Max Weinberg - Late Night With Conan O'Brien

Late Night With Conan O'Brien

In July 1993, Weinberg had a chance sidewalk meeting outside Carnegie Deli with newly selected Late Night host Conan O'Brien, where Weinberg spoke about his ideas for music on the show. O'Brien promised Weinberg an audition. Within a few short days Weinberg put together The Max Weinberg 7, recruiting musicians he had worked with during his career including on the Killer Joe project, starting with guitarist and arranger Jimmy Vivino. Weinberg decided a muscular, drums-driven jump blues vibe, partly derived from the Killer Joe sound, is what he would use as a starting point for the group's sound. At the early August audition the outfit impressed O'Brien with their ability to play not just rock but also rhythm and blues, soul, jazz, pop, and big band swing; Weinberg was so anxious to land the job that he threw up afterward. After a final meeting with executive producer Lorne Michaels they were hired as the house band. The band performed on the show every night since its premiere on September 13, 1993. O'Brien later said of the Weinberg choice, "The energy and enthusiasm of his music coincided with the show I wanted to do. Plus, his tan offset my ghostly complexion." Weinberg held the title of music director on the show, while Vivino did most of the arranging. Of his career rebound, Weinberg said simply: "I grabbed the brass ring twice."

In the early phases of the show, Weinberg was involved in occasional comedy bits, but mostly focused on his musical responsibilities, including the selection of walk-on music for guests. The band got a 30-second featured spot each night after O'Brien's opening monologue. O'Brien often received poor notices during the early years of Late Night, and Jon Pareles of The New York Times pronounced the Max Weinberg 7 as the "saving grace" of the show. Weinberg established an image by dressing in high-quality suits and a tie; he said, "I like us to look sharp and play sharp," and "I don't want to look like the audience, I want to look different." Weinberg became a television celebrity, and his visibility and stature grew from Late Night and established an image for him beyond Springsteen. Indeed, much of the show's young fan base, and some of the staff on the show itself, were unaware of Weinberg's past role in the E Street Band.

In 1994, Rhino Records released Max Weinberg Presents: Let There Be Drums, a three-volume set of CDs that highlighted drumming that Weinberg admired on songs from the 1950s through the 1970s. Recaps in 1998 of the first five years of Late Night concluded that the band had been an important element in the show surviving, with Weinberg's personality providing a foil to O'Brien's and with "the Max Weinberg 7 television viewers wishing they were in the studio to hear more." Their sound also fit into the swing revival going on during the late 1990s.

In 2000, Conan sidekick Andy Richter left the show, and Weinberg became the "second banana". Weinberg continued to present an obvious visual foil: as O'Brien said, "If you looked at this guy you would never know he was the drummer in a huge rock 'n' roll band. You would say he was the guy who did the band's accounting. But Max is the authoritative, buttoned-down adult in the midst of all this madness." The drummer reveled in O'Brien's youthful audience: "To be 49 and appreciated by 14-year-olds again? What a thrill!" Weinberg engaged in stare-downs with O'Brien and gave scripted screeds about newsmakers. Additionally, Weinberg was comically presented as a twisted character with sexual fetishes and homicidal tendencies in comedy bits. When Conan O'Brien was host of Saturday Night Live on March 10, 2001, his monologue featured a visit from the SNL studio to the Late Night studio (only a few floors apart in the same building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza), where Conan discovers Weinberg engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman on his desk (played by Max's real-life wife, Becky). Weinberg says of his comic persona: "t's playing against type. I've been happily married for nearly 30 years, with two wonderful children. It's not what I portray on the show, and that's funny." Weinberg continued his one-man college shows, now titled "E Street to Late Night: Dreams Found, Lost, and Found Again".

Weinberg returned to the E Street Band briefly when Springsteen re-grouped the band in early 1995 to record a few new songs for the Greatest Hits release. The regrouping was only temporary and the band returned to inactivity. Also in 1995, Weinberg drummed on two of Johnnie Johnson's songs: "I'm Mad" and "She Called Me Out of My Name," on Johnnie's 1995 album Johnnie Be Back. Weinberg spent two years building an 8,900-square-foot (830 m2) house in Middletown Township, New Jersey that they moved into in 1999; he picked up many of the furnishings for it from locations around the world during subsequent tours.

The Max Weinberg 7 released a self-titled album in 2000 on Hip-O Records; Weinberg said he waited until then because "I wanted to change my style of playing and hone my style before I committed to a record." He was especially proud that the band had successfully backed Tony Bennett during a late 1990s appearance on Late Night: "Two years ago if you'd asked me if I could play with Tony Bennett, I would have said absolutely not. I'm not in his league. But we played with him the other night, and it was wonderful. We swung."