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