave and Phil also pursued another important path to musical enlightenment. “The story goes that if you were Black in Mississippi, you went north, and if you were Black in Louisiana or Texas, you went west,” Alvin explains, “because there were so many aerospace jobs and a slightly ... slightly … less segregated vibe out here. My brother Phil and I were little record collectors, collecting 78s and 45s, so we loved blues records, and we figured out that not only were some of these people still alive, but they were playing a mile away. If you didn’t act like an idiot, you could maybe sneak into a bar and see ’em, and that’s what we started doing.”
“I was learning; it was rudimentary, but it was good stuff: Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson. Put those together and it worked.”
With a neighborhood full of bands and a head full of blues, R&B, and primal rock, the Alvins formed a series of groups. Or, at least initially, Phil, who is two years older than Dave, did. Most of these bands played primarily in the garage, and eventually Dave was allowed to join on sax and flute—although he was also coming up on guitar. One night, he got his lucky break. Phil’s band was booked to play a wedding and needed another guitarist. Dave was called in. “I had an early evening gig, playing at a mental hospital in Long Beach with my own little noisy band,” he recounts. “After we were done, I packed up the Twin and the Les Paul knockoff I had borrowed, and I drove to this wedding reception, and the people loved it. Bill Bateman was playing drums, and that was the first gig of what became the Blasters.”
Inspired by his blues heroes, Alvin uses a thumbpick much like most plectrum-employing guitarists tend to use a flatpick. It’s one of the reasons for his pointed attack and ultra-responsive tone.
Photo by Chip Duden Photography
The Blasters were a sweat-soaked speedball who roared onto the L.A. punk turf in ’79 alongside X, the Germs, Black Flag, Fear, the Circle Jerks, and pretty much every other outfit in Penelope Spheeris’ documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. With their dirty roots in gut-bucket American music, perhaps they were most akin to the Delta-blues-inspired Gun Club, who were also on the scene. But they had muscle and crunch and focus that made them unique. Roughly a year into their tenure, after befriending blues legends like Big Joe Turner, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and T-Bone Walker, they added one to their band: tenor saxist Lee Allen, who was a key figure in the development of rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s as part of New Orleans’ studio community.
With Phil as vocalist and Dave as songwriter and spark plug, the Blasters played hard and constantly. “What happened onstage was, my brother and I had developed two totally different types of guitar playing,” says Alvin. “His was based on fingerpicking but also he wasn’t a single-string guy. He could do it, but it wasn’t his deal, where it was mine. Because I was learning; it was rudimentary, but it was good stuff: Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson. Put those together and it worked. Even my brother had to admit it. He was like, ‘We got something here.’ Our friend, the late blues harmonica player James Harman, knew that I needed a guitar if we were gonna have this band. In a Santa Ana, California, pawnshop, he bought a ’64 Fender Mustang for me, for, like, $70. That would have been around March of ’79.”
When the Blasters made their first album, 1980’s American Music, “James had a white ’61 Strat that he swore belonged to Magic Sam, so that’s what I played on that record. And then on the first album we did for Slash Records, the one with the sweaty face on it [1981’s The Blasters], James brought me a ’56 Les Paul goldtop. The Mustang didn’t really appear on records until the second Slash album, Non Fiction.” And for ’85’s Hard Line, Alvin played a ’51 Broadcaster owned by the band’s guitar tech, who went by Tornado. “I was a fry cook,” Alvin notes. “I didn’t have money for fancy guitars and amps, and, if I did, I wouldn’t have known what to buy.”
The classic ’80s Blasters lineup, from left to right: drummer Bill Bateman, pianist Gene Taylor, Phil Alvin, bassist John Bazz, Dave Alvin with his ’64 Strat, and the legendary saxist Lee Allen.
