"It’s a party, not a concert.”
This is how Max Weinberg, drummer for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, describes his Jukebox shows, the most recent of which rocked the Stone Pony in Asbury Park on Saturday evening, September 6, 2025.
The show should have taken place on the outdoor Stone Pony Summer Stage. However, the forecast called for thunderstorms, so the decision was made to bring the show indoors.
How to accommodate the thousands of people who wanted to see Max and the band inside the iconic Pony, a venue that only fits 700? The answer: three separate shows over the course of one long, rainy summer night.
Kicking off at 7:30 PM and not ending until 2:00 AM, all three shows featured the Jukebox’s signature all-request format—in which audience members call out the songs they want to hear from a scrolling list of classic rock hits. The first two shows also featured an opening set of tunes showcasing each of the group’s killer vocalists.
The core of the band includes Bob Burger, Glen Burtnick and John Merjave, whom Max calls his A-Team. Acclaimed drummer Joe Bellia occasionally joins the band on percussion, as he did Saturday evening.
Max also recruited several powerhouse female vocalists—Reagan Richards, one-half of Williams Honor, the popular Jersey Country duo (the other half being renowned songwriter/guitarist Gordon Brown); Lisa Sherman who leads several nationally touring tribute shows, including “Three American Troubadours: Celebrating Taylor Simon King” and “Disco Connection”; and actress/singer/songwriter Jill Hennessy.
Photo by John Cavanaugh
A highlight of the first show was The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” with E Street Band member Garry Tallent stepping in on bass and Merjave channeling Eric Burdon’s gritty vocals.
The high-energy second show kicked off with “Gimme Some Lovin’” by the Spencer Davis Group, followed by Richards’ powerful rendition of “Breathless” by the Corrs. Other highlights included Sherman rockin’ the early 80’s pop/disco staple “Gloria,” and Hennessy delivering a soulful “Son of a Preacher Man.”
Once the crowd was nice and warmed up, Max grabbed the mic and amiably went out into the audience to take requests. People shouted out songs from the list of classic rockers and one (“Mississippi Queen” by Mountain) that wasn’t on the list. More on that one later.
Then he made his way back to the stage to play them. As a front man, Max has an easy, engaging demeanor with the crowd; in this case, the adoring hometown crowd. Max stepped out from behind the drums with the E Street Band in 1993 and for 17 years served as bandleader and comic foil for Conan O’Brien’s late-night shows on NBC. That experience, he recalled last week after a pre-show rehearsal, helped him hone the skills to front the Jukebox, including “the comfort of getting up and speaking extemporaneously…I’d never done anything like that.”
The format started with a gig Max had booked in Evanston, Illinois in 2017. He was fresh off The River 2.0 tour with Bruce and the E Street Band. “I’d known Bob Burger and Glen Burtnick forever from old Asbury Park days, and I needed to put a band together to play that, and they didn’t have a job that particular night.”
The guys had a set list featuring “some of our favorite stuff. It went over very well. We came off and they were really enthusiastic, they wanted us to go back for an encore and we didn’t have any more songs that we had played together. Knowing Glen, John and Bob, I knew that they knew every song. So Mark Stein, my manager, said why don’t you just go out there and wing it?
“So we go back on stage…and I said, ‘we’re out of songs, what do you want to hear?’ And someone said, ‘Hang on Sloopy.’ OK we know that, I think we know that and if we don’t we’ll fake it, that’s the Jersey way. So we played an extra hour of stuff that we all knew…we’d play a Beatles song and I would tell a story, whether it was about playing with Paul McCartney or George Harrison…or something that reminded me of the Beatles, based on the fact that I thought the audience might find it amusing. We came off and Mark said, ‘that was fantastic, that’s the show you should do, where you take audience requests.’”
And Max Weinberg’s Jukebox was born.
Max is a natural storyteller and shares humorous anecdotes throughout Jukebox performances, as he did that first night in Evanston. When introducing The Beach Boys’ “Do It Again,” he mentioned that he is a huge fan of legendary session drummer Hal Blaine, who had provided drums on “Do It Again” and many other Beach Boys hits. He then shared that during the “Magic” album recording sessions, Bruce had told him he could do his “Hal Blaine thing” on the evocative “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” which he brilliantly did. If you haven’t heard it recently, give it a listen with that story in mind.
A special guest during show #2 was renowned photographer and blues harmonica player, Danny Clinch. “Now we’re going to give you a little taste of what it was like at the Upstage,” Max said, referring to the legendary after-hours club in Asbury Park where Springsteen, Southside Johnny, and other Shore musicians would jam nightly until 5:00 AM back in the tumultuous late 60s. The band proceeded to tear into the Slim Harpo tune “Shake Your Hips,” highlighted by Clinch’s blistering harp solo, a song that the Rolling Stones recorded for the “Exile on Main Street” album in 1972.
After rocking through songs by Cheap Trick and The Ramones, Max prefaced the aforementioned “Mississippi Queen,” saying “we never played it, but that’s what this band is about, it’s about taking risks. And if you’re at the Stone Pony on a hot summer night…you wanna take some risks. Because it’s risky just being in this joint!” Needless to say, they nailed it.
Max then dove back into the crowd to get more requests. “We’re going to play as many of those as we can get to, before they shut this place down,” he said once back on stage. “Back in the old days, the Stone Pony was open till 5:00 in the morning… that’s how Bruce and the E Street Band stayed alive in those days, by coming here almost every single night. They refer to this place as The House That Bruce Built, and I believe that’s true. In fact, the first time we played Born in the U.S.A. it was right here,” he revealed, as cheers erupted from the crowd.
These shows happened to coincide with the 50th anniversary week of the release of “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen’s seminal 1975 album. In fact, Max had performed with Bruce and the E Street Band earlier in the evening at Monmouth University’s Pollak Theater for the “Born to Run 50th Anniversary Symposium, sponsored by the Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music.
Usually, Max ends the show by inviting fans on stage to sing, dance and play percussion on “Glory Days,” from Bruce’s Born in the U.S.A. album, which he did for the first show. But in honor of the 50th anniversary of BTR, he invited everyone in the room for show #2 to sing along to “Thunder Road.” It was a special moment of connection to cap off a rollicking hour-and-a-half party.
“That’s my job as a drummer, to get people up and dancing and moving and forgetting whatever else is going on in their lives through rhythm. When you’ve got great singers like these guys, great instrumentalists, you’re able to do that.”
On Saturday night at the Pony, they certainly did.
Visit MaxWeinberg.com for upcoming tour dates, merch, and more.
Suzanne Pisano is a versatile Jersey Shore-based writer with a passion for music and the arts. For more visit Suzannepisano.com
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