Max Weinberg Interview

INTERVIEW WITH MAX WEINBERG FROM TheCelebrityCafe.com ARCHIVES

DM) Seems like you've been very busy lately with the Late Night Life, life as an author, and life as a conference speaker, plus touring with the E-Street band.

MW) I really enjoy being busy. I think I'm pretty fortunate, because I think I have the best of both worlds; at least I have for the last year and a half. Playing with my band on Conan O'Brien is really a major dream come true. This is our eighth season, and we've certainly gained a very dedicated audience, which is something I'm very proud of. I'm proud of the CD, The Max Weinberg, and, of course, I played for a year and a half on tour with Bruce and the E-Street band, which was in a lot of ways revisiting my roots but doing it at a time when I'm much more adept at what I do.

DM) Some critics have talked negatively about late night show bands as being something just to play the music between commercials. What's your usual response to those critics?

MW) When you look at the original Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson and the Doc Severson band, it doesn't get much better than that. That big band was modeled after the Count Basie sound, so that no matter if they played late at night or earlier in the day, it was a swinging, driving band. That's kind of the perspective I took when I got involved with Conan, to hark back to those days when a band really played some music. We play all through the commercials. I'm very fortunate to have six guys playing with me who are some of the best musicians anywhere. Jimmy Vavino, who's our guitarist, is also our arranger. He's an enormously talented guy. He sings, plays guitar and arranges better than anybody else in New York City, and all the guys from the band play great. I've never seen it discussed, as bands that play on late night are less than musical organizations, because I know they all try to play the best kind of music that they can.

DM) Which music is more your personal musical style, E-Street or Late Night?

MW) Well, I came up as a drummer in service of whomever I was playing for, whether it was a singer or a sax player. Although I feel that I have a certain style, drummers have to be a bit chameleon-like or they don't work, so my perspective was that I always wanted to work. So I learned how to play all kinds of music with a lot of different leaders. When I became my own leader, what I naturally gravitated to was instrumental music, being a drummer. A genre that I always loved was Jump Blues, which we started playing when the show went on the air in 1993. Jump Blues was a short-lived genre that existed after World War II, almost a precursor of rock and roll. It was muscular music but it was rooted in jazz, and that's kind of the approach that I took when I put this band together.

DM) Does the CD contain the same music that we hear on late night?

MW) Only on some of the things. It certainly is the style of music that we display every night. But there are some surprises, some new tunes that we've come up with, new for the CD, but some of the tunes are ones we have been playing since the beginning of the show. On one tune that we wrote, a good friend of ours, Dr. John, plays lead and also piano; it was written with him in mind.

DM) So I assume that, with the show, you're not going to need to tour around in order to support the CD.

MW) Yeah, we're pretty fortunate in that we're on TV every night, playing for millions and millions of people so often. And the result of being on TV that frequently means that you have to be in one place all week, so that kind of eliminates touring. But, with my schedule over the past year and a half, I've had quite a lot of touring on my plate, so I'm ready to stay in one place.

DM) How did you work out the touring and the television show?

MW) I was very fortunate that Conan O'Brien and the producer gave me a leave of absence. NBC, as well, was very understanding, and I think it's a comment on the respect that people have for Bruce Springsteen that I was able to do this tour.

DM) Well, it was a pretty big deal in the media that it was the first time the E-Street band got together in years.

MW) Yeah, it was a blast, and we had a great time.

DM) Did it feel the same way it did before, just like picking up where you left off?

MW) In some ways yes; in most ways it was much better. Everybody had become much better musicians through the years. Older mostly, and several of us, having had families, had a lot to do with the relaxation that crept in. In most ways it was better though, although I don't know exactly why. We did about 140 concerts, and at the end nobody was really all that tired. It seemed like a good time to end it, but in terms of how we were doing physically, there was no problem carrying on at all.

DM) Do you ever envision that it could happen again?

MW) I never really think about it. It was a one-time affair from my perspective, getting back together and looking at what we did. I was very fortunate to be granted a leave of absence. It was for a specific amount of time, and now I'm back on TV, so that's my perspective; that's my home to me. I look forward to spending many, many more years on the Conan O'Brien show.

DM) Do you enjoy the stability of the Conan O'Brien show, as opposed to a tour where you can wake up in any given city?

