Bruce Springsteen Forum

Springsteen's Drummer, Max Weinberg, Has a
Real-Estate Obsession


By BEN CASSELMAN
April 11, 2008; Page W1


Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had just finished playing a sold-out show at Earls Court in London, and Max Weinberg, the band's longtime drummer, was thinking about countertops.


[Max Weinberg]
Max Weinberg of the E Street Band and his house in central New Jersey.

Specifically, Kirkstone countertops. Mr. Weinberg wanted the pale green stone for the kitchen in the house he was building back in New Jersey. He knew the stone came from England, and he noted a kitchen-supply store they passed on the way back from the concert. The next day, the store's manager told him that it didn't stock the material but suggested he try the Kirkstone showroom nearby. Mr. Weinberg paid a visit and had the stone shipped across the Atlantic.

Mr. Weinberg's Middletown, N.J., house is full of such stories: light fixtures picked up on tour in Milwaukee; heart-of-pine floors snagged at $8 a foot from a supplier in New Hampshire; William Morris-patterned wallpaper from the original producers in London. Some have a connection to where he found them; others are just good buys he finagled on the road. "I'd do great deals because I'd help [the suppliers] get tickets to the shows," says Mr. Weinberg, who turns 57 on Sunday.

Some celebrities are well known for their real-estate investing. Serial buyers such as Nicolas Cage, Ellen DeGeneres and Billy Joel have scooped up lavish spreads and then dumped them just as quickly, often at substantial profits. Mr. Weinberg is a different sort of real-estate obsessive, the sort who spends hours leafing through property records at town hall, who throws around names of architects the way most people throw around names of rock stars.


[Max Weinberg]
Max Weinberg built his house in Middletown, N.J., in part by using materials he picked up while on tour.

"If you ask somebody, 'Give me the stereotypical description of a rock star,' they would not say meticulous due diligence, understanding intricacies of zoning," says Mr. Weinberg's friend and attorney, Jerry Zaro. "It's nothing for Max to go down to city hall and spend a day mired in their arcane regulations."

But Mr. Weinberg is moving from private real-estate enthusiast to developer, and the transition has stirred up a controversy. He plans to sell 22 acres of his 40-acre estate as a three-lot subdivision. His plan, filed with the township in 2002, drew an immediate outcry. Mr. Weinberg, who has served on the board of the Monmouth Conservation Foundation, came under fire for developing the land rather than preserving it. He was branded, in his own words, "an arrogant rock star." A Newark Star-Ledger columnist called Mr. Weinberg a "symbol of hypocrisy" and said his professed environmentalism was "a way of feeling good without actually doing good."

Trudging across the property one chilly day recently, Mr. Weinberg brushes off the allegations that he's a hypocrite. The conservation foundation, he says, has never been against development, just against thoughtless development. His project, he says, is "very conservative" -- just three lots, with the maximum number of trees preserved.


[Max Weinberg]
Mr. Weinberg's home theater has a statue of the "Creature From the Black Lagoon."

Not everyone was convinced. Neighbors criticized the plan for threatening one of the largest undeveloped spaces remaining in the area. Local planning authorities expressed similar concerns -- but said they had little choice but to approve it since Mr. Weinberg had done his research, and the subdivision plan was done by the book.

"I really feel this is not best for the area," the Middletown Township Planning Board's chairwoman, Judith Stanley Coleman, said at the time of the vote, according to the Asbury Park Press, a local newspaper. "But we have laws in front of us that we have to take into consideration, and that is what we have to abide by."

After the approval, the controversy died away -- but it could soon make a comeback. Mr. Weinberg plans to put the 22-acre subdivision on the market this spring, asking $8 million for the three lots. (He says he hopes to sell them together but will entertain offers for them individually as well.) If Mr. Weinberg gets his price, he'll make a handsome profit -- he paid less than $1 million for the full, 40-acre property in 1997. "I wanted my children to be able to take advantage of my planning," he says.

But Mr. Weinberg says he also had another, more creative goal: He wanted to make something. When he bought the land it was overgrown almost to the point of being impassable. Mr. Weinberg says the first thing he did when he bought it was clear paths. "I wanted to see what I had," he says. "I really wanted to do something with it."

That same impulse has lain behind Mr. Weinberg's real-estate dealings for 30 years. He likes to look at land and envision possibilities no one else sees. Says Mr. Zaro: "I can look at a dense thicket of woods and he can envision a beautiful subdivision. He's living in his canvas."

