SLIPKNOT‘s Jay Weinberg spoke to Vater Drumsticks about how he was influenced and inspired by watching his father Max perform with Bruce Springsteen‘s E STREET BAND in the early 2000s.
He said (see video below): “I never took a drum lesson in my life. I wanted to find out what I really loved about the drums for myself. ‘Cause I had some guitar teachers that made it feel like I was going to school, and I didn’t wanna go to school after school, so I really wanted to find out what I loved about drums just by doing it. So I wanted to play along to my RAMONES records and my METALLICA records, and so on and so forth. But what I really learned, and what I feel was completely invaluable, was everything else about music…
“Being a drummer who plays in a band every single night, the music almost feels like that much of it [puts two fingers close together], and the rest of it is all about just tenacity and application and endurance,” he explained. “And not just physical endurance through playing the music, but endurance to see an artistic vision through with the people that you’re collaborating with. It takes a lot of fortitude to really make all those things fire on all cylinders, and it takes the right combination of people, takes the right combination of attitudes. And so I got to learn that at a really young age by seeing them do it night in and night out.”
Jay continued: “The real learning was seeing, to me, the baddest band in the land, the real tenacious E STREET BAND, watching them do what they did for four hours a night. To this day, you don’t see bands doing that; they’re in a league of their own. So to have that education of seeing that happen every night, it’s, like, there’s no partying here. It takes so much focus to deliver on your vision and what Bruce and the E STREET BAND have done for decades has been flawlessly executing a certain vision. So that’s what I really took away from that experience, and then, of course, now applying that to SLIPKNOT. It’s a vision that I’ve come to understand, and [I] was a fan when I was very young. I knew the band inside and out, knew the songs like the back of my hand, knew the vision of the band and the direction that the band was going. It takes that application and tenacity of just, like, every day you wake up and you’ve gotta bash down the door. So that was the best lesson that I ever got from Max Weinberg University.”
Jay was asked to fill in for his dad as the touring drummer for BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND more than a decade ago. Earlier this year, he described the experience as “completely insane. And I didn’t expect for that to happen, but the stars aligned in that way that just like it was one of those ‘right places at the right time’ kind of things,” he said.
Jay discovered SLIPKNOT when he was a pre-teen, through his father. He was hooked immediately and was a huge fan of SLIPKNOT by the time he was invited to Los Angeles to try out as replacement for Joey Jordison in 2014.
SLIPKNOT announced its split with Jordison in December 2013 but did not disclose the reasons for his exit. The drummer subsequently issued a statement saying that he did not quit the group.
SLIPKNOT spent most of last year touring in support of its sixth studio album, “We Are Not Your Kind”, which was released in August 2019 via Roadrunner Records.
