Steven Van Zandt reflects on 'Sun City' and its contribution to raising global awareness of apartheid

Musician, actor and author Steven Van Zandt talks with Yahoo's Lyndsey Parker about his new book and discusses 'Sun City,' his influential song that raised global awareness about South Africa's apartheid regime.

Video Transcript

STEVEN VAN ZANDT: So, I have the book, just finished reading it, and it opens in a really interesting way. I've to talk about this epiphany you had politically, social politically. How for years you weren't very politically active or even aware and then you kind of, when you got into it, you got into it. So, I'd love to start by talking about what this epiphany was because it seems like you've always been kind of searching for meaning and purpose and life and this was the path you went down.

LYNDSEY PARKER: I guess it was the moment that we were doing the River Tour in Europe, a kid asked me why we're putting missiles in his country in Germany. So, of course, I thought what a ridiculous question but the question never left my mind, for weeks. And then I realized, oh, my God, I'm an American, something that had never occurred to me before.

This kid from Germany wasn't looking at me like a rock and roll guy or a factory worker or Republican or Democrat, he was looking at me as an American. That was an epiphany, to realize if we are a democracy, which of course I found out later that we're not, but if we're mostly a democracy, we have obligations and responsibilities as citizens.

So, I thought, well, everybody needs an identity and that'll be mine, I'll be the political guy for a while and see what happens, but that put me on that path. I became an artist/ journalist and started to go to places.

STEVEN VAN ZANDT: What I want to definitely ask about, the "Sun City" record. There were a lot of other charity songs and initiatives coming out, obviously Band-Aid, We're The World, Hearing Aid, the list goes on. But you kind of took it another step further.

LYNDSEY PARKER: I made a list of all of the conflicts we were involved in and I think there was 44 at the time but I couldn't find out much about South Africa and I had to go down there. I went down there twice actually in '84, and interviewed everybody I could and found out that it was just really slavery and needed to go. It wasn't going to be fixed.

So I came back with the intention of just adding a few people, I took the song off my third album "Freedom No Compromise" and was going to add 5 or six people to it and try and get some attention.

And it was a little bit risky for artists to get on because we were crossing the line from social concern, feeding people in Africa, to political. Pointing the finger, naming names, saying this is what's wrong and this is how we fix it.

And I mentioned Ronald Reagan's name in the song, which was quite controversial at the time, in that particular era, the Reagan era, he's Ronald Reagan, everybody's happy cowboy grandfather, extraordinarily popular. And Meanwhile, committing crimes all over the world with our tax dollars, they didn't never really saw us coming.

And suddenly, of course, no radio station would play it, too Black for white radio, too white for Black radio because we have our own apartheid state right here in America. And so we were desperately trying to figure out what to do, and of course, the answer was a great video.

(SINGING) Say I, I, I, I, I, I, ain't no place sun city.

And that's how people heard the song, they never heard the song on the radio, basically, They heard the song on MTV and on a BET, Black Entertainment Television. I convinced MTV to play it at a time when they weren't playing many Black artists, they didn't really want to get a big, big war about Michael Jackson, they may have started to play him but they were very nervous about it.

Anyway, so I convinced them and I said, look, if you play my video, you're going to play more Black artists than you'll ever play in your life because we had all kinds of Black artists on the record.

STEVEN VAN ZANDT: Yeah, and rappers too, and rappers weren't on "Band-Aid" and they weren't on "We are the world."

LYNDSEY PARKER: That's right, and that's one thing we wanted to make a point of doing, I felt very strongly about rapping in those days. The industry didn't like it and was hoping it would just go away. They were very surprised I was putting Melly Mel on next to Miles Davis and then David Ruffin and Jackson Brown.

And run DMC and I thought here comes rap music, and this is the first time in my lifetime Black artists are expressing themselves openly and freely and consistently, you know. And I thought, this is really, really a healthy thing and we need to support it. So we put them on the record against all advice and against all you know in the sort of insults.

Of course we were right obviously, and they ended up adding to the street credibility of what we were doing, which is the whole intention. So it was really good, wonderful and it was completely successful just like we wrote it up, we ended up raising enough consciousness to override Reagan's veto.

Reagan vetoed the economic sanctions bill which was the key to freeing South Africa. Of course, Reagan vetoed it and the first time his veto was overridden, which was a really extraordinary victory at the time. And then the banks cut off South Africa, they had to release Mandela, and goodbye apartheid.

STEVEN VAN ZANDT: So, I know you're reluctant to take credit because you did not do this or any of the things you've done, politically, for cloud or for a career move for yourself.

I don't enjoy taking credit for this or-- the whole aspect of supporting apatheid was embarrassing to me, that's why I did everything I could to get rid of it. I'm not going to stand there and take credit for something that should never have had to take place, or we shouldn't have had to tear down apartheid and to change our government's policy for supporting slavery.

I mean, we shouldn't have had to do that, it was embarrassing. So I think I wasn't about to sort of say, oh, aren't I a hero, I was just being an American Patriot doing the right thing. On the contrary, it was a real career risk to take part in this video and, in fact, at that point I was making a new record deal and there were four deals on the table. When "Sun City" was a success, those four deals disappeared.

STEVEN VAN ZANDT: Really?

LYNDSEY PARKER: Yeah. So it was the opposite of a career move. We can only guess but I think my guess would be that we were a little bit too effective and people started to get nervous around me, they started to get afraid of me and they figured with a popular government, what's next? Maybe we're next.

I really had a big mouth in those days and I wasn't afraid to use it, so corporations were not that comfortable with me, you know. So it might have been that.

STEVEN VAN ZANDT: Well, you talk repeatedly in your book "Unrequited Infatuations" about when you did political things, whether it was "Sun City" or like the five album arc that you did after you had this epiphany we were talking about. You repeatedly talk about you having these crises in your brain where you were like, I've blown it, this is career suicide, I'm persona non grata, et cetera.

LYNDSEY PARKER: At the point where I was on, I was on the flight to South Africa actually, my second record "Voice of America" had come out and I was about to do the research for South Africa. And I'd always been a very nervous flier, I never liked flying. On the flight, again, a bit of a revelation hit me, that I'd basically blown my life by walking away from the E Street Band, something that I'd worked towards for 15 years.

And we finally he had some success with "The River" the first thing I co-produced, and then born in USA which I also co-produced, and I left before that tour. I spent my entire life in that direction hoping to make a living playing rock and roll and finally I do it and I walked away from it. And it occurred to me that I've blown my life.

And so all my fear left me at that point, completely, suddenly I go from like sort of trembling on planes to like not caring one bit about it. Which helped when it came to the research of going into dangerous places because I was literally fearless at that point.

They want to kill me, good, do me a favor, kind of an attitude. Yeah, so, it's nice to get to that place because it's very liberating but I wasn't quite ready to commit suicide in the obvious way.

I thought, well, I'm committed to this political thing now, I'm really jumping in, I'm really going to-- I have to be 100% committed to this because this is all I've got So, that really helped focus your mind on what you're doing, and from that came the strategy to bring down the South African government, which I fully, fully intended to do.

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