Normally when someone is booked for a lecture, it’s pretty easy to guess what the topic will be.

They’re famous for one thing, and one way or another, that will shape the focus of the program.

For Steven Van Zandt, who will speak at Stambaugh Auditorium on Tuesday for Youngstown State University’s Centofanti Symposium, even he isn’t sure what he’ll be talking about.

“I’ll talk about anything anybody wants to talk about,” Van Zandt said during a phone interview Monday. “It could be literally anything. I’ve been around for a while and done a bunch of things, so anything anybody wants to talk about that I could be helpful or useful (on), I’m happy to do.”

Any conversation with Van Zandt has to include music. He first gained fame as Miami Steve, playing guitar with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. He eventually became music director of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-inducted group. He’s also led his own band, Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, and has written songs and / or produced music for such artists as Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector, Gary U.S. Bonds, Lone Justice, Meat Loaf and Springsteen.

But it also could be acting. After serving as Springsteen’s musical consigliere, he played consigliere to mob boss Tony Soprano on the acclaimed HBO series “The Sopranos.” He also starred in “Lilyhammer,” the first original series on Netflix, a streaming service that now spends billions on original programming.

Then there are entrepreneurial efforts, from his syndicated radio show, “Little Steven’s Underground Garage,” to his Sirius XM station that plays rock ‘n’ roll, the genres that influenced it and the contemporary artists that continue its legacy. There’s also Wicked Cool Records, a label that provides a platform for those artists to release their music, and Wicked Cool Wellness, which sells everything from coffee to candles.

Van Zandt easily could fill the program talking about activism, such as his efforts in the 1980s opposing Apartheid in South Africa and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela or his advocacy for the release of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, whose prison sentence was commuted by President Joseph Biden earlier this year.

TEACH ROCK

One topic that merges many of those interests is Teach Rock (teachrock.org), a STEAM-based curriculum that uses popular music to instill a passion for learning in students. It’s available at no cost to teachers, students and families.

“The initial sort of mission was just to keep the arts in the DNA of the public education system,” Van Zandt said. “That hasn’t changed. That was the number one goal, and we felt, if it worked out, we would achieve our second goal, which was to try and increase the number of students graduating from high school.

“The statistics are quite alarming when you really look at them — close to 50% of the kids in a poor neighborhood are dropping out of high school, and then 50% of them end up in the justice system, the wrong side of it,” Van Zandt said. “The other interesting statistic was that, if a kid likes one single class or one single teacher, they will come to school, so we wanted to be that class.”

The program has continued to adapt as new needs are discovered, from changing the methodology to be more in tune with how today’s children learn to creating a program called Harmony, which encourages interaction among students who are increasingly disconnected from each other by devices and social media.

“There is an absolute epidemic of isolation and alienation (that is) increasing suicide and just a basic social alienation that needs to be dealt with,” he said.

YOUNGSTOWN BANDS

With “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” and Wicked Cool Records, Van Zandt has championed many acts that don’t fit neatly into any current mainstream music trends and would have a hard time finding exposure elsewhere.

A couple of those acts have strong Mahoning Valley roots. The Deadbeat Poets, led by Frank Secich (Blue Ash, Stiv Bators Band) working with members of Youngstown’s Infidels, had several of its songs featured as the “Coolest Song in the World” on the “Underground Garage.”

The Jellybricks, featuring Boardman native Larry Kennedy, had its song “Age of Stupid” picked as the “Coolest Song in the World” for all of 2024, and last month Wicked Cool released the group’s latest album, “Dreaming in Stereo.”

“I think Frank was the one who introduced us to The Jellybricks,” Van Zandt said. “They’re just a great band, what can I say? These days, if you’re in a rock ‘n’ roll band, there’s simply no logical reason to do it. It’s strictly passion, because there’s no reward at the end of the rainbow these days. So when we see great, great bands coming up, it makes you want to support them even more. People still want to be in rock ‘n’ roll bands and make great records. And, man, if they do, we’re going to play them.”

There has been a massive change in physical media sales over the course of Van Zandt’s career. In 1985 Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” sold 15 million copies. In 2024 Taylor Swift was the only artist to sell more than a million physical copies of any new release.

Van Zandt said he was lucky and able to hold onto the publishing rights to the songs he wrote throughout his career, unlike many of rock’s formative artists. But even with the hindsight of how unfair those record deals were decades ago, Van Zandt believes many of those performers would sign those same deals today, compared to the alternative.

“You have to acknowledge the fact that the business should not have been run the way it was in terms of the contracts being so unfair. But at the same time, there was a deal with the devil going on back then that, I swear, if we could make that deal today, everybody would make it — We’re going to skim your royalties, okay, but we’re going to make you famous, and you’re going to work the rest of your life on the investment that we are making. And we are making that investment because we’re going to steal from you, okay? We have to have incentives to make the deal with you. That incentive is we’re going to steal most of the money.

“They should have been more transparent about that. But nobody knew what was going to happen. Nobody knew that the bands were going to be able to work for 50 years. I kind of see both sides a little bit more clearly now, not that it was fair, not that it was right. Chuck Berry was pissed off his whole life because they took most of his royalties. But before he went on stage, they put $10,000 in cash into his guitar case four or five days a week for 50 years.

