Little Steven drew plenty of disciples to Stambaugh Auditorium on Tuesday, and he had a simple message.

“All I suggest is, do whatever you do with a purpose. Write with a purpose. Live with a purpose, and try to be useful, because what else can we do? What else matters?”

Stevie Van Zandt, 74, clearly practices what he preaches. He’s a man with a distinctive look and many personas — the guitar-playing consigliere to Bruce Springsteen and music director of the E Street Band, leader of Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, a costar of the long-running HBO series “The Sopranos” and the star of Netflix’s first original series “Lilyhammer,” host of the syndicated and SiriusXM radio show “Little Steven’s Underground Garage,” the founder of Wicked Cool Records and a Broadway producer.

But as the guest speaker for Youngstown State University’s Centofanti Symposium, Van Zandt led with a role that isn’t as lucrative as some of those mentioned above but may be the one for which he is most proud — activist.

In both his short speech at the beginning of the program and his conversation with “Tangled Up in Blues” host and longtime radio personality Cornel Bogdan, Van Zandt’s passion for activism (and music) came through.

Van Zandt said his activism started after Springsteen’s European tour in support of “The River” in 1981. He and Springsteen ventured into Eastern Germany, several years before the Berlin Wall came down, and later he was confronted by someone who asked him why he was putting missiles in his country. He realized he wasn’t viewed there as a musician but as an American.

“If I’m an American, what obligations go with that? What is my place in the world?” Van Zandt said.

When he left the E Street Band and started Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, he decided he was going to be “the political guy.”

There are acts who have filled that role in the past, and some even had hits with those songs — Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” Neil Young’s “Ohio” — but it’s not the path to take if commercial success is the primary goal, and it clearly kept Van Zandt’s music from reach as wide of an audience as it could have.

Van Zandt was one of the leaders of the cultural boycott used to exert pressure on South Africa to free Nelson Mandela and end Apartheid. He cowrote and produced the song “Sun City,” which featured a genre-spanning array of talent (Springsteen, U2, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Run-DMC, Joey Ramone).

Many radio stations avoided it — “It was too white for black radio and too black for white radio. How ironic is that?,” Van Zandt said — but it broke through thanks to extensive play on MTV and BET. Through their lobbying efforts and a shift in public opinion, Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, and Mandela was freed in 1990.

Closer to home, Van Zandt argued for the release of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975, and recorded the song “Leonard Peltier” in 1988. It didn’t happen as quickly as Mandela’s freedom, but President Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence before leaving office and he recently was freed from prison.

That activism continues with efforts with Teach Rock, which “keeps the arts in the DNA of the public education system” and uses music to help teach history, math, science and other cross-curricular subjects.

Van Zandt demonstrated that dedication to education by taking time to talk to a small group of students Tuesday afternoon before his appearance in the main hall.

He encouraged those students to study the greats.

“Look back at history and find the best of the best and use that as your standard,” Van Zandt said. “Go for greatness.”

He admitted today’s youth have far more distractions than he did growing up, and those distractions prevent the work that needs to be done to be truly successful.

“There’s no such thing as being born great. I know a lot of people who have achieved greatness and none of them were born great. Every one of them has developed, and that takes time. And what do we not have enough of these days? We’re living with time deficit disorder.”

Considering the number of projects that Van Zandt seems to be juggling constantly, maybe he should add time management seminars to that list.

Andy Gray is the entertainment editor of Ticket. Write to him at agray@tribtoday.com.

Staff photo / Andy Gray
Stevie Van Zandt is shown talking to a small group of students Tuesday afternoon at Stambaugh Auditorium before his lecture in the main hall later that evening.