When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Izod Center in the New Jersey Meadowlands on May 21, there was one musician conspicuously absent: Max Weinberg, the group’s drummer for more than three decades.

As Mr. Springsteen tore into his opening number, “Badlands,” Mr. Weinberg was on another stage 3,000 miles away, pounding his drum kit through a dress rehearsal of “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien,” in advance of its debut last Monday on NBC.The following night Mr. Weinberg boarded a red eye for the East Coast so he could rejoin his E Street band mates, however temporarily, for the second show of that New Jersey stand, which fell on a rare night off from his new duties.

For Mr. Weinberg and the seven other East Coast musicians who have relocated to California along with Mr. O’Brien — including all the founding members of the Max Weinberg 7, the house band on Mr. O’Brien’s “Late Night” for 16 years — the turnover in hosts (and bands) on “Tonight” has proved to be both exhilarating and disruptive.

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NEW JERSEY’S most famous R & B band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, has been conspicuously missing from the concert stage for over two years. In typical blue-collar fashion, Southside Johnny Lyon had no euphemistic excuse for his band’s absence.

“It wasn’t fun anymore,” said Mr. Lyon, 51, from his home not in New Jersey but in Nashville. “I’m not a schmoozer, I didn’t feel up to the business part of it. Besides, I don’t think I was any good the last couple of years.” While he was at it, he dispelled rumors of throat problems, which may have arisen because he failed to complete a performance during his last tour.

That was then. Today Mr. Lyon and his Jukes are touring full force, making three appearances in Connecticut, starting with a 6:30 p.m. concert Thursday on the Fleet Stage in Stamford. The show is part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. The band next performs on July 7 at City Center Danbury, then the following day at Taste of Enfield.

The band is even back in the recording studio for the first time since releasing “Better Days” in 1991. It seems that Mr. Lyon’s case of burnout has blown away. “Music is fun again,” he said. “I was glad to come back for the right reason.”

Mr. Lyon, who formed the band in 1974, has undergone many changes since his last tour: a divorce, his mother’s death, the sale of his house in North Stamford and the unfathomable move to Nashville.

“Here’s how stupid I am,” he said. “I moved out here to get away from the music business. With everything else happening, the divorce, my mother’s death, I had no more ties to New Jersey.”

To Mr. Lyon’s fans, his move to the capital of country music is as unimaginable as the New York Yankees relocating to the Meadowlands.

Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes evoke memories of nights dancing and drinking in the Stone Pony or some other bar on the Jersey Shore. The band became known as the country’s best bar band, a label Mr. Lyon proudly wears. “We made ourselves a reputation as a good band to see,” he said. “Maybe that’s because I’ve always associated music with having a good time.”

That association was made in Mr. Lyon’s youth, growing up Ocean Grove, N.J., half a mile from Asbury Park. “My father worked at the post office and my mother worked for the phone company,” he said. “I remember they’d come home from work, have a few beers and listen to records of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Big Joe Turner. I didn’t realize till I went to my friends’ houses with their parents drinking martinis and listening to Mantovani that my parents were weird.”

Though he said he had no intention of making music his career, when he was 15 years old Mr. Lyon became the lead singer of a R & B band because he already knew the songs of Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and Sam Cook. Mr. Lyon has indeed recorded many of these older songs on the Jukes’ 10 albums and Mr. Cook’s “Havin’ a Party” remains a staple of the band’s repertory.

“Not that I’m anti-intellectual,” Mr. Lyon said, “but I respond viscerally to music. It’s got to pick me up and shake me around. That’s what this music has always done to me.”

Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes rose from a Jersey band to national popularity soon after the band’s old friend Bruce Springsteen landed on every national magazine cover with the success of “Born to Run.”

The group signed with Epic Records and released “I Don’t Want to Go Home” in 1976; it featured Mr. Springsteen’s “Fever,” a Jukes signature song. The album was among the band’s best, along with “Hearts of Stone” (1978), the live double LP “Reach Up and Touch the Sky” (1981) and “At Least We Got Shoes” (1986).

Mr. Lyon said that his return to performing started casually, among friends at jam sessions in Nashville coffeehouses. “I was playing because I wanted to,” he said, “not because I had to please some record label or anybody else.”

“Writers always ask me if I’ll retire,” he said. “Music is not a choice. It’s just something you do. I’ll probably drop dead on the stage. The thing about my career is that I never planned it. Like everything else in my life, I just let it happen.”

By E. KYLE MINOR
Copyright (c) The New York Times, 2000