“It’s a fascinating big picture, when you really look at it … Would any rock artist today trade all of their royalties to be made famous? Yes, you would. That’s where the money is. Forget about records royalties; the money’s live. Look at us. We’re not selling any big, big records anymore. Nobody is. That’s just the script today.”

‘YOUNGSTOWN,’ THE SONG

Van Zandt’s lecture at Stambaugh is in the same theater where Bruce Springsteen performed on Jan. 12, 1996, in support of the album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” which includes the song “Youngstown” about the Mahoning Valley’s steel history.

Unlike most of the songs Springsteen has recorded without the input of the E Street Band, “Youngstown” frequently is played on tour, and not just when Springsteen is playing nearby in Cleveland or Pittsburgh.

“I said to him on the last tour, man, I think this is one of if not the greatest song he’s ever written,” Van Zandt said. “That’s how strong I feel about it. It’s just unbelievably good. Everything about it is just an absolute masterclass in songwriting — the specifics, the fantastic wording, the locations, the setting, the vibe, the storytelling. It’s just a work of art and, yeah, it’s become an essential part of the show, at least lately. It just blows my mind every single night.

“The lyrics are always the last thing I kind of get to, you know? I don’t necessarily focus on the lyrics that often, even though I spend a lot of time working on them when I’m writing. But when you really dig into those lyrics, it’s just one of the greatest songs he’s ever written.”

Springsteen has written a lot of great songs, and if Van Zandt was the one making the setlist, there are many that would be played more frequently. For him the sweet spot is that late ’70s, early ’80s era, not just the songs that ended up on “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The River,” but the wealth of material that was recorded and often performed live but not released officially until the four-CD “Tracks” compilation in 1998.

“Those are some of my favorite things,” he said. “I’m always trying to talk him into doing, you know, ‘Can we just do one of those every night, do a different one every night?’ Sometimes we’ll throw one in, but not as often I wish we would, because I think the fans would love that also.

“Any number of them — ‘Loose Ends,’ ‘Restless Nights,’ ‘Where the Bands Are,’ ‘Take ’em as They Come,’ ‘The Little Things My Baby Does.’ They’re absolutely phenomenal. Bruce’s outtakes are another band’s career. And frankly, I’ve always been surprised more bands don’t pick up on them, because they’re just sitting there waiting to be covered.”

2025 PLANS

Springsteen and the E Street Band will head to Europe in May, for a combination of postponed shows from last year and some new dates. Van Zandt said he didn’t expect any U.S. shows to be scheduled for this year

The band’s tours in 2023 and ’24 had some room for variation but hewed closely to a framework that focused on songs about aging and loss and an encore packed with greatest hits. Van Zandt wasn’t sure that format would continue into 2025.

“I would expect it to be a slightly different set,” he said. “We’ll see what he’s feeling and what he’s thinking. I mean, some rather significant things have happened, you may have noticed,

in terms of history, so I don’t know. We’ll see what he wants to do, what he wants to say, but it’s up for grabs. There’s no real reason to change things too much, and there’s no reason not to change everything.

“That’s a nice thing. We established this very early and I always give Bruce credit for it, to have the balls to just have trust in the audience to actually be able to do whatever we wanted to do. , We’ve had some hit singles, and we’ve done tours and we didn’t play any of them, as opposed to some bands just being totally trapped by their hit singles and having to do that same set every single night for 40, 50, years. We never had that, which was nice. I think that really helps our longevity by keeping it interesting for us as well as the audience. So it could be, it could be anything. It could be 20 different songs, you know.”

VAN ZANDT’S FUTURE

In 2021 Van Zandt released his memoir, “Unrequited Infatuations.” Last year the two-and-a-half-hour documentary “Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple” debuted on HBO.

Those are the kinds of projects that tend to be released at the end of someone’s career, but the 74-year-old Van Zandt doesn’t sound like someone who is contemplating retirement.

While Springsteen’s tours with the E Street Band tend to span one or two years, followed by an equally long hiatus, Van Zandt said his dream scenario would be for the band to tour two, three months every summer and then have the other nine months to do other things.

Along with Teach Rock, the “Underground Garage” and Wicked Cool, other things for Van Zandt probably won’t include another tour with the Disciples of Soul. The tours in 2017 and ’18 backed by an 11-piece band and three backup singers performing music from his solo career and songs he wrote for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes were satisfying creatively but not financially.

“We just can’t generate enough audience to make it pay, to make it pay for itself,” he said. “I’m still trying to achieve my lifelong goal of breaking even, and this wasn’t even close.”

It would include a return to acting.

“I want to get back on TV. I’ve written four pilot scripts for four different shows. I got a fifth one on the way. It could be one of those or it could be something else. I don’t really care if it’s one of mine or not, but I do want to get back on TV this fall after this tour.”

Van Zandt said he also is looking for investors for a studio, where he could film pilots and take them directly to the networks and streaming services, which have curtailed content development. He also called producing “Once Upon a Dream,” the Broadway production featuring the band The Rascals as, “My favorite thing I’ve ever done in my life,” and he’d love to work on another project like that.

“I got lots of ideas … We’ll see what destiny has in mind.”

If you go …

WHAT: Centofanti Symposium lecture by Steven Van Zandt

WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday

WHERE: Stambaugh Auditorium, 1000 Fifth Ave., Youngstown

HOW MUCH: Admission is free, but tickets are required and are available online at experienceyourarts.org and by calling 330-259-9651.