So you're dialing your way through the parched and pathetic wasteland of

American radio — the same market-tested, focus-grouped, over-played corporate

crap every damn day — and suddenly you come across ... what is this? A rock and

roll station? But you've never heard any of the songs before. And yet, each

and every one of them is, as they used to say, rockin'. Can this be legal?

What you've stumbled across is "Little Steven's Underground Garage," a

weekly, two-hour rock and roll blow-out hosted by Steve Van Zandt. You may know

Steve from "The Sopranos" (he plays Silvio Dante) or as the longtime

guitarist with Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. Now you can get to know him

as the coolest DJ in the country, a proud throwback to the late-night hipster

jocks of long-gone 1960s and '70s FM radio.

"I love radio," Steve says. "But I just can't listen to it today. And I

think there are all these kids out there now who don't know what rock and roll

radio can be."

"Underground Garage" is a vivid demonstration. But what, you ask, is

"garage," exactly? That's a tricky question, but essentially garage rock is

music that was inspired by the great wave of British Invasion bands that

poured into this country in the wake of the Beatles from 1964 up till about

1968. (After that, rock started getting arty and self-conscious, and to hell

with it.) These bands (The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Yardbirds,

Animals, Troggs, on and on) lit a fire in the hearts of an army of bored

teenagers across the nation, who were in turn motivated to start growing

their hair out, hit up their dads for enough cash to buy some Rickenbacker

guitars and Vox amps and head off to the family garage with their friends to

start thrashing out what they hoped would be hit tunes of their own. (The

Beatles made it seem so easy.)

Hundreds of these home-grown bands — thousands, maybe — actually did

make records; albums, even. And while some of them did score local demi-hits

(the Remains and the Vagrants in the Northeast, the ultra-great Sonics out in

the Northwest, Texas' immortal 13th Floor Elevators), most, inevitably, sank

down the pop memory hole without a trace. But their music, with its jangly

guitars, raw harmonies and fierce, stomping riffs, never died. Instead, it

became collectible. And in 1972, rock scholar Lenny Kaye (later the guitarist

with the Patti Smith Group) curated a double-album's worth of semi-obscure

garage classics called Nuggets (now available on CD in a Rhino box set).

Nuggets, in turn, unleashed a blizzard of similarly obsessive reissue

series devoted to garage rock in all of its multifarious flavors, from

straight British Invasion to surf, soul and psychedelic. (One of these

enterprises, the pretty much all-bootleg Pebbles series, must be up to

Volume 40 by now.)

On his show, Steve Van Zandt plays all of this stuff and more — taking

"garage" to include such latter-day practitioners as the Ramones and the New

York Dolls, and such up-and-coming garage-oids as the Shazam, the

Greenhornes, Creatures of the Golden Dawn and the wondrous Chesterfield

Kings, of Rochester, New York.

You'd think there'd be no way to get a show like this on the radio these

days, but the Hard Rock Cafe chain jumped at sponsoring it when Van Zandt

approached them, and agreed to at least a one-year commitment. "Underground

Garage" is now being aired on 26 stations, with more signing on monthly; and

the Hard Rock people say they're going to be featuring local garage bands in

their 40 Cafes around the country, with an all-garage TV show possibly in the

offing.

"People miss rock and roll," Steve says. "It has a fun vibe that doesn't

exist anymore. The records we play are three-minutes long at most. Some are

2:10. But man, there's hours of music today that doesn't equal that one

little 2:10 record."

For a list of radio stations carrying "Little Steven's Underground Garage," check out Van Zandt's Web site.

—Kurt Loder