Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg has made the surprising confession that he has “never [taken] a drum lesson in [his] life.”
Weinberg, whose father Max Weinberg is the drummer of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, opened up about his musical journey in an interview on the Vater Drumsticks YouTube channel (via Ultimate Guitar).
“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,” he began.
He continued: “I really wanted to find out what I loved about drums just by doing it. 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.”
Weinberg went on to reveal that it was through watching his dad play in the E Street band that he learnt about “tenacity and application and endurance” in music.
“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,” he said.
“And so I got to learn that at a really young age by seeing [the E Street band] do it night-in and night-out.
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“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.” he continued.
“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 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,” he concluded.
Check out Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg discussing why he was against taking a drum lesson:
