From Stevie in '75 to Stevie AT 75... Happy Birthday to our beloved rock-and-soul Renaissance man!
- Letters To You
- 14 minutes ago
- 2 min read
November 22, 2025
Happy 75th birthday to the E Street Band's true Renaissance man: singer, songwriter, producer, guitarist, arranger, bandleader/musical-director, activist, actor, director, writer/screenwriter, satellite-radio pioneer, record-label executive, entrepreneur, and educator, who has more passions, pursuits, and projects than he has nicknames, if not headscarves ... the one and only Stevie Van Zandt.
Give Linsey Davis and her team at ABC News Live twenty minutes, and they'll give you an overview of what's so great about our beloved Stevie (though if you want the FULL picture - literally - Bill Teck's brilliant 2024 HBO/Max documentary Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple remains essential, of course.) Davis' report, which dropped earlier this week, also includes an extended focus on the program that Van Zandt founded and Bruce Springsteen has called "his greatest legacy:" TeachRock.
If you need a shot of hope about humanity's future - and who doesn't these days? - there's nothing better than seeing Stevie and his TeachRock team working to preserve all that's great and important about what he calls "the Renaissance period" in rock and soul for future generations. "As far as I'm concerned," Van Zandt tells Davis at one point, "[TeachRock has reached] a million students, and we got 49 million more to go... I just feel like we are able to transform at this point the education system in a way that needs to happen, or else we're going to lose a whole generation."
He doesn't just sit around talkin' about it, either. There's wonderful footage of Stevie visiting New York's East Side Community High School, interacting with students and their history teacher Ben Wides, one of the first teachers to adapt the TeachRock curriculum in his classes. The report's concise history of TeachRock growing from an idea first put forward by Van Zandt more than two decades ago, to watching him now witnessing that idea of his put into action in one of the thousands of schools and classrooms where it's happening every day, is quite inspiring indeed.
Click below for your twenty minutes of Van Zandt zen:
Happy Birthday, Stevie, and best wishes for many more Happy Birthdays to come. Thanks for all of your continued commitment, passion, wisdom, and wit, helping to lead us out of the darkness each and every day.
