Adam Weiner: A Rock’N’Roll Preacher Gets Serious (But Not Too Serious)

The last time I saw Adam Weiner, he was standing atop his piano bench in a gold-lame bolero jacket, a white tank top and black tuxedo pants. His dark, curly hair was plastered with sweat against his forehead, and he was exhorting the sardine-packed crowd inside a white tent to shout for joy.

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The time was the spring of 2019, a full year before the pandemic pall fell over America. The place was Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion festival amid the leftover, Old West sets from the Red Headed Stranger movie. But the mood was not cowboy honky-tonking; the mood was religion and rock’n’roll mixing in dangerous proportions as they once had with Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.

As his band Low Cut Connie segued into “Shake It, Little Tina,” their piano-pounding showstopper, Weiner had climbed up on the bench like a preacher at a pulpit. He asked us if we were having a good time, and we assured him we were. But this boogie-woogie evangelist had an unconventional concept of what a good time actually involved.

“I don’t care where you’re from,” he shouted. “I don’t care what color you are; I don’t care what religion you are. I don’t care what you do all day; I don’t care what you do all night.” Off came the jacket, revealing black suspenders and a gold medallion, and he began swinging his hips to drive home each point. This rock’n’roll party had no room for discrimination or hatred—all were welcome, and all were celebrated. “All I care about is that we’re here together right here, right now.”

Here was a clue that Weiner and Low Cut Connie were more than just a party band living in the moment; they were after a grander vision than that. They wanted to hitch the engine of high-octane rock’n’roll to a wagon offering inclusion, maybe even redemption, to all the beat-down, left-out and forgotten folks that the music was made for in the first place. The band has since doubled down on this bet by releasing this year’s Private Lives, an album of 17 ambitious songs that offered a similar shindig with a message.

“We got known as a party band,” Weiner says over the phone from his Philadelphia home, “and people still use that term. I have no problem with that—if people want to associate me with having a wild time at a sloppy rock’n’roll show, that’s great. But over time, I wanted to expand the definition of what that includes. I wanted to talk directly to everything they’re feeling, not just the party spirit.”

The turning point, he says, was the 2016 election. After that, when he looked out in the crowd during the show or when he talked to fans after the show, he detected “a scary level of fear and anger” he hadn’t seen before. If he was really going to respond to his audience, he had to engage with those feelings as well as the joy and release. And to do that, he would have to open up about his own doubts and depression.

“Nothing’s more likely to change your thinking,” he explains, “than to get on stage when there’s been a school shooting, or to get on stage when someone we cherish has just died or to do my live stream an hour after George Floyd was killed. Look at Tina Turner, Otis Redding and James Brown, the most exciting performers ever. Their music acknowledged racism, poverty, sexism and sadness, and I want my music to do the same. There’s a common ground that we all find in music and performance, that we all share as human beings on this planet.”

The key song from the new album was “Now You Know,” a personal confession with rattling maracas, a rock’n’roll admission that he grew up when “it was a bad time to be a sensitive child,… a bad time to be out in the wild.” It’s that time again, he sings, and he can sympathize with every kid who feels that way now. “I’m a lonely boy,” he sings, “but I ain’t a liar, still feel like my pants are on fire. You stand on the stage, take off your clothes; the weight of the world is starting to show.”

If you’ve ever seen Weiner climax a show by slipping off his suspenders and ripping his tank top to pieces, even as he hollers, “What we have to do, boys and girls, is spread this sweet feeling all over the country, all over the globe, and if we do that, we’ll never lose,” you understand how taking off your clothes is connected to the weight of the world. As the women’s and LGBTQ movements have proven, freedom in the public realm is linked to freedom in our private lives.

“In recent years,” he says over the phone, “I’ve begun to include more truth-telling in my songwriting and my performing. I want to be more diverse in the people I’m speaking about and speaking to. I’ve met so many people over the years while I’m traveling; I’ve seen so much struggle, and frankly I’ve had my own struggles. Nothing’s more likely to expand your understanding than having to do a show when you’re depressed or seeing people lifted up when they’re depressed or experiencing adversity. It’s a magic trick, to change people’s minds like that.”