Photo courtesy of Dave Alvin
That Mustang, currently on display at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, became a stage favorite. “It was light and very good at deflecting beer bottles,” Alvin says. “If you look closely at that guitar, you’ll see where there is a slash across the upper cutaway. That is from a beer bottle at the Cuckoo's Nest [in Costa Mesa], when we were opening for the Cramps in, like, January/February 1980. Blammo! And if you look closely at the paint job, you’ll see glass embedded all over that guitar, from me holding it up going, ‘Not gonna get this guy, pal.’”
“I didn’t have money for fancy guitars and amps, and, if I did, I wouldn’t have known what to buy.”
Seeking a less combative home for his songs, Alvin left the Blasters in 1986—although he’s played reunion shows and tours with the band since, and recorded two duo albums with his brother. The next few years were busy as he shifted toward building his own outfit. He replaced guitarist Billy Zoom in X, and contributed “4th of July” to X’s 1987 album, See How We Are. Alvin had started his musical association with John Doe and Exene Cervenka from X in 1985, when he joined them in folkie spinoff the Knitters for the album Poor Little Critter on the Road, and he pitched in again for the follow-up, The Modern Sounds of the Knitters, 20 years later. In ’87, he also released his first solo album, Romeo’s Escape, which added new compositions to reprised versions of the Blasters’ “Jubilee Train,” “Long White Cadillac” (which Dwight Yoakam also cut), and “Border Radio,” and allowed Alvin to begin his journey as a vocalist.
Thirty-six years and 14 studio albums later, he has a singing voice like polished oak, with the warm tone and wise phrasing of a seasoned barroom confidant, intent on getting every nuance of his stories across. He also has a Grammy, for his 2000 album Public Domain: Songs from the Wild Land, and two more nominations, and starting in 1995 began publishing his writings: two collections of poems and lyrics, and last year’s New Highways: Selected Lyrics, Poems, Prose, Essays, Eulogies, and Blues, which covers all those categories as well as poignant autobiographical tales.
Dave Alvin’s Gear
The Blasters were known for their sweat-soaked, high-energy performances. Here, Alvin’s playing through a Fender Super Reverb, before his switch to a Rivera-built Concert.
Photo courtesy of Dave Alvin
Guitars
- 1964 Fender Stratocaster (studio only)
- Replica of his ’64 Strat built by Drac Conley (live)
Amps
- Rivera-built Fender Concert (live)
- Fender Vibroverb reissue (recording)
Effects
- TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb
- Boss BD-2 Blues Driver (modded)
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario EHR350s (.012–.052)
- Thumbpick
For many of those years, Alvin’s 6-string companion was an ivory 1964 Stratocaster he’d purchased in the early ’80s. “I needed a great all-around guitar,” he says. “It took me a while to get over my gun-shyness about taking it out on tour and all that. But once I got used to it, our relationship together deepened. I started figuring out what it was capable of doing, and what I was capable of doing. But it eventually got to where the rosewood on the fretboard was just a veneer, so one of my dear friends, Drac Conley, built me an exact copy. Because I knew my Strat had to be retired from the road. I hate to say it’s even better, but it’s capable of more stuff.”
These days, Alvin’s clean tone, with just the right amount of crunchy breakup and crisp, punchy attack, is a signature committed roots music fans immediately recognize. That attack is mostly the result of his furious thumbpicking. “When I was a kid going to see certain players at the Ash Grove [a now-gone L.A. club that focused on songwriters], when I was trying to figure out this magical thing called guitar playing, I would see Reverend Gary Davis—one night on a double bill with Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, and they were both playing blues-based music from an entirely different direction, and they were both thumbpick players. And then Brownie McGhee would use a thumbpick. I’d see people like that and wonder ‘what is that?’
