Max Weinberg, the drummer for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, plays the drums. He will be performing with Max Weinberg’s Jukebox on March 11 at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts as a benefit for the New York Ski Educational Foundation. (Provided photo )

LAKE PLACID — For the upcoming NYSEF fundraiser at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts, Max Weinberg’s Jukebox will be as interactive as its namesake machine.

The band lets the crowd pick the setlist.

Audience members choose from a menu of more than 200 classic rock songs, write them on cards and submit them. Onstage, Weinberg pulls cards at random, and his crack band plays the requested tunes.

“We have never rehearsed. We know these songs,” he said. “This is how I learned to speak.”

It perhaps goes without saying that they’re all ace musicians. In case you don’t know, Weinberg has been part of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band since 1974 and led Conan O’Brien’s late-night television band from 1993 to 2010. The other three Jukeboxers — Bob Burger, John Merjave and Glen Burtnik — have played with Styx, ELO, the world’s top Beatles tributes and their own power-pop band, The Weeklings.

Max Weinberg stands on the shore of Lake Placid lake. (Provided photo)

Locals and visitors can see Max Weinberg’s Jukebox at the LPCA on Saturday, March 11 at 6 p.m. Tickets cost $50 to $65, and 100% of proceeds go to NYSEF, the New York Ski Educational Foundation, which trains local student-athletes in winter sports.

The Wilmington-based nonprofit organization boasts 13 Olympians among its alumni.

“Lake Placid has a very special place in my heart, and I’m happy to help out, particularly for this organization that does so much for aspiring skiers,” Weinberg said on Tuesday, Feb. 28, from Denver, while on tour with Springsteen.

Weinberg, 71, considers skiing “a little too adventuresome for me,” but he can talk in some detail about NYSEF’s work and hopes this show’s proceeds will help young skiers who couldn’t otherwise afford to reach their potential. It was a different winter sport that first drew him and his wife to Lake Placid about 20 years ago.

“We were a serious hockey family,” he said, and they came for their children’s CAN/AM tournaments.

He said he fell in love with the Adirondack vistas the first time they drove up state Route 73 — and that was before he even saw it in summer. His parents ran a summer camp in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains when he was growing up, so he loves this kind of environment.

“When I get off at Exit 30 and start that drive, I suddenly start to decompress,” he said of the closest Adirondack Northway exit to Lake Placid.

Weinberg started the Jukebox band after the E Street Band’s last tour ended in February 2017, and they’ve since played more than 300 shows. Also in 2017, he and his wife bought property on the shore of Lake Placid lake, and he personally went before the village-town review board to talk about plans for their Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house. But they never built it; instead they sold the land to a neighbor. His and his wife’s primary residence is in Florida, and they own a home in Italy, but he said he hasn’t yet given up on the dream of owning a “little outpost” in Lake Placid, too. Nevertheless, own or rent, they still come up to visit.

“It doesn’t take a lot to entice me back to Lake Placid,” he said. “I always have a great time ’cause I know so many people now. I’ve got a lot of friends up there. Really, there is nothing I like better than a crisp summer day on the lake. It doesn’t even have to be crisp; it can be hot.”

Springsteen and his wife Patti Scialfa used to come here every summer to see their daughter Jessica Springsteen compete in the Lake Placid Horse Shows. (Jessica, by the way, won a silver medal in team jumping at the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.) Therefore, Weinberg said, “There’s been a lot of conversations between the Weinbergs and the Springsteens about Lake Placid.”

Weinberg said he has been trying for years to play a concert here, but it kept getting postponed. Then, just as it started to come together, Springsteen called the E Street Band to reassemble. After a six-year hiatus, they started a world tour on Feb. 1 and will continue all year.

Nevertheless, Weinberg managed to slot this gig in between Springsteen dates. On March 9, he and the E Street Band will play a massive arena in Columbus, Ohio; two days later, he’ll play Lake Placid with the Jukebox band. The next day he’ll rejoin Springsteen at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut and move on to Albany two days after that.

“I was sort of in the area,” he said.

The songs he plays with the Jukebox band are the ones he grew up playing in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a period he and fellow E Streeter Steven Van Zandt call the “Renaissance,” in which the wild physicality of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll blended with songwriting intellect and countercultural revolution during the Baby Boomers’ teens and 20s.

Unsurprisingly, his Jukebox band’s repertoire includes a healthy dose of Springsteen songs.

The instrumentation is two guitarists and a bass player — all of whom sing individually and in three-part harmony — plus Weinberg as drummer and self-described “impresario,” hosting and telling stories about many of the songs.

They used to have audience members holler out song titles, but after the COVID pandemic they switched to written cards to spread fewer germs.

Requests usually stick to the band’s massive repertoire, but every once in a while someone will order beyond the menu. Sometimes, Weinberg said, they’ll give it a whirl if they know the tune — this from the guy who closed Conan O’Brien’s last “Tonight Show” with a star-studded “Free Bird.”

He said it kind of reminds him of the early days when he’d be in bands that had to play for eight hours straight and take all kinds of requests.

“If you didn’t know it, you had to fake it,” he said.

As for the Springsteen tour, “It’s incredible. I’m having a blast,” Weinberg said. “It’s a wonderful thing to be playing music, thankfully successfully, with your friends all these years later.

“It took about a week to shake off the rust, and then we were hitting like a finely tuned engine.”

The crowd energy at Springsteen shows is legendary, but Weinberg said the band has to earn that energy, and “Nobody works a room like Bruce Springsteen.

“The hardest thing in a rock band is to have a great frontman singer and great songs, and the E-Street Band is very fortunate that those boxes are triple-checked with Bruce Springsteen.”

Next year it will be 50 years since Weinberg responded to Springsteen’s ad in the Village Voice and auditioned for the E Street Band. Weinberg was 23 and knew nothing about the New Jersey rocker, who was 24 but had already released two albums on Columbia Records.

“It was like love at first sight, at least from my point of view, and I got the job done and I got the job,” he said.

Weinberg plans to share the E Street experience in Lake Placid by donating Springsteen tickets for auction, to raise a little more money for aspiring skiers. The winning bidder will get to see an upcoming show of their choice.

For tickets to the March 11 concert, visit online at www.lakeplacidarts.org.