Bruce Springsteen Can’t Believe Everyone in the E Street Band Still Likes Each Other

“And he’s skipping over his 13-hour heart surgery,” Springsteen added. The drummer kept that procedure hidden from his bandmates until he was on the mend. “I said, ‘Max, Jesus Christ, why didn’t you tell me, man? I could have killed you doing one of the encores,’” Springsteen said. “But I have to salute Max. As you can watch in the film, he’s doing things that guy half his age would have a very difficult time doing.”

As for other difficulties, Springsteen and Weinberg revealed at the Q&A that they got over their squabbles early. “When Max initially got in the band—and I don’t think he’d mind me telling you this—he had trouble staying in time,” Springsteen says. “It was on The River album. I said, ‘Max, here’s why you have to stay in time. When you stay in time, you deepen the characters in my writing. You make them more steadfast, steady. You dig deeper into their souls and you bring more meaning to my music.’ And what’d you do? Max went home and slept with his drum kit.”

“It was my rock-and-roll bar mitzvah conversation,” Weinberg says. “It took place in June of 1979, in the lounge of a recording studio in New York. I was 28, and it really did change my life. I had a lot of potential. At that age, I also had a lot of anxiety that I brought out in my drumming. But Bruce sat me down and we talked. Well, I listened. He talked.”

Weinberg said Springsteen made a cinematic reference to get him to see the beat of the song in a different way. “He used a wonderful metaphor,” Weinberg says. “He said, ‘Picture a John Ford movie. The character is on the horse going across Monument Valley.’ And I’ll never forget this: ‘You are the mountains. You have to be the mountains.’ That conversation changed the course of my life, because I’d been in the band five years. I could have gone one way; I went the other way. When Bruce said I slept with a drum set, I went into this deep, deep [study].”