Mr. Weinberg has completed only one canvas: his 8,900-square-foot, seven-bedroom house. (The structure, separate from the land, has an assessed value of $1 million.) The house took two years to build -- the family moved in on Christmas Eve 1999. It is full of personal touches: a fireplace made from "peanut stone," a rough rock found in Monmouth County; a music room adorned with drum memorabilia, including a crash cymbal given to him by Ringo Starr; a movie theater with a "Creature from the Black Lagoon" statue cast from the mold used to make the costume in the movie; and a medieval-style wine room with a suit of armor, picked up for $100 at an antiques store in nearby Red Bank. "I'd never want to sell the place," Mr. Weinberg says. "What would I do with all this stuff?"

Mr. Weinberg may be proudest, however, of the house's guts. The structure has a 15-zone heating system, meaning 15 rooms or areas can have their temperatures controlled individually. The system's copper pipes line up neatly on one wall in the mechanical room. "Have you ever seen a cleaner mechanical room?" Mr. Weinberg asks, smiling.

Mr. Weinberg made his first foray into real estate in 1977, when he bought the home he had been renting, a three-bedroom house overlooking the water in Atlantic Highlands, N.J. Mr. Weinberg paid just $48,000 for the property, but it felt like a big step; he was a 26-year-old rock musician, but suddenly he had a mortgage. He also was hooked.

"I got my feet wet in real estate through that deal," he says. "I loved that house. I loved the fact that I owned it."

It didn't take Mr. Weinberg long to want more. He began planning out his dream house, a glass-and-steel home modeled after the work of Richard Meier, one of his architectural heroes. His cliff-top property was the perfect site, but he also needed the land below the cliff -- the house would have its entrance atop the cliff and the rest of the house would extend down below. So Mr. Weinberg made his first trip to town hall and learned that the 1½ acres of land was owned by a woman in her 90s who lived in New York. Mr. Weinberg wrote her a letter and worked out a deal to buy the land for $8,500, he says.

Mr. Weinberg never built his Richard Meier-esque house because he and his wife, Becky, decided they'd like to live on a larger property. In 1984, the couple paid $300,000 for a five-acre farm that was part of a development, also in Monmouth County, and learned a lesson that Mr. Weinberg hasn't forgotten.

The Weinbergs bought the property, part of a subdivision, from the developer, who initially planned to keep the farm for himself. The developer seemed impressive -- he wore fancy suits and drove a Cadillac -- but he was deeply in debt and needed to make a deal, Mr. Weinberg says. But Mr. Weinberg didn't know any of that -- and he didn't dig into the deed records that might have revealed it. (Mortgages usually are attached to deeds.)

After the deal was done, the seller pulled Mr. Weinberg aside. "You paid me too much for the house," he told him. "I was up to here in debt. I needed the money."

"Why didn't you tell me this 10 minutes ago?" Mr. Weinberg recalls asking.

"That's business," the man replied.

In the end, Mr. Weinberg made money on the deal -- he sold the house for $590,000 in 1997, records show. But he knows he could have had the house for less, and he says he resolved never again to be out-researched on a real-estate purchase. He credits that lesson with helping him in later deals, from his current land, which he bought in a complex transaction involving a land swap with the seller, to a house he's considering buying in Tuscany, Italy, for which he has studied up on wild boar, a local nuisance. (They can burrow, he has learned, but they can't jump.)

"My whole thing has been research," he says. "All the answers can be found in city hall."

Mr. Weinberg has no plans to sell the New Jersey house, but he will be leaving it in 2009. "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," the NBC show whose band he leads, will be moving to Los Angeles, and Mr. Weinberg will move with it. Mr. Weinberg has already been on house-hunting missions in Los Angeles -- his broker there, Blair Chang, says they've looked at at least 100 homes so far.

Mr. Weinberg's real dream, he says, is to construct a house based on an unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright design. He has scouted for land in Los Angeles to do so, and though he says he is unlikely to find a site in time to build a house before his move, he holds out hope for the long term. It's a dream that Mr. Weinberg has had since he was a child, when he fell in love with Wright's work while touring the Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum in New York, and one that he has nurtured through years with Mr. Springsteen's band.

"When I was out on tour, I had a lot of time on my hands," Mr. Weinberg says. "And all I did was read books about architecture and how to build houses."

Write to Ben Casselman at ben.casselman@wsj.com
Quelle: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1207875 ... ekend_Jour