In a new interview with Vater Drumsticks, SLIPKNOT drummer Jay Weinberg talked about taking lessons, his father Max Weinberg, who is the drummer of Bruce Springsteen‘s E STREET BAND, and more.
“I never took a drum lesson in my life,” Jay said. “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,” he continued. “I wanted to play along to my RAMONES records and my METALLICA records 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.
“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.
“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 was a fan when I was very young,” Jay added. “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.”
SLIPKNOT‘s latest album, We Are Not Your Kind, was released on August 9, 2019 via Roadrunner Records. Album was once again recorded at a Los Angeles studio with producer Greg Fidelman, who engineered and mixed SLIPKNOT‘s 2004 album Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) and helmed 2014’s .5: The Gray Chapter.
We Are Not Your Kind sold 118,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first week of release to land at position No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. Furthermore, the album made an impact worldwide with No. 1 debuts in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia, Canada, Japan, Ireland, Belgium, Portugal and Finland, as well as Top 5 debuts in Germany, France, Norway, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain and New Zealand.
