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| The Rascals Reunited, |
Van Zandt, the guitarist for the E Street Band and star of The Sopranos, has loved the band since going to see them in his first concert, taking along his New Jersey friend and future rock star Bruce Springsteen.....telegraph.co.uk
It was 1965, at a skating rink in Keyport, and headlining that night were The Young Rascals, who were promoting their hit Good Lovin'.
Van Zandt (then 14) and Springtseen (15) each paid $2.50 for their tickets."I'll never forget it. It was the most exciting night ever," Van Zandt told AFP's Mark Kennedy. "They were phenomenal live, really quite different than anybody else. And very, very influential to this day."
Nearly half a century later, Van Zandt, 62, has found a way to repay The Rascals by taking the original four-man band to their biggest and most unlikely stage yet — on Broadway.
The reunited band will play 15 performances at the Richard Rodgers Theatre beginning on April 15th, with a show that combines live performance, video reenactments, archival concert and news footage, op-art backdrops and psychedelic lighting, with a 50-foot-by-25-foot LED screen. Van Zandt, who shares directing duties with visual designer Marc Brickman, calls it a "bio concert", adding "this could be a new form and a new industry."
The quartet — singer Eddie Brigati, keyboardist Felix Cavaliere, guitarist Gene Cornish and drummer Dino Danelli — left a rich legacy of songs including It's a Beautiful Morning, How Can I Be Sure, People Got to Be Free and I've Been Lonely Too Long.
"The musical depth is astounding when you get into it," says Van Zandt, who runs his own record label and hosts a radio show. "The Rascals are something else. They're up there with the Beatles, and Stones and Byrds. That level of musicality. They have a real chemistry. It is like magic.
The band was known to fight discrimination by demanding that a black act appear on the bill at each of their concerts and they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 when Van Zandt, wearing one of the Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits the band dropped when they ditched the word 'Young' in the band name, gave a speech praising the band and joking: "To sound that black, you had to be Italian". Television writer David Chase happened to watch that speech and thought Van Zandt would be great on his new show,