The mighty Max Weinberg, drummer for Springsteen, took requests last night at the Park West

Max Weinberg, the Mighty Max, the longtime drummer for Bruce Springsteen, took a working break on Thursday night, between those two sold-out shows at Wrigley Field with his usual bandmates over on E Street. How to describe this? You could say, he submitted himself to being yelled at by strangers for about 100 minutes. In his other job, it’s Springsteen being screamed at by strangers: “Badlands! The Ties That Bind!” But this was Max Weinberg’s Jukebox, a longtime side project from a guy who knows his way around side hustles: He spent 17 years as bandleader for Conan O’Brien; he’s led, time to time, a 15-piece Buddy Rich-esque jazz ensemble, and a 23-piece big band.

On Thursday at Park West, he brought a modest three-piece, most of the members of the Weeklings, a smart East Coast-based Beatles tribute act, so picture the following:

Weinberg strolled the edge of the stage: OK! Hi! So what do you want us to play?

“Lola!”

“Layla!”

“Cinnamon Girl!”

Weinberg held up his hands as requests flew like popcorn — “Tom Petty!” “Pump It Up!” — and he explained, at 72, as a member of AARP now, he may get to those, but whoa, he could only remember a handful of requests at once; he’d try to keep up. The result was as sweet, casual and easygoing as an E Street Band show is intense and epic. The point, he suggested, was a light communing with “the common vocabulary” of the FM gods. Or as I think of it, a Memorial Day 400 Classic Rock marathon, played live. But nothing taxing. No 45-minute encores. In fact, to jog the memories of the decidedly AARP-adjacent audience, alongside the stage, before and during the show, Weinberg posted a rolling litany of some of the many songs they were willing to play on demand.

“Doctor My Eyes!”

“White Room!”

“Rocky Mountain Way!”

“867-5309!”

I can’t stress enough how deeply strange this seems at first. Springsteen, of course, has been known for decades to take requests, to play stump-the-band and call “audibles” on a whim, tearing apart the evening’s setlist and riding the momentum of the audience.

But the reason some musicians can do this, as Weinberg and his band illustrated so well, was those years of starving and playing beachside bars, county fairs and for disinterested drunks in bowling alleys. No one wants to hear the original songs of a bar band. They want Creedence! And Skynyrd! I hesitate to call Max Weinberg’s Jukebox an elevated take on workaday wedding bands, but that’s what they are — touchingly so. There were moments in this — performance? live playlist? intimate hang? — when the very thinness of the sound itself seemed to be the point and all that was missing was the ker-clunk of a nearby billboards table and the chandelier clang of loose beer bottles.

Someone has to honor that image.

We have taken it for granted for so long that we forget a screamed request is an arts tradition almost unique to live popular music. No one shouts “do ‘Glengarry!’” at a Steppenwolf actor. Outside of small bar shows, it’s also a demand that’s rarely met.

Younger bands roll eyes at requests or simply ignore them. This may not be the best example but when I went to see Lou Reed once — Lou Reed, who probably wore sunglasses to hide his contempt — someone shouted “Sweet Jane!” and he explained this music thing he did, at least currently, at this moment, was a one-way street, thank you. The accepted request is not completely extinct; even the Rolling Stones are known, 60 years into their run, to switch things up for a particularly good shout. Lana Del Rey, too. But the nature of much live music doesn’t allow this. No matter how loudly you scream a favorite song at Beyoncé, the computers beneath her stage are going to run the same show as last night. Taylor Swift, thoughtfully, has a two-song segment carved into her Eras Tour for acoustic tunes and piano numbers that change night after night. But those are not exactly requests. Even Springsteen, on this current tour, is sticking to a relatively static set of songs, allowing requests into the set once in a rare while.

Setlist.FM, the popular setlist wiki, hasn’t helped any of this.

Since so many large tours operate on a carefully calibrated clock these days, the person who might have shouted “Freebird!” once in jest now knows exactly what will be played; they can track a tour across continents, even if every performance is the same as the last. So there are few surprises, and odds of having a request taken grow moot.

Max Weinberg’s Jukebox, instead, plays like a rejoinder, even if, considering how stale requests can get — “Twist and Shout”? Really? — it also serves as a reminder of the limits of requests. “If you don’t have a good time,” he joked, “don’t blame me.” On the other hand, he amended that with the surf-bar credo: The more you drink, the better we sound. They sounded pretty good when the requested songs became inspired notes on the perfection of some standards: A tender reading of “The Weight,” in honor of The Band’s Robbie Robertson’s death earlier this week, held a stark, swampy sway. Cheap Trick’s “Surrender,” the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” played like rousing reminders the grungiest Cro-Magnon big beats never get very old.

Weinberg, a master of the especially loud snare snap and thunderous Bo Diddley roll, acknowledged how unusual it may appear to have his drum kit so close to the audience, considering he’s “always in the back and slightly out of focus in all the photographs.” Then every few songs, whenever the band reset itself, the requests came and came.

“Bowie!”

“Bruce!”

“Beatles!”

There’s a wonderful lunacy about encouraging a few hundred people to treat you as if the number-letter combination of every beloved jukebox 45-inch single exists inside your muscle memory, ready to be extracted — C34, “Rebel, Rebel,” and so on. At Park West, an older woman sat by herself and drank and shimmied in place and, every so often, shouted “Hang on Sloopy!” She wasn’t especially loud. So she would shout and wait, shrug when the next song was not “Hang on Sloopy,” then drink some more. Eventually Weinberg played it; “Hang on Sloopy” was once a fabled cornerstone of any bar band. Of course he played it. The woman, though, did not dance. She listened and sang quietly. If I had to guess, she made a request, and when’s the last time anyone listened?

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com