“My brother played with no picks, but my thumbs were too sensitive to pull that off. Then, I had this other problem: I was clumsy with a flatpick. I can hold a flatpick and strum, but to do anything else? So, when I really started trying to be a serious guitar player, I gave up on flatpicks,—‘Get rid of this shit’—and the thumbpick came absolutely naturally to me. And so, what I’ve done for years is, I use a thumbpick and on my index finger I have an acrylic nail. Not one of the press-on ones. It’s one I’ve built up with whatever vile stuff they use. And because of the strength of the index fingernail, I could really make use of what the guitar can do. If I really want to play an aggressive solo, I will hold the flat side of the thumbpick with my index finger, as if it’s a flatpick, and bend the notes doing that, so it gets extra push. If it’s a quieter song, I’ll use the index finger only to play single-string solos. Or I will play chords with only the index finger or use the skin of the middle finger to strum if I’m doing a tender ballad.”
The Blasters back up the great blues shouter Big Joe Turner in 1983 at Club Lingerie, a Sunset Strip venue that was an essential part of the L.A. punk and alternative rock scene. The room closed in 1995.
Photo courtesy of Dave Alvin
His only pedals are a TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb and a Boss BD-2 Blues Driver. “Once I start singing, I don’t want to have to worry about what my feet are doing,” he says. “I can take my pinky and slide up the guitar volume, or move the pickup selector to get different tones, but when I’m on stage it’s so exciting that I can’t bother with pedals.”
His other ace is volume. Alvin opens up his amp so its full voice can be heard, and he can achieve sustain, feedback, ringing overtones, and distortion organically. “In one of my road cases, there’s a sign that I made, apologizing for the volume and the damage, but if you’re gonna sit there,” he says, chuckling, “you’re asking for it.”
In 2020, Alvin opened up another new vista, by revisiting a different kind of old music: psychedelia. Working as the Third Mind, Alvin and cohorts Victor Krummenacher, Michael Jerome, and David Immerglück tore a page from the paisley textbook and covered songs by the Butterfield Blues Band (“East-West”), Alice Coltrane (“Journey in Satchindananda”), the 13th Floor Elevators (“Reverberation”), and other twisted troopers. It’s elegant and visceral, and was likely a surprise to many of Alvin’s longtime fans, but Hendrix is also part of his DNA, even if he found it unapproachable until now.
“In one of my road cases, there’s a sign that I made, apologizing for the volume and the damage, but if you’re gonna sit there, you’re asking for it.”
“I’m a barroom guitar basher, but I thought, ‘Let's go down the rabbit hole,’” Alvin says. “When I was around 12, I saw Jimi Hendrix twice, and about a year and a half later, I saw Big Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker with the Johnny Otis Orchestra, and those were the nights! With The Third Mind, I’m less Jimi imitator than using techniques he and Michael Bloomfield used, like manipulating the pickup selector and leaning into the volume.”
That same year, he was almost permanently sidelined by colorectal cancer. He’d spent nearly 12 months on the road and was feeling exhausted. “I was thinking, ‘Maybe I just can’t do this anymore,’” until his diagnosis cleared up the mystery. The cancer had migrated to his liver as well.
Dave Alvin & The Guilty Ones "Harlan County Line"
Dave Alvin leads his band through “Harlan County Line,” the opening track on his Eleven Eleven album—rife with his deft thumbpicking and snappy, biting, clear tone.
“It was extremely difficult,” Alvin allows. “The chemotherapy caused this terrible neuropathy in my feet that still hasn’t gotten better, and they kept saying ‘Well, it’ll take about another year,’ but my hands.… I could not play guitar for about seven months. It was too painful. Touching the guitar was razor blades because my hands were swollen. I won’t say that I had to completely relearn how to play guitar, but I honestly had to teach myself how to play guitar again. The synapses weren’t firing correctly for a long time—between the fingertips and the brain. So, it meant playing a lot of scales, which I still do now. And the scales really helped the neuropathy in my hands, which are no longer swollen. I’m able to play shows. I’m about 90 percent where I was before the chemotherapy.
“It’s not like I’ve ever said, even when I wasn’t sick, ‘I don’t need the practice, I’m pretty good, I can outplay that guy,’” he continues. “I’ve had my ass handed to me by so many guitar players over the years that I’m still just.… Well, by the time I kick the bucket, I would like to say I don’t suck. I wanna be the best as I can be on guitar.
