BRICK – A township man will be performing with Rockin’1000 on January 31 at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
Rockin’1000 is dubbed “the biggest band in the world.” Originally created in Cesena, Italy, more than 1,000 musicians play and sing simultaneously with a setlist of rock music from various decades. The group originally assembled in July 2015 under the direction of Marco Sabiuas as a way to ask the Foo Fighters to visit Cesena. It was organized as a crowdfunding effort by Fabio Zaffagnini.
The upcoming New Year’s Eve show marks the first time performing in the United States. The two-hour concert has a special guest director, singer Harry Connick Jr.
Brian Wainwright, 57, and his wife Tracie are very excited about this musical opportunity and spoke to The Brick Times about their adventure.
“I’ve been interested in music since I was eight years old and all through middle school and high school. I was in the marching band in high school. I lived in Toms River at the time and moved to Brick in 2000. I am part of a country band, Runaway Train. We are about two years old. Before that there was a couple of members with me in a different band and we started this band up,” Brian Wainwright said.
He added, “we play all over from Bar A, Headliner, all over Monmouth and Ocean counties. We play all over the place. We have 40-plus gigs lined up already for this year.”
As to Rockin’ 1000, “my wife saw advertisements for it on Facebook. We saw videos of massive amounts of people on a football field and it looked pretty cool. She saw they were coming to America in New Orleans so I looked into it and I saw you had to send in an audition tape. I had to make a video of me playing whatever song and sent it in and they reviewed it and a couple days later I got an e-mail back from them saying that I was accepted.”
He had to wait for registration day to show up and “had to have my computer open, phone open and tablet because everybody and their mother from other countries were going to sign up for this one so you had to be ready. They had 200 other drummers and they went all over the world. I will be playing drums. They have singers, bass players, keyboards. There are only so many spots on the field.”
Drummers that have inspired him include Dave Grohl from Nirvana. “He was also in a punk band before that. A lot of my favorite drummers come from punk bands in the 80s, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, stuff like that,” he added. “When I first started drumming I had to play to a record downstairs in my mother’s house because we didn’t have ways of making your own drumming track, so you made your own and played along with records of The Who, Pat Penatar.”
He was also accepted as a member of the Ocean County String Band. “They played Mummers music and I got into a swing band that was playing old 40s and 50s music. We were playing around the Holiday City’s and all their little parties. Those people can party.”
Tracie Wainwright met her husband while in high school. They have two sons. “Brian just retired in October from a school district and started a seasonal job installing irrigation systems in people’s yards. He loves what he does. He loves playing the drums and this is an outlet for him to do that.”
“They are expecting 30,000 people at Rockin’ 1000 in the stadium. We have some friends going with us and we all sitting together in row seven. I have zero musical talent. I have a husband who plays the drums, a son who does musical theater. My youngest son plays the guitar and my oldest son sings. I tune the radio. That’s about it,” she joked.
“We are going to zig zag around a bit but we are going to Nashville on the way home, hit a couple places in South Carolina and Savannah Georgia and hit the Keys, Miami and Orlando. We are trying to hit all the places we don’t normally get to go to,” she added.
The three-and-a-half-week adventure will conclude before February 21 when the Runaway Train will be performing. They have to get back by February 18 so they can get a rehearsal in before that.
Other 2026 dates for Rockin’ 1000 include Manchester, England and Turin, Italy.
On July 7, 2019, Rockin’1000 played 18 songs in the Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt, Germany. Around 1,002 musicians performed in front of an audience of 15,000 spectators. The project achieved the world record for the largest performing rock band with hundreds of guitarists, bass players, drummers, keyboardists, and singers – as well as wind sections and string sections. They played rock classics by Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Oasis, Depeche Mode and others.
