For Steven Van Zandt, Rock ’n’ Roll is the Fountain of Youth

Are the challenges to being on tour in your 70s different from being on the road in your 20s, 30s and even 40s?

The only challenge is hydration. You have to make sure you’re hydrated to make it through three hours of a show, but not too hydrated.  

Do you follow a special diet?

There’s no real rules about it. We all know that sugar is bad. I think the whole world understands that now. So you try to keep that to a minimum — sugar and the carbohydrates that turn into sugar in your body, the bread-type stuff. Other than that, it’s kind of loose. My wife’s a vegan, so [I] sometimes lean that way or vegetarian, but then again, sometimes I’ll go more protein-oriented. I don’t really have any rules about that. You just try and stay in as good a shape as you can.

What’s your stay-fit routine when not on the road?

Quite often I’m in the gym four or five times a week, and I try to keep it to one meal a day. I have a shake in the morning and maybe a salad for a second meal. And then a dinner. You try to keep it pretty much at one meal a day if you can. And just more conscious of the obvious stuff. The calorie intake — it’s calories in, calories out. It’s the same old story. Nothing’s changed.

Steven Van Zandt appears on the documentary, "Wiseguy: David Chase and The Sopranos."

Warner Bros.

When you look back at the songs you’ve written, do you have any favorites?

Yeah, there’s a couple. I always point out the songs I’ve written for [producer, writer, director] Chris Columbus —  for his movies. He seems to bring out the best in me just because he trusts me so much. When somebody trusts you, you tend to do your best work. Writing a Christmas song was quite a challenge. When you’re competing with “Jingle Bells,” “Deck the Halls,” “Joy to the World,” it’s a challenge. “All Alone on Christmas” I wrote for Darlene Love, for Home Alone 2, and “The Time of Your Life,” which I think is maybe my most important song. Certainly one of them. I wrote [“The Time of Your Life”] for Chris’ Nine Months movie. But there’s others. I’m quite happy with my work through the years, and really wouldn’t change much.

You’ve been married almost 42 years — your wife, Maureen, even played your character’s wife on The Sopranos. What’s the secret?

What I always say is, the secret of staying together is staying apart. And then when you see each other, it’s always new again. From touring so much through the years, that just happened naturally. She’s very much her own person. She has a theater company and she’s as busy as I am. And that’s healthy. And look, codependence works for some people. I’m not making a judgment on that. But I’ve just found interindependence, whatever that word is, works better for us. We’re both very opinionated, headstrong. We connect whenever we can. You want to have some room to be your own person. 

What do you like to do together?

We haven’t been doing it as much lately [because of the tour], but we used to go to the ballet. She was a ballet dancer, and she taught ballet and also taught acting to ballet dancers at the American Ballet Theater. So we would go to the ballet, which she turned me on to, and I just loved that whole world. Really broadened my entire horizons in terms of artistically. And occasionally we go to a play, a theater, a show. And other than that, just going out for a nice dinner, especially in the summer, so we can bring our dog and eat outside — the whole family outing. That’s a relaxing thing for us. We’re working all the time.

In your Disciple documentary, you talk about The Beatles’ arrival in the U.S.  being the moment that changed everything in rock 'n' roll. Who else inspired you?

I always include the Rolling Stones as the other side of that because The Beatles were quite sophisticated by the time we discovered them. …[The Beatles] were so good, you couldn’t quite picture doing it. It was a wonderful world, but you couldn’t imagine being in it. But then the Rolling Stones come four months later, and they just made it look easier than it was. They weren’t as sophisticated. They weren’t as perfect in terms of their harmony or their hair or their clothes. They were like the first punk band, very, very right-off-the-street kind of guys. And so, as I like to put it, The Beatles revealed a new world to us, and the Rolling Stones invited us in.  And then the entire British Invasion became enormously influential to me —  the Who and the Kinks and the Yardbirds and the Animals. Then America woke back up with the folk-rock stuff. Bob Dylan and the Byrds brought things back to America in a very significant way. I grew up in [the] 1950s, so I had to go back and study the pioneers.… Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley. All those became very, very influential to me. By the end of the ’60s, I had absorbed all of that wonderful Renaissance period of the ’60s, as well as the roots of it all from the ’50s. It’s quite a large palette.

After The Sopranos, you did more acting, even starring in another Mob series, Lilyhammer. Is there any more acting in your future?

I want to get back. I just signed with a new agency. I have four scripts of my own and another two on the way. It doesn’t have to be one of my own scripts, but I made it clear. I was out in Los Angeles last week meeting with people saying, “OK, it’s time for me to start acting again, or maybe directing.” I may take a directing job here and there in the interim. We’re going to have five months in between the Canadian shows in November and the summer shows starting in the middle of May. I probably can’t do a whole new series yet — that’ll have to wait till after next summer. But I do want to get back on TV with a significant series. Until then, I could do a cameo, a smaller part on TV or direct something. I’m hoping to get back doing something in that five-month period that’s coming up and then get seriously back after the tour.