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by Jay Lustig/The Star-Ledger
Friday May 15, 2009, 4:02 PM
Danielle RichardsDrummer Jay Weinberg fills in for dad Max on tour with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
(NOTE: For complete transcipts of the interviews with Jay and Max Weinberg, click here for Jay, here for Max.)
Jay Weinberg was practically born with a backstage pass in his hand.
“I remember I went to see the Rolling Stones when I was like 5, and all of a sudden I’m walking out of the bathroom with Mick Jagger, and it’s like, ‘No big deal, not a problem,’ ” says the 18-year-old son of drummer Max Weinberg.
He brings a similarly imperturbable attitude to his new gig: sharing drumming responsibility with his father on the current tour by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, which comes to the Izod Center in East Rutherford on Thursday and Saturday. With Conan O’Brien succeeding Jay Leno as the host of the “The Tonight Show” on June 1, Max, who leads O’Brien’s house band, can’t take time off to tour as he normally would. So Jay, a freshman at Hoboken’s Stevens Institute of Technology, will take over when his father can’t be there.
That’s right — a college freshman is playing drums on one of the year’s biggest rock tours.
(Photo: Ron Ring - Bruce Springsteen with drummer Jay Weinberg at an April concert at the Wachovia Spectrum in Philadelphia.)
“It’s certainly a unique story,” says Adam Budofsky, editorial director of Cedar Grove-based Modern Drummer magazine. “Maybe this sort of thing has happened before, at some point in the past, but I can’t remember it.”
To prepare for being the band’s lone drummer, Jay has played on portions of most shows of the current tour, which began with warm-up concerts at Asbury Park’s Convention Hall in March. He will be on his own for the first Meadowlands show on Thursday, as Max will be in Los Angeles that night, taping a test run of “The Tonight Show.”
He tends to play a little faster than his father and, with his long hair flying, adds a touch of youthful exuberance to the band’s collective personality. Musically, he has fit in smoothly, even though his previous experience was primarily with punk and metal bands.
“It’s been pretty intense, but I’m getting more comfortable,” he said May 8 while backstage at New York’s Ace of Clubs nightclub before a show by his own punk-rock band the Reveling.
“He’s killing on the drums,” said his proud father in a phone interview Monday, before a show in St. Paul, Minn., “and I’ve already stolen many, many of his licks.”
Working On a Dream
Jay’s first E Street experience came in July 2008, when he sat in for his father for one song — “Born To Run” — at a Giants Stadium concert, and didn’t miss a beat. Max says that late last year, when he conferred with Springsteen and others in the E Street organization about possibly missing shows, the idea of Jay taking over temporarily presented itself as “a very elegant and poetic solution.”
“In true Bruce, courageous fashion, he said, ‘Yeah, give the kid a shot,’” says Max.
Jay says he got a call from Springsteen in January or February. “He said, ‘Jay, as you know I have this band. And in the band, we have the world’s greatest drummer, who has a scheduling conflict. And when I asked him how we could resolve it, he gave me your name and number.’”
The first order of business was learning the vast E Street repertoire. Springsteen provided him with a list of about 200 core songs. Of course, he has had to learn other songs along the way, as well.
One of Jay’s biggest challenges came April 29 at the Wachovia Spectrum in Philadelphia. Springsteen decided, before the show, that he wanted to play “Kitty’s Back.” Jay had never played the song with the band before, or even rehearsed it.
“That’s a very complicated song, and Jay said, ‘I can do that,’” says Max. “He wrote out a little chart for himself that explained to him .Â¥.Â¥. basically it was a roadmap of the song. And he played it perfectly. I couldn’t believe it. That was one of our big show-stoppers, and we don’t play it very often, and without even ever playing it with the band, just by listening to it and learning the arrangement, he played the whole thing as well as I could play it.”
Jay feels that in addition to learning songs, he is developing the sixth sense that all E Streeters need.
“Bruce looks one way, you know to stop,” he says. “Bruce looks another way, you know to pick it up.”
“He’s gonna get up there, and he may not do it the same way twice,” says Max of Springsteen. “He’s feeling out the moment. What is happening is happening right now: It didn’t happen in rehearsal, and it may not happen tomorrow night. And you have to align yourself with that kind of thinking.”
