(Photo: Anne-Marie Caruso/NorthJersey.com)

These days, you can get almost anything at the touch of a button. Why not Max Weinberg?

"Many of you know me as a rock-and-roll drummer, or a drummer on TV," Weinberg, the celebrated drummer for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, said as a film crew captured him behind his kit at the Lakehouse Recording Studio in Asbury Park on a recent Saturday

Those are the very words you'll hear, starting Oct. 19, every time you push a button at the interactive "work station" at the new Grammy Museum Experience, opening at Newark's Prudential Center in the fall.

Walk into the booth, slip on a pair of headphones, press "START," and there will be Mighty Max — prerecorded, but still mighty. What's more, he'll be giving free advice.

In that booth, you can pick up a pair of drum sticks and — even if you're not a drummer —  get a three-minute tutorial on how to play the classic drum part Max Weinberg created for the classic 1984 Bruce Springsteen song "Born in the U.S.A."

The Weinberg exhibit is one of several "work stations" that will be part of this Grammy mini-museum, one of several satellite venues spun off from the 9-year-old Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. (Photo: Anne-Marie Caruso/NorthJersey.com)

 

"These are called eighth notes," he'll say, as you try to follow along on a Roland electronic drum kit.  "And you want to play them real steady so the guitar player can lock onto that."

The Weinberg exhibit is one of several "work stations" that will be part of this Grammy mini-museum, one of several satellite venues spun off from the 9-year-old Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. Hundreds of artifacts, including guitars, costumes, and set lists, will now reside permanently in the 8,500-square foot space set up in a wing of the Pru Center.

"I saw this in L.A.," Weinberg says. "You walk into a booth, press a button, and Ringo Starr was there giving you a lesson on how to play a Beatles song. It's the same concept here."

A musical education on the road

The Grammy Museum — a place where you could go to educate yourself about pop music — is the kind of luxury that Weinberg and his bandmates could never have imagined back in 1974, the year Weinberg joined Springsteen's E Street Band. (It it was the year before they went nuclear with "Born to Run.")

Weinberg and Springsteen on stage in Philadelphia on Sept. 7, 2016. (Photo: Elizabeth Robertson, AP)

 

Back then, Springsteen and his boys had to be their own Grammy museum.

"When we got together, I can tell you of hundreds and hundreds of hours on our various vehicles, from vans to buses, discussing the intricacies — all of us — of the records we admired," Weinberg says.

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It might be 4 a.m., Weinberg says, when Bruce would start to wax lyrical about, say, "The Wanderer" by Dion and the Belmonts.

"You just got eggs at the 76 truck stop, and you're back on the bus listening to music, and you're chilling out listening to 'The Wanderer,' and how the drummer — who is Panama Francis, the great R&B drummer from Atlantic [Records] — goes into the sax solo, from just playing the beat on the snare drum to playing the cymbal, and then when it goes back to the vocal, he shuts the cymbal down, It goes zhoonnnnkk! And Bruce pointing that out to me, that little detail — you know you hear it, but you don't really hear it until someone who loves it takes a second to point it out to you."

Max Weinberg, drummer for the E Street Band at the Lake House recording studio in Asbury Park on Saturday July 15, 2017. Weinberg records an instructional feature on drumming for the soon-to-open Grammy Museum in Newark.  (Photo: Anne-Marie Caruso/NorthJersey.com)

 

Anyone who wanted to seriously school himself in rock, in those days, was on his own. It wasn't until 1968 that the Grammys even acknowledged rock-and-roll in any serious way ("Sgt. Pepper" was the first rock release to win Album of the Year). 

Back in the early 1970s, there  were no video tutorials, no museums, no drum clinics, no School of Rock. If you were serious about pop music — and Bruce and his E Street Band were very, very serious — you set your own course of study.

"All of us would have these discussions," Weinberg says. Not just Bruce, Steven Van Zandt, and other members of the band, but also Springsteen's manager and mentor, Jon Landau.

"I can remember hours sitting in [Landau's] apartment, listening to all different types of music that he loved, that I wouldn't necessarily have listened to," Weinberg recalls. "He'd point out the beauty of this or that. The Grammy Museum certainly can, and does, fulfill the function of those communal meetings we had."

'A great boon to Newark'

For a new generation of kids, growing up at a time when music is being cut from school budgets and AM radio is a shadow of its former self, The Grammy Museum Experience may serve as a form of remedial music education.

