Stevie Van Zandt’s Unrequited Infatuations may be the first rock memoir to include a complete nine-point presidential agenda. (Item four: “become a democracy.”) If that seems ambitious, Van Zandt has learned over the course of a half-century career not to rule anything out. Who could have guessed that a kid from New Jersey would become a bona fide rock star, be recruited to star in one of the most influential shows in television history, invent two genres of music, turn Netflix into an entertainment giant, and free Nelson Mandela?

Okay, Van Zandt doesn’t take complete credit for either of the latter two accomplishments, but he proudly points out that his show Lilyhammer was the first Netflix exclusive, paving the way for Stranger Things and Bridgerton - not to mention The Irishman, which featured Van Zandt in a cameo role as crooner Jerry Vale. As for Mandela, well, it’s fair to say Van Zandt helped to fuel the fires of freedom. But who got the photo with the towering icon? “A little guy with a big s**t-eating grin.”

Yes, that would be Paul Simon, who controversially made Graceland in defiance of a cultural embargo against South Africa’s apartheid government. Simon swore his intentions were pure, but Van Zandt had a different response to the situation. “I ain’t gonna play Sun City,” he declared, citing a popular South African resort in the chorus of a song that became a punk-er, more pointed celebrity singalong than the earlier “We Are the World.” Bruce Springsteen sang on both songs, but only one also had Run-D.M.C., Lou Reed, Gil Scott-Heron, Ringo Starr, and Miles Davis. Still, only one of the songs got significant radio play. “If you know ‘Sun City,’ it’s because of MTV,” writes Van Zandt. “Or BET.”

Rock vans know Van Zandt best as Springsteen’s soul brother, the guy who’s never afraid to tell the Boss what he needs to hear. Springsteen has often taken Van Zandt’s advice - for example, speeding up “Hungry Heart” and releasing his Nebraska demos as a finished album - but he’s just as often said no. (Van Zandt thought “Dancing in the Dark” was too pop, and that Springsteen should never have broken his self-imposed music video ban.) Van Zandt’s come and gone from the E Street Band, which by his account makes him responsible for his buddy’s happy marriage: would Bruce have needed Patti Scialfa to join the band if Van Zandt had still been around? (His absences also led to the fortuitous recruitments of first Nils Lofgren and later Tom Morello.)

Van Zandt and Springsteen first met around 1966, at a Jersey Shore battle of the bands. (Unrequited Infatuations includes a copy of an early newspaper clipping for Van Zandt’s band the Source, appearing under the warning IF YOU ARE OVER 20 PLEASE TURN THE PAGE.) They inevitably came together onstage, but Van Zandt parted ways with Springsteen when Bruce signed as a singer-songwriter who, the label thought, didn’t need a lot of extra guitarists hanging around the studio.

“Miami Steve,” as Springsteen started calling him after a Vegas sojourn involving Bermuda shirts, spent much of the ‘70s playing with their fellow Jersey Shore pal in Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. He joined Springsteen for the Born to Run tour, and ultimately co-produced The River - still his favorite Springsteen album, even after a lot of his favorite songs were left on the cutting room floor. (Fortunately, those stellar outtakes later saw the light of day on various compilations.) Since 1999, Van Zandt’s been a regular member of the band again.

In Van Zandt’s account, David Chase was fascinated by the way the E Street Band members weren’t faceless side players but highly specific personalities, and Chase thought Van Zandt would be perfect for the starring role in his show The Sopranos - despite the fact that the musician had never acted before. That fact worried HBO, which was taking enough of a chance on the now-legendary show as is, but Chase insisted on Van Zandt’s involvement and collaborated with the author to create the character of Silvio. The relationship between Silvio and Tony (James Gandolfini), friends since boyhood, ended up being partly inspired by Van Zandt’s relationship with Springsteen.

“Hey,” said Bob Dylan one night backstage, “I saw you on TV!” That was something Van Zandt would hear a lot over the next two decades, although he’s done a lot more than TV. There’s been an entire solo career (leading to his second nickname, “Little Steven” after Little Anthony, Little Walter, and his wedding officiant, Little Richard). There’s been production and writing work for artists like Gary “U.S.” Bonds, Darlene Love (her Home Alone 2 title song? a Little Steven composition), and even Dylan.

(The epic version of “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky” that appears on the first Bootleg Series collection was a Van Zandt production, and Van Zandt says he convinced Dylan to go solo and folk-blues when he wasn’t writing songs in the early ‘90s, giving us Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong instead of a full-band album with songs like “Light My Fire” and “Somebody to Love.” “Unless you’re playing somebody’s bar mitzvah,” said Van Zandt, “you cannot do these songs.”)

Then, of course, there’s Van Zandt’s human rights activism, which involved some tense situations like a moment at a big-ticket fundraising dinner where “Mandela’s guy” called Van Zandt to say the freedom fighter wouldn’t be able to make it after all. Van Zandt, who had Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy waiting to shake Mandela’s hand, cooly declared he’d be refunding the half-million dollars the dinner had raised.

“You can’t do that!” came the response. “That’s ANC money!”

“Just watch me, motherf***er!”

Mandela came.

Van Zandt is also a radio host, which is where the story comes around to inventing genres of music. To be precise, Van Zandt shaped two original satellite radio channels: the first original formats on Sirius, “underground garage” and “outlaw country.” His passion for music overflows in Unrequited Infatuations, making it as much a book of rock history as personal history; in the opening pages, a ten-year-old Stevie testing the assertion that it would take 200 plays to wear a 45 RPM record out. “I passed that limit often.”

Unrequited Infatuations is full of delightful if hard-to-document assertions like the notion that the always-natty Van Zandt inspired Prince to start wearing long coats. (“For $350 a ticket, maybe you could put a f**king shirt on?” he writes about the Cream reunion, which saw the power trio take the stage in tees.) It’s a great read, and if even ten percent of Van Zandt’s claims are true, that gives him ten times as much of a claim to his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame membership as you may have realized he deserved.

Reflecting on his seemingly ill-advised decision to quit the E Street Band (again) just before Born in the U.S.A. made Springsteen one of the world’s biggest rock stars, Van Zandt recalls words spoken by Chadwick Boseman in character as James Brown in the biopic Get On Up. “Five minutes ago you were the baddest band in the land,” says Boseman in the film. “Now you’re nobody.”

Van Zandt, of course, was never nobody. He was Miami Steve, he was Little Steven, he was Silvio Dante, he was Frank Tagliano, he was the guy who convinced Ronnie Spector to cover Billy Joel’s Wall of Sound tribute, “Say Goodbye to Hollywood.”

“To this day, however,” Van Zandt writes, “whenever she sings ‘Say Goodbye to Hollywood’ live, she introduces it as ‘the song Bruce Springsteen produced for me.’ I’m the invisible man. What are you gonna do?”

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November 11: Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah by Kathy Iandoli

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December 2: Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore by Dan Ozzi