Springsteen escorts Van Zandt in to New Jersey Hall of Fame
Oh what a night: Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were inducted Sunday into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, but it was Bruce Springsteen who stole what could have been Meryl Streep’s show.
The Boss made a surprise appearance at Asbury Park’s Convention Hall to introduce his longtime friend and guitarist Steven Van Zandt into the hall. Springsteen himself was admitted a decade earlier.
The two joined forces onstage and played “I Don’t Want To Go Home,” trading vocals and eventually welcoming the entire class of inductees - and many of their family members - onstage to close the show.
“We did the impossible: We made New Jersey hip,” said Van Zandt, who is from Middletown.
Then, referring to his surprising second career as an actor in the hit HBO series “The Sopranos,” in which he played mobster Silvio Dante, Van Zandt quipped, “I had the experience of witnessing New Jersey become fashionable twice in one lifetime. Thank you, New Jersey; you have been very, very good to me.”
Springsteen introduced the erratically clothed Van Zandt as “the only man I know besides Hugh Hefner who has figured out how to spend his whole life in his pyjamas. Though born in Boston, Massachusetts, there is no purer distillation of the Jersey ethos than Little Stevie Van Zandt.”
Meryl Streep, of Summit, who actually was named to the hall in its first year in 2008 but has yet to appear at an induction ceremony, had to bail again due to a production conflict with her hit HBO series “Big Little Lies.”
Because of that, she has not yet officially entered the New Jersey hall.
Comedian and actor Joe Piscopo, who introduced former Mets and Yankees pitcher Al Leiter, said the event was “so New Jersey that I had to pay a toll to get in.”