A very cool form.

"I think the Grammy Museum generally is a marvelous idea," says Weinberg. "And I'm thrilled that they're bringing it to Newark, where I spent my early years. I spent a lot of my young years playing there, and I spent my early years living there, before we moved to the suburbs. It's a great boon to Newark and the arts there, and the arts community that has continued to thrive through all its trials and tribulations."

This being the Grammys' Jersey outpost, there will be a special emphasis on Garden State heroes: Frank Sinatra, Whitney and Cissy Houston, the Shirelles, Bon Jovi, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, the Four Seasons. And of course, Bruce.

"Thanks to Bruce in particular, New Jersey is right on the map, starting in the mid-1970s, and has never really left," says Robert Santelli, founding executive director of the Grammy Museum. Santelli, a Jersey boy himself (Jersey City, West New York, Point Pleasant Beach), is a music historian who has worked for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and whose books include "Greetings From E Street: The Story of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band" (2006).

Robert Santelli, executive director of the Grammy Museum. (Photo: Business Wire)

"When you say New Jersey, wherever you go, people think of Springsteen," Santelli says. "But the interesting thing about New Jersey is that we're so diverse. Just as New Jersey is a microcosm of America, so New Jersey music is a microcosm of American popular music."

All of that music was absorbed, like a sponge, by Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny, and other Jersey guitar-slingers who worked the rough shore saloons of the 1960s and Seventies.

Back then, your professional survival — occasionally, just your survival — depended on being able to play what the audience wanted to hear. Musicians of Sprinsgteen's generation might learn hundreds, even thousands, of tunes. That spirit is preserved, to this day, in the Boss' stadium shows. How many times have you seen the E Street Band go into a 30-second huddle onstage, and then come back playing "Shout," "Seven Nights to Rock," "Summertime Blues," or some other old cover that no one — including, possibly, Bruce himself — saw coming? 

"We were lucky that pop music and the transistor radio was our link to the world," Weinberg says.

Max Weinberg's Jukebox

The drummer, himself a walking musical encyclopedia, brought that skill set  not only to 40 years of Bruce gigs, but also to his stint as bandleader on "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" and other programs. There too, he might be called on to pull all kinds of tunes out of his hat. "If you want to keep working as a drummer, you better know every kind of song," he says.

He's also put that knowledge to good use, lately, in a new band: Max Weinberg's Jukebox. (They have shows July 16 and 17 at City Winery in New York, Aug. 30 at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park and Oct. 18 at White Eagle Hall in Jersey City.) The whole show, he explains, consists of audience requests.

Max Weinberg, drummer for the E Street Band at the Lake House recording studio in Asbury Park on Saturday July 15, 2017. Weinberg records an instructional feature on drumming for the soon-to-open Grammy Museum in Newark. (Photo: Anne-Marie Caruso/NorthJersey.com)

"The audience creates the set list," Weinberg says. "That's really fun, because we play for two hours. We have 500 songs on our list. … A very important component to this is drinking. Because it's pandemonium."

You might ask how Weinberg, given his long-term gig with the self-proclaimed "hardest working white man in show business," finds time in and around his mammoth Springsteen tours (the last one ended on Feb. 25 in New Zealand) to do things like Max Weinberg's Jukebox and shoot footage for the Grammy Museum Experience.

The answer is that, with the Boss, there is often quite a bit of down time. At the moment, Weinberg has no idea when the phone might ring and Bruce might be on the horn with another set of dates.

Right now, the only thing that's been mooted about Springsteen's upcoming schedule is a "Broadway residency" that many are excited about — eight weeks at the Walter Kerr Theatre in November and December which Weinberg, as far as he knows, is no part of. Nor is he necessarily convinced that the engagement, announced in the New York Post and Rolling Stone but not on Bruce's official website, is gospel.

"I don't know anything about it except what I read in the New York Post," he says. "I not only don't know what he's doing, I don't know whether he's doing. … I read it and I said, I've been with Bruce 43 years. There are elements that don't ring true."

Not that Weinberg is against the idea. As a matter of fact, he thinks an evening with Bruce Springsteen, on Broadway, would be fantastic.

Bruce, after all, does know a lot of songs.

"If he ever did decide to do it, in whatever capacity, with his songlist, that would be super compelling," Weinberg says.

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com

http://www.northjersey.com/sto...xperience/474268001/