“The one thing I will say is that I’m very lucky, in that I’ve had fans that have stuck with me through a lot of changes. But all of my changes have been organic. I’ve stuck to my guns, taking, basically, the same idea we had when we started the Blasters to the extreme: 'Let’s see how long we can do this and not work a day job.'”
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Stevie Van Zandt with “Number One,” the ’80s reissue Stratocaster—with custom paisley pickguard from luthier Dave Petillo—that he’s been playing for the last quarter century or so.
There’s a life-size cameo of a go-go dancer in banana yellow; she’s frozen in mid hip shimmy. One wall displays rock posters and B-movie key art, anchored by a 3D rendering of Cream’s Disraeli Gearsalbum cover that swishes and undulates as you walk past it. Van Zandt’s shelves are stuffed with countless DVDs, from Louis Prima to the J. Geils Band performing on the German TV concert seriesRockpalast. There are three copies ofIggy and the Stooges: Live in Detroit. Videos of the great ’60s-music TV showcases, from Hullabaloo to Dean Martin’s The Hollywood Palace, sit here. Hundreds of books about rock ’n’ roll, from Greil Marcus’s entire output to Nicholas Schaffner’s seminal tome, The Beatles Forever, form a library in the next room.
But I haven’t seen this yet because the elevator is dead, and I am in it. Our trap is tiny, about 5' by 5'. A dolly filled with television production equipment is beside me. There’s a production assistant whom I’ve never met until this morning and another person who’s brand new to me, too, Geoff Sanoff. It turns out that he’s Van Zandt’s engineer—the guy who runs this studio. And as I’ll discover shortly, he’s also one of the several sentinels who watch over Stevie Van Zandt’s guitars.
There’s nothing to do now but wait for the NYFD, so Sanoff and I get acquainted. We discover we’re both from D.C. and know some of the same people in Washington’s music scene. We talk about gear. We talk about this television project. I’m here today assisting an old pal, director Erik Nelson, best known for producing Werner Herzog’s most popular documentaries, like Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Van Zandt has agreed to participate in a television pilot about the British Invasion. After about half an hour, the elevator doors suddenly slide open, and we’re rescued, standing face-to-face with three New York City firefighters.
As our camera team sets up the gear, Sanoff beckons me to a closet off the studio’s control room. I get the sense I am about to get a consolation prize for standing trapped in an elevator for the last 30 minutes. He pulls a guitar case off the shelf—it’s stenciled in paint with the words “Little Steven” on its top—snaps open the latches, and instantly I am face to face with Van Zandt’s well-worn 1957 Stratocaster. Sanoff hands it to me, and I’m suddenly holding what may as well be the thunderbolt of Zeus for an E Street Band fan. My jaw drops when he lets me plug it in so he can get some levels on his board, and the clean, snappy quack of the nearly 70-year-old pickups fills the studio. For decades, Springsteen nuts have enjoyed a legendary 1978 filmed performance of “Rosalita” from Phoenix, Arizona, that now lives on YouTube. This is the Stratocaster Van Zandt had slung over his shoulder that night. It’s the same guitar he wields in the famous No Nukes concert film shot at Madison Square Garden a year later, in 1979. My mind races. The British Invasion is all well and essential. But now I’m thinking about Van Zandt’s relationship with his guitars.
Stevie Van Zandt's Gear
Van Zandt’s guitar concierge Andy Babiuk helped him plunge deeper down the Rickenbacker rabbit hole. Currently, Van Zandt has six Rickenbackers backstage: two 6-strings and four 12-strings.