MW) I love both. Certainly being on TV every night, an hour from my house, lends stability to my life. I'm a family man with two children, and it's tough when you're on the road. But then again, there's nothing equal to what it is to be playing in front of 20,000 fans of your music. When I say that I have the best of both worlds, it's really true. I have this incredible experience of being on TV each night, doing comedy and writing music and playing with a great bunch of guys in my band; and on the other hand, I have the experience of playing those classic songs that Bruce wrote. The E-Street band is a fabulous band with great players, real personality-filled players. It was wonderful to have Steve Van Zandt back in the band, because he was really so important to the E-Street band sound.

DM) When you went on tour recently, this must have been the first time your kids really saw you on tour.

MW) Yeah, the last time we went on tour was 1988, and my daughter was a year old then, and she actually did go on that tour; but she doesn't' remember much about it. To my children, I'm the television guy. They grew up with me on television, so seeing me playing in a rock band was something that they had not really experienced before. My daughter's a musician and appeared with the E-Street band several times in New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia. She plays keyboards and sat in with us, which was a lot of fun for me as her father.

DM) Whose idea was it initially to have her join in with you guys?

MW) It was actually Bruce's idea; he heard her playing one time at rehearsal. When we took a break, she was playing some classical music, and he said, "That sounds great. Learn some of our songs and come up and play with us."

DM) That must have been incredible for you as a father to play with your daughter.

MW) It was. It was fun for all of us, because it was the second generation of E-Street musicians. She's very talented and she's very classically trained, but she loves rock and roll and came up to play some rock and roll. But that was quite a big thrill for me.

DM) Did everybody always keep touch through the years?

MW) Oh, through the years, even when we weren't actively playing, we all stayed very close with one another. You know, you can't go through that kind of experience, coming out of nothing, to the kind of impact that group had, without becoming close and remaining so.

DM) That's the other thing that really surprised me about your career, that you played on two of the best-selling albums of all time, Bat Out of Hell and Born in the USA.

MW) Yeah, it's incredible. I read a statistic which said they were the two largest-selling rock records of all time, as far as rock is defined and not pop.

DM) How did Bat Out of Hell come about, then?

MW) Well, I had a friend who came to me in the summer of 1976 and said he had found this great singer and piano player who writes songs, and he wondered if I could I come up and hear them and maybe get involved, maybe even put a band together. So I went up to New York to this small rehearsal studio on 57th street, and there were Meatloaf and Jim Steinham and Ellen Foaley, who sang "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights." And I was blown away by the songs and by Meatloaf's performance. Roy from the E-Street band got involved, and Todd Rundgren produced it. Overall, it was recorded relatively quickly. I think it happened between August and the autumn, and who knew it would be a classic record and become one of the biggest- selling records in history.

DM) That came out after E-Street started hitting its peak?

MW) The fact that Roy and I were involved was the main publicity of the record. We'd been with Bruce and the E-Street band for several years at that point and had been a big concert attraction. That had been the focus of publicity for the record company. At that point, other than Rocky Horror Picture Show and a couple of off-Broadway things that Meatloaf did, he really came out of nowhere to that level of success.

DM) After the record, what other involvement did you have with Meatloaf?

MW) Well, I recorded with Jim Steinham throughout the '70's and recorded with Meatloaf again in the 80's on a record that bombed out, one that a legendary producer worked on. I played on quite a few of Jim's compositions, such as the Bonnie Tyler stuff, and he had a big hit with Air Supply. I also played on what was considered the only unsuccessful Barbra Streisand record in history, called "Left in the Dark." Jim Steinham wrote it and it did nothing.

DM) So you've been on the best albums and the worst albums in history.

MW) It was a good record; it just wasn't in the style that her fans expected to hear.

DM) In addition, you wrote a book, I understand?

MW) Yeah, I wrote a book in the early 80's, called The Big Beat, which was interviews with all of my favorite drummers, from Ringo Starr to Charlie Watts, to Levon Helm of The Band to Elvis Presley's original drummer. It was a "fan's-eye view" of the people who made me want to become a drummer.

DM) What did you learn from the experience of doing these interviews?

MW) It started out originally as a way to find out more information about drumming, and it became an oral history. My interview with Ringo was the first interview he had done since the Beatles broke up. Very in-depth, and at the time none of the Beatles were doing interviews. This was in 1980. They did interviews about other subjects, but they all were very reluctant to talk about the Beatles. It hadn't been all that long ago that they'd broken up. It was quite a thrill for me to meet him and interview him for the book. The book isn't available anymore, but I own the rights for it and the film of the interviews. It was fun, although it was a lot of work, but it turned out to be a lot of fun, anyway.