Max Weinberg’s favourite Bruce Springsteen song
When you’ve spent the majority of your adult life as a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, it’s hard to imagine that you could possibly be better known for a different gig. Even Steven Van Zandt, after years portraying Silvio Dante on The Sopranos, is generally gonna be identified by the man on the street as “Little Steven!”
If there’s a real celebrity outlier from The Boss’ crew, it might actually be drummer Max Weinberg, who gained a second wave of fame in the 1990s and 2000s as comedian Conan O’Brien’s bandleader on the US talk show Late Night. In that role, Weinberg created a sort of deadpan comedic version of himself to serve as O’Brien’s foil, and over time, it changed his whole reputation from serious, workmanlike rock drummer to goofy, jazz-orientated absurdist.
“If you looked at this guy you would never know he was the drummer in a huge rock ‘n’ roll band,” O’Brien once said of his old sidekick. “You would say he was the guy who did the band’s accounting.”
Even as Weinberg’s new comedy fan base was growing, he was still regularly called upon to hit the road when Springsteen assembled his Asbury Park Avengers for another tour. It was on these occasions that many of Max’s younger Millennial admirers were properly introduced to the drummer from the “huge rock n’ roll band”.
Whether he looked the part or not, Weinberg was an essential component of the E Street line-up dating almost back to its inception (he replaced original drummer Vini Lopez in 1974). And in that role, he was again something of a necessary foil to the guy at the front of the stage, often tasked with creating an understated, rhythmic backbone to some of the most explosive and emotive rock anthems in the American canon, be it ‘Born to Run’, ‘Thunder Road’, ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’, etc.
One of Weinberg’s own personal favourite songs from the E Street catalogue is a particular heartstring puller. ‘Backstreets’—from 1975’s Born to Run LP—is one of Springsteen’s quintessential “rebel without a cause” tales, which the Boss described years later as being about “youth, the beach, the night, friendships, the feeling of being an outcast and kind of living far away from things in this little outpost in New Jersey.”
“Laying here in the dark, you’re like an angel on my chest
Just another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness
Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
Well, after all this time, to find we’re just like all the rest
Stranded in the park, and forced to confess“.
As Max Weinberg explained in an interview with ABC Radio, ‘Backstreets’ resonated with him narratively, as a Jersey boy himself, and it also provided him with one of his best challenges behind the kit.
“I guess what hit me most about [‘Backstreets’] was the emotionalism of the lyrics,” Weinberg said. “I felt particularly proud to play on that record because it was 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. And I like to think we did.”
Some people would say that “not playing a lot” is one of Weinberg’s secret weapons, as his tasteful minimalism—sort of like the anti-Keith Moon—delivers just the right complement to the E Street Band’s lush wall of sound.
Of course, that sort of less-is-more approach doesn’t quite hit the same way when you isolate the drums on their own—a fact that was exploited to hilarious effect in a Late Night with Conan O’Brien sketch in 1999, called ‘Max Weinberg’s Greatest Hits’. A parody of CD compilation adverts of the era, the sketch imagines a Springsteen hits album in which you can only hear Weinberg’s drumming and nothing else. The solo Max version of ‘Born in the USA’ is easily the best.