Guitars
- 1957 Fender Stratocaster (studio only)
- ’80s Fender ’57 Stratocaster reissue “Number One”
- Gretsch Tennessean
- 1955 Gibson Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” (studio only)
- Rickenbacker Fab Gear 2024 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Model (candy apple green)
- Rickenbacker Fab Gear 2023 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Model (snowglo)
- Rickenbacker 2018 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Fab Gear (jetglo)
- Two Rickenbacker 1993Plus 12-strings (candy apple purple and SVZ blue)
- Rickenbacker 360/12C63 12-string (fireglo)
- Vox Teardrop (owned by Andy Babiuk)
Amps
- Two Vox AC30s
- Two Vox 2x12 cabinets
Effects
- Boss Space Echo
- Boss Tremolo
- Boss Rotary Ensemble
- Durham Electronics Sex Drive
- Durham Electronics Mucho Busto
- Durham Electronics Zia Drive
- Electro-Harmonix Satisfaction
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- Voodoo Labs Ground Control Pro switcher
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario (.095–.44)
- D’Andrea Heavy
Van Zandt has reached a stage of reflection in his career. Besides the Grammy-nominated HBO film, Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple, which came out in 2024, he recently wrote and published his autobiography, Unrequited Infatuations (2021), a rollicking read in which he pulls no punches and makes clear he still strives to do meaningful things in music and life.
His laurels would weigh him down if they were actually wrapped around his neck. In the E Street Band, Van Zandt has participated in arguably the most incredible live group in rock ’n’ roll history. And don’t forget Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes or Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. He created both the Underground Garage and Outlaw Country radio channels on Sirius/XM. He started a music curriculum program called TeachRock that provides no-cost resources and other programs to schools across the country. Then there’s the politics. Via his 1985 record, Sun City, Van Zandt is credited with blasting many of the load-bearing bricks that brought the walls of South African apartheid tumbling into dust. He also acted in arguably the greatest television drama in American history, with his turn as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos.
Puzzlingly, Van Zandt’s autobiography lacks any detail on his relationship with the electric guitar. And Sanoff warns me that Van Zandt is “not a gearhead.” Instead he has an organization in place to keep his guitar life spinning like plates on the end of pointed sticks. Besides Sanoff, there are three others: Ben Newberry has been Van Zandt’s guitar tech since the beginning of 1982. Andy Babiuk, owner of Rochester, New York, guitar shop Fab Gear and author of essential collector reference books Beatles Gear and Rolling Stones Gear (the latter co-authored by Greg Prevost) functions as Van Zandt’s guitar concierge. Lastly, luthier Dave Petillo, based in Asbury Park, New Jersey, oversees all the maintenance and customization on Van Zandt’s axes.
“I took one lesson, and they start to teach you the notes. I don’t care about the notes.” —Stevie Van Zandt
I crawl onto Zoom with Van Zandt for a marathon session and come away from our 90 minutes with the sense that he is a man of dichotomies. Sure, he’s a guitar slinger, but he considers his biggest strengths to be as an arranger, producer, and songwriter. “I don’t feel that being a guitar player is my identity,” he tells me. “For 40 years, ever since I made my first solo record, I just have not felt that I express myself as a guitar player. I still enjoy it when I do it; I’m not ambivalent. When I play a solo, I am in all the way, and I play a solo like I would like to hear if I were in the audience. But the guitar part is really part of the song’s arrangement. And a great solo is a composed solo. Great solos are ones you can sing, like Jimi Hendrix’s solo in ‘All Along the Watchtower.’”
In his autobiography, Van Zandt mentions that his first guitar was an acoustic belonging to his grandfather. “I took one lesson, and they start to teach you the notes. I don’t care about the notes,” Van Zandt tells me. “The teacher said I had natural ability. I’m thinking, if I got natural ability, then what the fuck do I need you for? So I never went back. After that, I got my first electric, an Epiphone. It was about slowing down the records to figure out with my ear what they were doing. It was seeing live bands and standing in front of that guitar player and watching what they were doing. It was praying when a band went on TV that the cameraman would occasionally go to the right place and show what the guitar player was doing instead of putting the camera on the lead singer all the time. And I’m sure it was the same for everybody. There was no concept of rock ’n’ roll lessons. School of Rock wouldn’t exist for another 30 years. So, you had to go to school yourself.”
