Drummer Max Weinberg has been with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for more than three decades and has served as the musical director of “Late Night” for Conan O’Brien for more than a dozen years.   

But Weinberg was back to being a teenager in New Jersey when he was recently invited over to Springsteen’s house to preview the singer’s upcoming album covering songs associated with Pete Seeger.      

Springsteen brought Weinberg up to his room and played him 22 songs—13 of which made “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions”—while the two sat on the Boss’ bed.       

Weinberg, who did not play on the disc that is due out April 25, said anyone expecting the type of sparse, quiet album that Springsteen is prone to occasionally releasing will be surprised.      

“It’s really moving,” he said. “People are talking like it’s going to be another ‘Ghost of Tom Joad’ or ‘Devils and Dust,’ but it’s nothing like that. It’s very uplifting. Very joyous.”      

Despite the good vibrations, Weinberg said he’s not sure whether the E Street Band will re-form ever again, given that saxophonist Clarence “Big Man” Clemons is now 64 and the rest of the band members are in their mid 50s.      

“My main focus, my main job, is ‘Late Night With Conan Brien,’” he said during a two-hour public talk recently in upstate New York.

“I never think of the E Street Band one way or another as a going concern,” Weinberg said, comparing the band to Brigadoon, a mythical city that reappears every 100 years. “It’s out there. The bonds are still there. But as we’re getting older, you never know if we’re ever going to do it again.  

“I hope it happens again and I hope I’m able to do it because when we do play together now it becomes a very precious thing. But after 30 years, you get trained not to think about it much.”     
Ironically, it was a line from his old boss that might have helped him land the job at “Late Night” in 1993.      

Weinberg was taken by surprise after receiving a phone call from Springsteen in 1989, telling him he was breaking up the legendary band to go in another direction.      

Aimless for six months, the drummer decided to finish his college degree, and he wound up in law school with the hopes of becoming a music manager. But law school lasted only six weeks, and Weinberg took a job with a music company.      

After not playing the skins at all for several years, he got the itch back after joining 10,000 Maniacs on their last tour.      

Shortly after that tour ended, he  was hired as the second alternate drummer for “The Who’s Tommy” on Broadway, meaning he would fill in when the understudy to the regular drummer couldn’t make it. Though it was a far cry from the days when Springsteen’s band was the biggest in the world, he happily accepted it.      

As he went to celebrate the offer with his wife, he ran into his fate on a New York City street corner. There, he noticed little-known comedian Conan O’Brien, who had recently been tapped to take over “Late Night” from David Letterman.    

After impressing O’Brien and other executives with a makeshift band quickly brought together days later, Weinberg remarked to the talk-show host that “Bruce used to say that we took our fun very seriously.”    

“I think that struck a chord,” he said, and the gig was eventually his.

On the show, he writes and arranges music while he and his band, the Max Weinberg 7, often back some of music’s best acts. The most nervous he’s ever been in music, he said, was backing Tony Bennett.      

But fans of the show know that Weinberg has been more than just a musician. He’s also been a comic foil, taking part in a range of skits that have him shooting O’Brien and being shot at, dressing up as a woman, and staring down his boss.      

Weinberg said he’s willing to do anything to make a fool of himself, with one caveat: it can’t embarrass his wife of 25 years, Becky.      

He said the one time he balked at a skit was when O’Brien was hosting “Saturday Night Live” and they wanted the drummer to be found having sex with a model on his boss’ “Late Night” desk.          

Weinberg agreed to do the skit only after the young model was replaced by his wife.      

“A few days later I saw Matt Lauer at the gym and he said he saw the show and asked ‘who was that chick you were with?’” Weinberg recalls. “It was the first time I got to bust out the line, ‘That wasn’t a chick, that was my wife.’”     

A veteran television personality now, the drummer said it took him a while to get used to playing for laughs.      

“It was a difficult transition doing comedy because when we were out as the E Street Band we were very serious and trying to save the world,” he said.      

As popular as he is today with college-aged O’Brien devotees, Weinberg will always be remembered by an older generation of fans as the driving backbeat during Springsteen’s legendary three- and four-hour marathon shows in the 1970s and ’80s.      

He’s not a drummer who digs solos, but confessed that his favorite Springsteen songs to play live are “Ramrod,” because the big beat lets him relax and look at the audience, and “Candy’s Room,” because the opening drum work makes him feel “in that moment that I’m the only one up there.”       

On stage, he said the secret to playing three or four hours without a break is “not to pace yourself.”    
He said Springsteen told him early on “don’t hold anything back and the momentum will create more momentum.”      

He learned that during his very first show in Philadelphia with the band in 1974. The group played for three exhausting hours. Weinberg was ready to go home when Springsteen asked where he was going. There was still another show to do.      

While he has joined Springsteen and the E Street Band for two major reunion tours since 1999, Weinberg said he has had to make some adjustments on the road now that he is 55-years-old.      His style is now more finesse than the aggressive years of his youth.

And prior to the shows, the drummer eats two pieces of boiled chicken, takes a 45-minute nap, and does some deep breathing exercises before getting dressed.

He’s not the only band member getting in a pre-show snooze.   

“You come to our dressing room and everyone’s asleep and then we go out and play full out,” he laughed.             

Kenneth Lovett is a reporter for the New York Post and a contributor to The Wire.