There are obviously many seasoned drum masters Springsteen could have called on. But the choice of Jay makes sense on several levels. It reinforces the idea of the E Street as a family, and it gives the band a youthful shot in the arm.
“It might not be the most technically demanding gig,” says Budofsky. “But you have to have passion, and you have to be able to play these notoriously long, energetic shows. Just from that standpoint, the numbers of people who can do this begin to dwindle.
“Bruce is no dummy. He’s not going to hire somebody just because they’re his drummer’s son.”
Growin’ up
Jay, who grew up in Middletown, was born in 1990, a time when the E Street Band was on hiatus. Max began playing with O’Brien in 1993, and the E Street Band reunited in 1999.
Around that time, Jay started playing guitar, and later picked up bass. He didn’t start on drums until four years ago. He still plays guitar and bass, he says, “but drums is something I completely fell in love with. I can’t live without it.”
Starting with the 1999-2000 reunion tour, Jay would join his father for parts of tours. He says he has seen hundreds of E Street shows.
“I’ve grown up with the band for like 10 years,” says Jay, an Â¥’08 graduate of Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School. “So automatically, when I was like 12, I could pretty much play, like, ‘Murder Incorporated,’ ‘Badlands’ and all that stuff without even knowing how to play drums, just because I knew it.”
When he started playing the actual instrument, he learned quickly and mostly on his own.
“He said to me, ‘Dad, I don’t want to take any lessons. I just want to do this for myself, for fun,’” says Max. “And it made sense to me, because if you’re doing it for fun, you don’t need lessons. You’re going to figure it out.
“He did what I did. He played to records, and struggled with the difficulty of coordinating four limbs to act as one, and I really never showed him anything. I was busy with my work, and he’d come home from school and practice hours and hours every day.”
Both Jay and his father credit his discipline, and his ability to take his E Street responsibilities in stride, to his sports training. For many years, he was a hockey goalie.
“Being the last line of defense got me used to the high-pressure situations,” says Jay.
“You develop a thick skin,” says Max. “If the team wins, it’s a team victory. If the team loses, it’s all the goalie’s fault. It’s a lot like being a drummer, actually.”
While Max didn’t tutor him in drum technique, he has offered some more practical advice about “helping me condition my hands, and not develop tendonitis and carpal tunnel like he did,” Jay says. “It was really hard for him to record records at one time, because his hands hurt so much.”
The promised land
Jay is still a student at Stevens, in the business and technology program. He had to miss the May 4 E Street show at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., because of a test. Still, he hasn’t been in an actual classroom for a month. “I’ve spoken with the dean and with my individual teachers, and everybody’s been really cool about it,” he says. “They all want to help me do this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
He’s also sticking with the Reveling, a band he joined by answering a Craigslist ad and then auditioning. It’s far from a glamorous gig: at Ace of Clubs, they went on shortly before midnight, and played to about 40 people.
“He’ll go from playing with us, to 20,000, to playing underneath the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn to four people,” says Max. “He’ll haul his drums over there, and play until 4 o’clock in the morning, and they don’t get paid.”
Jay is the youngest in this group, too — his bandmates are all in their late 20s — but is more involved in the songwriting and arranging.
“Bruce and the E Street Band, that’s a benevolent dictatorship,” he says. “You follow the Boss: What he wants is what you do. But with a band like (the Reveling), it’s very democratic. We all have a say, we all bring stuff to the table.”
This week, though, there’s no question where his focus is. It’s on the E Street Band, and the Izod Center shows.
“That’s going to be a choking-up moment,” says Jay, about playing at the Meadowlands. “That’s going to be awesome.”
The Weinberg family had Devils seasons tickets for several years, and Jay has seen countless concerts there. A 2001 heavy metal show featuring Slipknot and Mudvayne, in particular, made a big impression.
The building “has so much history to me,” says Jay. “I remember going down a ramp on my stomach on a skateboard, and I fell, and the skateboard hit my face and almost knocked my teeth out.”
Was that backstage?
“Yeah, just doing shenanigans, on an E Street tour,” says Jay, a bit sheepishly, sounding, finally, like a typical 18-year-old.