By the end of the 1960s, Van Zandt tells me he had made a conscious decision about what kind of player he wanted to be. “I realized that I really wasn’t that interested in becoming a virtuoso guitar player, per se. I was more interested in making sure I could play the guitar solo that would complement the song. I got more into the songs than the nature of musicianship.”
After the Beatles and the Stones broke the British Invasion wide open, bands like Cream and the Yardbirds most influenced him. “George Harrison would have that perfect 22-second guitar solo,” Van Zandt remembers. “Keith Richards. Dave Davies. Then, the harder stuff started coming. Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds. Eric Clapton with things like ‘White Room.’ But the songs stayed in a pop configuration, three minutes each or so. You’d have this cool guitar-based song with a 15-second, really amazing Jeff Beck solo in it. That’s what I liked. Later, the jam bands came, but I was not into that. My attention deficit disorder was not working for the longer solos,” he jokes. Watch a YouTube video of any recent E Street Band performance where Van Zandt solos, and the punch and impact of his approach and attack are apparent. At Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., last year, his solo on “Rosalita” was 13 powerful seconds.
Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen’s relationship goes back to their earliest days on the Jersey shore. “Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity,” recalls Van Zandt. “At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to Telecaster. At that point, I was ready to switch to Stratocaster.”
Photo by Pamela Springsteen
Van Zandt left his Epiphone behind for his first Fender. “I started to notice that the guitar superstars at the time were playing Telecasters. Mike Bloomfield. Jeff Beck. Even Eric Clapton played one for a while,” he tells me. “I went down to Jack’s Music Shop in Red Bank, New Jersey, because he had the first Telecaster in our area and couldn’t sell it; it was just sitting there. I bought it for 90 bucks.”
In those days, and around those parts, players only had one guitar. Van Zandt recalls, “Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity. At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to Telecaster. At that point, I was ready to switch to Stratocaster, because Jimi Hendrix had come in and Jeff Beck had switched to a Strat. They all kind of went from Telecaster to Les Pauls. And then some of them went on to the Stratocaster. For me, the Les Paul was just too out of reach. It was too expensive, and it was just too heavy. So I said, I’m going to switch to a Stratocaster. It felt a little bit more versatile.”
Van Zandt still employs Stratocasters, and besides the 1957 I strummed, he was seen with several throughout the ’80s and ’90s. But for the last 20 or 25 years, Van Zandt has mainly wielded a black Fender ’57 Strat reissue from the ’80s with a maple fretboard and a gray pearloid pickguard. He still uses that Strat—dubbed “Number One”—but the pickguard has been switched to one sporting a purple paisley pattern that was custom-made by Dave Petillo.
Petillo comes from New Jersey luthier royalty and followed in the footsteps of his late father, Phil Petillo. At a young age, the elder Petillo became an apprentice to legendary New York builder John D’Angelico. Later, he sold Bruce Springsteen the iconic Fender Esquire that’s seen on the Born to Run album cover and maintained and modified that guitar and all of Bruce’s other axes until he passed away in 2010. Phil worked out of a studio in the basement of their home, not far from Asbury Park. Artists dropped in, and Petillo has childhood memories of playing pick-up basketball games in his backyard with members of the E Street Band. (He also recalls showing his Lincoln Logs to Johnny Cash and once mistaking Jerry Garcia for Santa Claus.)
“I was more interested in making sure I could play the guitar solo that would complement the song. I got more into the songs than the nature of musicianship.” —Stevie Van Zandt
“I’ve known Stevie Van Zandt my whole life,” says Petillo. “My dad used to work on his 1957 Strat. That guitar today has updated tuners, a bone nut, new string trees, and a refret that was done by Dad long ago. I think one volume pot may have been changed. But it still has the original pickups.” Petillo is responsible for a lot of the aesthetic flair seen on Van Zandt’s instruments. He continues, “Stevie is so much fun to work with. I love incorporating colors into things, and Stevie gets that. When you talk to a traditional Telecaster or Strat player, and you say, ‘I want to do a tulip paisley pickguard in neon blue-green,’ they’re like, ‘Holy cow, that’s too much!’ But for Stevie, it’s just natural. So I always text him with pickguard designs, asking him, ‘Which one do you like?’ And he calls me a wild man; he says, ‘I don’t have that many Strats to put them on!’ But I’ll go to Ben Newberry and say, ‘Ben, I made these pickguards; let’s get them on the guitar. And I’ll go backstage, and we’ll put them on. I just love that relationship; Stevie is down for it.”
