In December 2008, 18-year-old Jay Weinberg was being driven to school in New Jersey by his father, Max, when Bruce Springsteen called to speak with him.
"You may have heard I have a band," Springsteen told the teenager. "In that band I have the world's greatest drummer, who has a scheduling conflict. He gave me your name and number and suggested that I call you to see if you'd be interested in playing with me and the E Street Band."
At the time, Max Weinberg, drummer with Springsteen's E Street Band since 1974, was the bandleader on The Tonight Show with talk show host Conan O'Brien, and was unable to commit to playing all the dates on Springsteen's Working On A Dream world tour. And as former Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg recalls in a new interview with Rolling Stone, it was actually E Street Band guitarist, and Sopranos legend, Stevie Van Zandt who recommended that Springsteen keep it in the family when it came to hiring a replacement drummer.
"Steve had seen me play at Handsome Dick Manitoba's bar on the Lower East Side in New York with my high school band," Weinberg tells writer Andy Greene. "I'd been playing for a couple of years, and we were very inspired by Mastodon and Slayer, crazy complicated music at that point for teenagers.
"He told Bruce, as they were trying to figure out this scheduling conflict, 'What about Max's kid? I saw him playing this crazy music at a bar. He knows us. We know him. He’s grown up around us. Trust me, the music that he’s into, it’ll make your songs be like Mary Had a Little Lamb.
"That was Steve’s pitch," Weinberg continues. "They consulted my father since it’s about his position in the band. And he was kind of like, “That could be great.” It was keeping it in the family. And you have Jake Clemons, who’s been with the band for over a decade. Keeping it in the family is very important to them, and to Bruce.
"Going into the challenge, I knew that I couldn’t shortchange the E Street experience. Bruce, without language even, was able to coach me and guide me through this landscape of that. It was all new to me. I never played in front of more than 50 people at that point."
Weinberg went on to play with Madball, Against Me!, Hesitation Wounds and Slipknot.
Slipknot parted company with Weinberg in 2023, a decision which blind-sided the drummer, who is currently drumming for Suicidal Tendencies and Infectious Grooves.
"It came without an explanation, no reason," he tells Rolling Stone. "It was confusing then. If I’m perfectly honest, it remains confusing."
Weinberg is selling off the kit he used on Springsteen's Working on a Dream 2009 tour, Slipknot drums, masks and coveralls, signed studio-used drum heads and more here.