It was a struggle to pull Private Lives together. In the two years since his previous albums, Dirty Pictures (Parts 1 and 2), Weiner had assembled more than 30 songs, even as Low Cut Connie churned with personnel turnover and its leader suffered his own crisis of confidence. But when he finished the title track, one of the final candidates for the new album, he saw a theme that tied everything up: the fact that we all have to balance private secrets and public personas.

“‘Private Lives’ is the summation,” he says, “the mission statement. We breeze through many places and characters in that song. Once I had that, I said, ‘This wraps itself around the other songs.’ Each song should create a picture of origin and then take you somewhere. Outside of that, I wanted to be sure that the other people and voices I was taking on felt truthful. Anything that felt campy or a bit of a put-on had to go.”

Opening with the throbbing bass of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” and adding the female “dit-doo-doos” of the Raelettes, the song pulls the camera back to show us all the characters that make up a neighborhood: the squares and the freaks, the nanny who “moves a little weed on the side” and the guy who paints houses he can’t afford. Weiner sizes up their virtues and their flaws, only to declare, “It sounds cheesy, but these people, they’re the reason I’m alive.”

For a rock’n’roll hipster like him, perhaps the most daring move he could make is to confess to cheesy sympathy for someone else. Not for him the navel-gazing narcissism of so many singer-songwriters. Like songwriters from Stevie Wonder to Bruce Springsteen, Weiner’s songs have deepened as he has broadened his subject matter from himself to   the people around him.

“There’s a little bit of me in all of them,” he admits. “The older I am, the more people I’ve met, and I find them all endlessly fascinating. On Dirty Pictures, I had a song called ‘Hollywood’ about a homeless man playing guitar for tips. I don’t think I could have written when I was younger; I wouldn’t have paid enough attention. But now it’s so interesting to imagine the rest of people’s lives: the janitor who’s cleaning up after the show, the woman checking me into the hotel, the kid smoking cigarette at the diner on his break. I was never cool; I’m interested in them all.”

That outward gaze led Weiner to the new album’s “Look What They Did,” the most political song he’s ever released. This brooding ballad opens with just voice, piano and a simmering synth in the background as he describes a turning point in the history of Atlantic City, New Jersey: “They built casinos in 1981; they said the whole freaking city’s gonna grow. Donald Trump made half a billion—what have we got to show?” With the piano reflecting the sadness and the synth echoing the anger, the music reinforces the mixed feelings of the words.

“I’m not interested in writing songs about Donald Trump,” Weiner says, “but I am interested in writing about the people affected by him. The casinos moved into Atlantic City in 1981 when I was very young, and promises were made to the people who lived there. They didn’t want the casinos, and they voted them down. Then they voted for it after they were promised that all this money would go to the schools and the town. And none of the money did.

“And it decimated the local economy, because if you were at the casino, you didn’t have to go a few blocks to a dry cleaner or a restaurant or a bank, because everything was there in the casinos. When things went south, Trump and his cronies aggressively bankrupted the casinos, took their money and left town.”

Weiner grew up in New Jersey in the ‘80s, when Springsteen ruled the state like a pope. The Boss also wrote a song about promises made and betrayed in Atlantic City for the Nebraska album, and Weiner says that his song is a kind of unintentional sequel.

“I never thought Bruce was a genius like Dylan or James Brown,” Weiner says, “but I thought he was a hard-working craftsman, always trying to improve, always trying to expand the music he made. I think Nebraska is such an amazing album; that’s another kind of soul music. I spent my summers in Atlantic City, so I understood what Bruce was writing about. He talks about having a 50-year conversation with his fans, that he can take them new places and they will go with him. And I know what he’s talking about now that I’ve been doing this for a while, because I feel that way about my fans.”

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