Petillo takes care of the electronics on Van Zandt’s guitars. Almost all of the Strats are modified with an internal Alembic Stratoblaster preamp circuit, which Van Zandt can physically toggle on and off using a switch housed just above the input jack. Van Zandt tells me, “That came because I got annoyed with the whole pedal thing. I’m a performer onstage, and I’m integrated with the audience and I like the freedom to move. And if I’m across the stage and all of a sudden Bruce nods to me to take a solo, or there’s a bit in the song that requires a little bit of distortion, it’s just easier to have that; sometimes, I’ll need that extra little boost for a part I’m throwing in, and it’s convenient.”
In recent times, Van Zandt has branched out from the Stratocaster, which has a lot to do with Andy Babiuk's influence. The two met 20 years ago, and Babiuk’s band, the Chesterfield Kings, is on Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool Records. “He’d call me up and ask me things like, ‘What’s Brian Jones using on this song?’” explains Babiuk. “When I’d ask him why, he’d tell me, ‘Because I want to have that guitar.’ It’s a common thing for me to get calls and texts from him like that. And there’s something many people overlook that Stevie doesn’t advertise: He’s a ripping guitar player. People think of him as playing chords and singing backup for Bruce, but the guy rips. And not just on guitar, on multiple instruments.”
Van Zandt tells me he wanted to bring more 12-string to the E Street Band this tour, “just to kind of differentiate the tone.” He explains, “Nils is doing his thing, and Bruce is doing his thing, and I wanted to do more 12-string.” He laughs, “I went full Paul Kantner!” Babiuk helped Van Zandt plunge deeper down the Rickenbacker rabbit hole. Currently, Van Zandt has six Rickenbackers backstage: two 6-strings and four 12-strings. Each 12-string has a modified nut made by Petillo from ancient woolly mammoth tusk, and the D, A, and low E strings are inverted with their octave.
Van Zandt explains this to me: “I find that the strings ring better when the high ones are on top. I’m not sure if that’s how Roger McGuinn did it, but it works for me. I’m also playing a wider neck.”
Babiuk tells me about a unique Rick in Van Zandt’s rack of axes: “I know the guys at Rickenbacker well, and they did a run of 30 basses in candy apple purple for my shop. I showed one to Stevie, and purple is his color; he loves it. He asked me to get him a 12-string in the same color, and I told him, ‘They don’t do one-offs; they don’t have a custom shop,’ but it’s hard to say no to the guy! So I called Rickenbacker and talked them into it. I explained, ‘He’ll play it a lot on this upcoming tour.’ They made him a beautiful one with his OM logo.”
The purple one-off is a 1993Plus model and sports a 1 3/4" wide neck—1/8" wider than a normal Rickenbacker. Van Zandt loved it so much that he had Babiuk wrestle with Rickenbacker again to build another one in baby blue. Petillo has since outfitted them with paisley-festooned custom pickguards. When guitar tech Newberry shows me these unique axes backstage, I can see the input jack on the purple guitar is labeled with serial number 01001.
“Some of my drive is based on gratitude,” says Van Zandt, “feeling like we are the luckiest guys in the luckiest generation ever.”
