Max Weinberg has been the drummer for the E Street Band since 1974. He is not the most famous member — that is Springsteen, by a margin that requires no argument. He is not the most mythologized — that is Clarence Clemons, whose saxophone became the sound of Springsteen’s hope and whose death in 2011 produced the most publicly grieved moment in the band’s history. Weinberg is the drummer. He is the man who has held the time, night after night, for fifty years — who has been the rhythmic foundation beneath everything Springsteen has built — and whose contribution to what the E Street Band is has been consistently and cheerfully undervalued in the way that drummer contributions always are.
When Weinberg suffered a heart attack in 2000 and was forced to withdraw from touring for a period, the E Street Band was in the middle of a reunion that had already produced some of the most celebrated concerts of Springsteen’s career. The reunion — the band had been formally disbanded in 1989 — had restored something that the preceding decade of Springsteen’s solo work, however good, had never quite replaced. The chemistry between Springsteen and Weinberg, between Springsteen and Clemons, between all the original members, was specific to those specific people and was visibly, audibly present in a way the audiences responded to with something beyond normal concert enthusiasm.
The shows that followed Weinberg’s health crisis required a substitute drummer. The substitute was technically proficient. He was not Max Weinberg. Musicians who played those shows have described the experience as playing without a foundation — not falling, but aware, every moment, of what was missing and what the missing thing meant.
The night Weinberg returned — the specific concert at which he walked back to the drum kit — has been described by band members in interviews with the specific warmth reserved for things that matter beyond their surface. Springsteen stopped the show before Weinberg sat down. He turned to the audience and said something that the various accounts render slightly differently but that converges on the same essential content — that Max Weinberg was not his drummer. That Weinberg was his partner. That the E Street Band without Weinberg was a body without a heartbeat, which was, given the specific medical facts of the situation, a metaphor that landed with particular weight.
Weinberg sat down. The band played. Springsteen has said that the first song of that set — the moment Weinberg’s kick drum came in and the band locked into the groove that only exists when those specific people play together — was one of the most purely musical moments of his career. Not the best concert. Not the most significant artistically. The most purely felt. The moment when the thing you almost lost comes back and you hear it differently because of the almost.
The E Street Band has continued to experience loss — Danny Federici died of melanoma in 2008, Clarence Clemons of a stroke in 2011. Each loss has changed what the band is and what it sounds like. What Weinberg’s return demonstrated, before those losses accumulated, was the specific and irreplaceable value of the people who have been there longest — who hold the time while everyone else plays the melody, and without whom the melody has nothing to stand on.