Steve Van Zandt: Not Sure If Bruce Springsteen Tour Is Returning to America
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Wrecking Ball world tour wraps up later this month with a pair of shows in Ireland, but a stray South American festival gig on the schedule in September has lead to rampant fan speculation that another American leg might be in the works. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt says he isn’t sure what’s going to happen.
“I really, really don’t know,” he says. “I know that Bruce is off in August. But what happens in October-November, I don’t know. I really don’t. I would tell you, but I don’t know. It’s possible we’ve passed the point where it’s even possible now. I’d always heard that the tour was ending in September. I’ve heard that for the last year and a half. Then you start hearing rumors on the street. Half the time they’re true, so I never know. Some things you hear turn out to be rumors, but in this case I don’t think we are [playing more shows]. But I honestly haven’t been told we’re not, so I don’t know. We probably would have heard by now if we were.”
The guitarist says that if he called the shots, they’d radically rework the way tours were scheduled. “I am of the old school,” he says. “I wish we would play every year for a certain amount of time, whether it’s June-July-August-September . . . Whatever it is. I wish we’d establish a pattern of doing that every single year, and then everybody could have a second life the other months of the year. I’m of the endless, infinite tour philosophy. I wish the touring schedule would never end – it would just change from year to year, wherever we were.”
Springsteen recently told Rolling Stone that he recorded new material with the E Street Band during downtime on their recent Australian tour. Van Zandt was filming the second season of show Lilyhammer at the time (Tom Morello took his place), and he doesn’t know what’s going to become of the new music. “Bruce is always cutting things, always writing things and always recording,” Van Zandt says. “I’ve been saying this for 40 years, certainly since Darkness on the Edge of Town, but he literally always has an album in his pocket. He usually has two of them. What shape that will take, who the group will be, when it will come out, I have no idea. But there’ll be new records forever.”