Sporting a trademark purple bandana, Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist Steven Van Zandt showed up at the historic King Eddy on Friday afternoon to talk about arts in education, one day before Springsteen and his iconic E Street Band were set to rock the Saddledome for the first time since 2003. He was joined by longtime E Street Band bassist Garry Tallent.

Both were on hand for an event organized at the National Music Centre, which announced an international partnership between the organization with New Jersey-based Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music and Van Zandt’s TeachRock.

Van Zandt and Tallent arrived before the presentation and could be seen checking out the NMC’s Rolling Stone Mobile Unit at the King Eddy.

Both are longtime members of Springsteen’s backup band. Tallent is the founding bassist for the E Street Band, joining in 1972. Van Zandt, who is also a star of the Sopranos TV show, joined in 1975 not long after working on Springsteen’s classic album Born to Run. Van Zandt began his TeachRock organization 15 years ago and it will soon be permanently housed in the new home of Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music, which will relocated to bigger digs in 2026.

“The American government decided that arts were no longer important in schools, this is going back 15 to 20 years now, so all the arts education in public education stopped,” Van Zandt said about his organization. “We thought this was a travesty, obviously. So we formed out organization to put the arts back into public education.”

Van Zandt said the idea was to keep the arts into the DNA of American education, find a new methodology to teach arts to tech savvy students and to stem the alarming drop-out rate of students in poor neighbourhoods.

“We are the only country in the world that does not understand that art is not a luxury,” he said. “Art is an essential part of the quality of life.”

Cross-border musical partnership highlighted

Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music are currently housed at Monmouth University and will be moving to a bigger location on campus in 2026 that will include a 230-seat theatre, public programs and exhibitions. Its archives contain nearly 48,000 items from 47 countries, including oral histories, concert memorabilia, articles and promotional materials.

While it is dedicated to Springsteen and his contributions to American music, serving as the archival repository for his written works, photographs and artifacts, it has also created exhibits and programs dedicated to American artists such as Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Patti Smith, Frank Sinatra and Gaslight Anthem.

The NMC will work with the organization to share resources and co-curate exhibitions and programs, highlighting the “symbiotic relationship between the two countries’ music scenes, inspiring new projects that underscore our shared histories.”

Andrew Mosker, president and CEO of the National Music Centre, said the partnership means the NCM is “going global.” Mosker said the partnership with the archives has been in the works for “many, many years.” He considers Robert Santelli, executive director of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, a longtime mentor who helped in the development of NMC.

“(It) will allow us to showcase the connections between Canadian and American music, emphasizing how artists on both sides of the border have inspired each other and, together, shaped the musical landscape,” Mosker said.

Projects planned for the partnerships include a future one-day symposium, panels and artists discussion that explore the synergies between Canadian and American music. Dubbed Echoes Across the Border, it will be sometime in 2025.  A travelling exhibition will also be co-developed for 2026 to 2027.

But the partnership will be ongoing. While the Mosker and Santelli have discussed possible future projects, nothing is in set in stone yet.

“This is the first collaboration the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music has ever done,” Santelli said. “It’s the first, it will be the strongest and it will be the one that really means the most to us because our deep-seated relationship and geographical proximity to Canada. We are going to be doing collaborative exhibits of artists that are important to both to the U.S. and to Canada. It could be Joni Mitchell, it could be The Band, it could be any number of artists. We will also explore the creative process of artists in Canada and the United States share creative ideas on how this thing works. We’ll be doing lots of education programs in conjunction with TeachRock. Third, there will be a lot of public programs. You can expect workshops. Artists from the United States coming up here and vice versa. It’s going to be rich, enduring, powerful.”