Steven Van Zandt’s New Rock-and-Roll High School

From The New Yorker

(For anybody who doesn’t know, among his many endeavors Van Zandt played in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and in the Sopranos)

Steven Van Zandt’s New Rock-and-Roll High School

In his TeachRock program, Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video becomes a text about the slave trade

By John Seabrook
The New Yorker

Wearing his trademark silk head scarf, an exotic blend of Barbary pirate and Russian babushka, Steven Van Zandt was relaxing backstage at the PlayStation Theatre, in Times Square, recently, before a gig with his fourteen-piece band, the re-formed Disciples of Soul. Van Zandt, who is sixty-seven and is widely known as Little Steven (he goes by that name on his Sirius XM radio show), was limning his undistinguished career as a high-school student. “I was only interested in rock and roll and getting laid, probably in that order,” he said. Because neither was part of the curriculum at Middletown High School, in Middletown, New Jersey, he went on, “I had no interest in school whatsoever.”

He learned everything he needed to know from rock and roll, he said. His timing was impeccable. He was thirteen on February 9, 1964, when he saw the Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” “For those of us who were already the freaks and misfits and outcasts of the future, it was literally as shocking as a flying saucer landing in Central Park,” he said, in a voice full of awe and Jersey.

The Beatles engaged him as his teachers had not. “You’re responding emotionally to something,” he said. “Bits of information come through. So, suddenly, you find yourself learning about Eastern religion”—from the Beatles—“or about orchestration. Learning about literature from Bob Dylan. You didn’t get into it to learn things, but you learn things anyway.”

For the past decade, Van Zandt has been working on a way to re-create that dynamic, out-of-school learning experience inside classrooms, through his Rock and Roll Forever Foundation. The foundation’s team, which includes two ethnomusicologists, has crafted more than a hundred and twenty lesson plans based on popular songs and videos. Van Zandt calls the program TeachRock. For example, he said, “The first Elvis hit single, ‘That’s All Right,’ came out the same year as Brown v. Board of Education. And it reflects what’s going on and provides a basic context.” All the music is licensed and the lesson plans are available to teachers for free online.

At each of the thirty dates on the current Disciples of Soul tour, Van Zandt has offered tickets to local teachers, provided they arrive early so that he and his foundation people can walk them through a few sample lessons. (All of the tour’s proceeds will go to the foundation.) More than a hundred teachers had come out to the PlayStation; Van Zandt greeted them in the theatre’s balcony.

He picked up a microphone and told the group that about ten years ago the National Association for Music Education “came to me and said that the No Child Left Behind legislation was really devastating art classes.”

The teachers nodded vigorously.

“And they said, ‘Can you go to Congress and give it a shot?’ ” Van Zandt, who organized the anti-apartheid album “Sun City,” in 1985, has retained his passion for activism.

“So I went, and I talked to Teddy Kennedy and Mitch McConnell”—scattered boos—“and I said, ‘Bit of an unintended consequence here. By the way, did you ever hear that every kid who takes music class does better in math and science?’ They apologized, but they said they weren’t going to fix it.”

He went on, “I came back to the teachers and said, ‘Let’s do music history! Let’s use music as common ground to establish communication between teachers and students and just make your job easier.’ ” Big applause. “Instead of telling the kid, ‘Take the iPod out of your ears,’ we ask them, ‘What are you listening to?’ ”

Later, backstage, Van Zandt said, “I call it ‘teaching in the present tense.’ We were told, ‘Learn this, you’re going to use this someday.’ That doesn’t work anymore. The kids are different. It’s a paradigm shift.”

He explained that his method doesn’t lean only on sixties rock. “Kanye, we trace him back, Jay-Z,” he said. Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video is used to prompt discussion of the slave trade. He added, “The rock-era methodology had to do with politics and culture, which is hip-hop’s focus, to some extent, though not as much as maybe we would have liked.”

He concluded, “Teaching kids something they’re not interested in, it didn’t work back then, and it’s even worse now. We have an epidemic dropout rate.” He waggled his scarf. “Where are we going to be in twenty years? How are we going to get smarter looking at this Administration? You know, we’re just getting stupider.”

Edutainment. A dangerous trend.