Max Weinberg - Early Life

Early Life

Weinberg was born to a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey to parents Bertram Weinberg, an attorney, and Ruth Weinberg, a high school physical education teacher. He has three sisters, Patty, Nancy and Abby. He grew up in Newark as well as in the neighboring suburban towns of South Orange and Maplewood.

The young Max was exposed to music early on, attending Broadway shows weekly from the age of two and liking the big sound put forth by the pit orchestras. He then liked the rhythms of country and western music. He knew he wanted to be a drummer from the age of five, when he saw Elvis Presley and his drummer, D. J. Fontana, appear on The Milton Berle Show in April 1956. Decades later, Weinberg said, "I think anybody who wanted to develop a life in rock 'n' roll music had a moment. That was my moment," and Fontana became a major influence on him.

Weinberg started actually playing at the age of six. His first public appearance came at the age of seven when he sat in on a bar mitzvah band playing "When the Saints Go Marching In". The bandleader, Herbie Zane, was the leading act for bar mitzvahs and weddings in the area; he became enamored of the tyke and brought him along on other engagements as a kind of novelty act. Weinberg thus became a local child star, drumming in a three-piece mohair suit. He gained an appreciation for showmanship and was a fan of Liberace and Sammy Davis, Jr. He grew to idolize drummer Buddy Rich and become a fan of Gene Krupa and saw drummer Ed Shaughnessy of Doc Severinsen's band on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson as having an ideal job as well as admiring the level of playing and serious sartorial style of the Tonight Show musicians. Weinberg stayed with Zane until junior high school and learned rhythms such as cha-chas, merenges, polkas, and the hora and playing everything from Dixieland jazz to Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore".

Weinberg attended Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel, a Reform Judaism congregation in South Orange, where he was inspired by a local rabbi and had what he later described as "a wonderful Jewish background." He would later say that the Jewish concept of seder, meaning order, became key to his vision of how a good drummer serves his band's music. Witnessing his father lose two summer camps in The Poconos impressed upon him the fragility of economic success and led to a strong work ethic.

When the British Invasion hit in 1964, the Beatles and their drummer, Ringo Starr, became a huge influence on Weinberg. He began playing in local New Jersey rock bands, playing the music of The Rolling Stones, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and The Young Rascals. While a member of The Epsilons, he played at the 1964 New York World's Fair. He attended Columbia High School in Maplewood; there he knew Leigh Howard Stevens, who would become a famous percussionist in his own right. Weinberg graduated from Columbia High in 1969. Another band he was in, Blackstone, recorded an eponymous album for Epic Records in 1970.

Weinberg first attended Adelphi University, and later Seton Hall University, majoring in film studies. His general goal was to become a lawyer, but he was still most viscerally interested in a music career and kept his drum set in his car in case any chances to play arose. He performed at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and bars, then landed a job in the pit band for the Broadway musical Godspell.