‘Backstreets’: The Bruce Springsteen record Max Weinberg was “particularly proud” of
Every great rock song is only as good as the band that’s playing it. People might like to be the one in the shiny suit at the lip of the stage guiding the musicians forward, but the biggest rockstar divas never forget that if it weren’t for those players in the back, there’s no way they would be on that stage at all. Any band has to be a street gang in some respects, and for someone who paints on as big a canvas as Bruce Springsteen does, he needed that E Street Band thunder behind him.
Before ‘The Boss’ had his “office workers” with him, though, he already had something big on his hands when he started writing. He always wanted to be in a rough-and-tumble rock and roll band, but his ability to create lavish stories wasn’t the same as when Chuck Berry sang ‘School Days.’ He wanted to turn rock and roll into something operatic, and with Phil Spector as a sort of guide, The E Street Band became his custom Wall of Sound.
While the guitars took care of themselves with people like Stevie Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren coming in and out of the group, Clarence Clemons’s saxophone and Roy Bittan’s piano were instrumental in creating the perfect bed for him to tell his stories on tracks like ‘Racing in the Street’ or ‘Born to Run.’ As anyone who produces rock and roll knows, though, it’s important to start out with the drums first, and Max Weinberg was the perfect man for the job.
That didn’t mean that what he played was easy. A lot of the greatest drummers in the world might like to channel their inner John Bonham and play the most ferocious drum fills that they can think of, but as any drummer who lists Ringo Starr as one of their favourites will tell you, it’s always about the spaces in between the notes rather than the showmanship involved in every strike.
And when Weinberg came up with the arrangement for ‘Backstreets,’ he knew exactly where to go when it came time to keep everything straight. He could have easily played any fill that popped into his head to lead everyone in, but since the song is about those days lost to history hiding on the backstreets of New Jersey, having that stuttering beat was the ideal way of setting up the scene.
“I felt particularly proud to play on that record because it was a kind of an involved drum part.”
max weinberg
A lot of the song lives and dies on Springsteen’s vocal performance, but Weinberg would forever be proud of nailing that opening, saying, “I guess what hit me most about it was the emotionalism of the lyrics. I felt particularly proud to play on that record because it was a kind of an involved drum part, it involved not playing a lot, just getting into that tom-tom figure – ba-ba-ba-ba-boom bom-boom, ba-ba-ba-ba-boom bom-boom. And if anyone’s ever heard ‘Running Scared’ by Roy Orbison, that was the kind of tension we were trying to create.”
The whole thing makes perfect sense if we’re looking at it in conjunction with the lyrics. Not everything that happened on those backstreets was necessarily fun, and since those memories could get downright dangerous at times, that signature beat illustrates the protagonist having a few heart palpitations as they try to remember the lessons that they learned back in the day.
Listening to how Weinberg frames the scene, though, that was always how he thought about the right drum part. Most people liked the idea of a madman behind the kit, but true professional drummers know when the time is needed to fly off the handle and when it absolutely needs to be stripped back.