Photo by Rob DeMartin
Van Zandt also currently plays a white Vox Teardrop. That guitar is a prototype owned by Babiuk. “Stevie wanted a Teardrop,” Babiuk tells me, “but I explained that the vintage ones are hit and miss—the ones made in the U.K. were often better than the ones manufactured in Italy. Korg now owns Vox, and I have a new Teardrop prototype from them in my personal collection. When I showed it to him, he loved it and asked me to get him one. I had to tell him, ‘I can’t; it’s a prototype, there’s only one,’ and he asked me to sell him mine,” he chuckles. “I told him, ‘It’s my fucking personal guitar, it’s not for sale!’ So I ended up lending it to him for this tour, and I told him, ‘Remember, this is my guitar; don’t get too happy with it, okay?’
“He asked me why that particular guitar sounds and feels so good. Besides being a prototype built by only one guy, the single-coil pickups’ output is abnormally hot, and the neck feels like a nice ’60s Fender neck. Stevie’s obviously a dear friend of mine, and he can hold onto it for as long as he wants. I’m glad it’s getting played. It was just hanging in my office.”
Van Zandt tells me how Babiuk’s Vox Teardrop sums up everything he wants from his tone, and says, “It’s got a wonderfully clean, powerful sound. Like Brian Jones got on ‘The Last Time.’ That’s my whole thing; that’s the trick—trying to get the power without too much distortion. Bruce and Nils get plenty of distortion; I am trying to be the clean rhythm guitar all the time.”
If Van Zandt has a consigliere like Tony Soprano had Silvio Dante, that’s Newberry. Newberry has tech’d nearly every gig with Van Zandt since 1982. “Bruce shows move fast,” he tells me. “So when there’s a guitar change for Stevie, and there are many of them, I’m at the top of the stairs, and we switch quickly. There’s maybe one or two seconds, and if he needs to tell me something, I hear it. He’s Bruce’s musical director, so he may say something like, ‘Remind me tomorrow to go over the background vocals on “Ghosts,”’ or something like that. And I take notes during the show.”
“Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity. At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to a Telecaster.” —Stevie Van Zandt
When I ask Newberry how he defines Van Zandt’s relationship to the guitar, he doesn’t hesitate, snapping back, “It’s all in his head. His playing is encyclopedic, whether it’s Bruce or anything else. He may show up at soundcheck and start playing the Byrds, but it’s not ‘Tambourine Man,’ it’s something obscure like ‘Bells of Rhymney.’ People may not get it, but I’ve known him long enough to know what’s happening. He’s got everything already under his fingers. Everything.”
As such, Van Zandt says he never practices. “The only time I touch a guitar between tours is if I’m writing something or maybe arranging backing vocal harmonies on a production,” he tells me.
Before we say goodbye, I tell Van Zandt about my time stuck in his elevator, and his broad grin signals that I may not be the only one to have suffered that particular purgatory. When I ask him about the 1957 Stratocaster I got to play upon my release, he recalls: “Bruce Springsteen gave me that guitar. I’ve only ever had one guitar stolen in my life, and it was in the very early days of my joining the E Street Band. I only joined temporarily for what I thought would be about seven gigs, and in those two weeks or so, my Stratocaster was stolen. It was a 1957 or 1958. Bruce felt bad about that and replaced that lost guitar with this one. So I’ve had it a long, long time. Once that first one was stolen, I decided I would resist having a personal relationship with any one guitar. But that one being a gift from Bruce makes it special. I will never take it back on the road.”
After 50 years of rock ’n’ roll, if there is one word to sum up Stevie Van Zandt, it may be “restless”—an adjective you sense from reading his autobiography. He gets serious and tells me, “I’m always trying to catch up. The beginning of accomplishing something came quite late to me. I feel like I haven’t done nearly enough. What are we on this planet trying to do?” he asks rhetorically. “We’re trying to realize our potential and maybe leave this place one percent better for the next guy. And some of my drive is based on gratitude, feeling like we are the luckiest guys in the luckiest generation ever. That’s what I’m doing: I want to give something back. I feel an obligation.”
YouTube It
“Rosalita” is a perennial E Street Band showstopper. Here’s a close-up video from Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park last summer. Van Zandt’s brief but commanding guitar spotlight shines just past the 4:30 mark.
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