Jay Weinberg Reflects On His Firing From Slipknot: “Maybe I Became a Scapegoat”

Former Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg opened up in a new interview with Rolling Stone about being fired from the band.

Jay Weinberg has opened up about his firing from Slipknot in 2023, sharing his perspective on what happened behind the scenes.

Sitting down with Rolling Stone, Weinberg explained in an extensive interview about the circumstances behind his leaving Madball and Against Me! and Laura Jane Grace’s long-standing grudge against him. Weinberg would also discuss his early days with Slipknot, sharing anecdotes about how he couldn’t tell fellow industry friends that he was in the band, and how he and Slipknot guitarist Jim Root collaborated to write The Grey Chapter and We Are Not Your Kind.

Despite giving 10 years to the band, though, Weinberg would suddenly be fired from the band, who shared it was a “Creative decision”, a choice which still confuses the drummer to this day.

The interview would veer into speculation as Weinberg would reveal that in 2018, he felt pain in his hip when exercising and notified management. It wasn’t until 2020, during COVID, that Weinberg would eventually get an MRI, where he discovered he had a femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) from tearing the labrum in his hip.

“I told my bandmates and management what my doctor told me. At the time I was 30, and he’s like, ‘Do this when you’re younger. You’ll have a better chance of snapping right back, give it five, six months recovery.’”, Weinberg revealed.

“So I’m approaching the band like, ‘Hey, we’re not doing anything right now. This would take me six months to recover. Is this something I can do?’ And I was asked to not have that corrective surgery because we’ve got a record to make. We got to be on tour, and this and that. So I can’t hold up this operation.”

The drummer would go on to say that he was conditioned to believe that, due to him being a hired gun, he wasn’t in a position to prioritise his health over the needs of the band.

Following a tour which would end in November, with their next planned show set for April, Weinberg would request to have the medical operation in the downtime.

“I’d expressed to the band, ‘We’ve got this window of time. I will be able to recover before the next show. If we want to be creative in that time, I worked with a company called MixWave, where I created a virtual instrument so that I could have my own drum sounds available to me. If I’m on crutches and I can’t walk, I can’t drum, I can still program things and be in a creative mode,’ just to cover all my bases and got it approved. They were like, ‘Yeah, good to go. Go for your surgery.’”

But as it would turn out, the band’s management would quickly reverse their approval.

“I woke up the morning after traveling home from our last show together, and I received a phone call from the band’s manager in which he informed me that the band had made a decision to not renew my contract at the end of the year. I was shocked and full of questions. I was like, ‘Why? What happened?’”, Weinberg shared.

He would then go on to admit that there was already tension brewing in the band, even before he was recruited into Slipknot, but they were beginning to brew once more right before his departure.

“It took place, to be quite honest, at the end of a year that was a very difficult year within the band. That might relate to some of those preexisting tensions before I arrived at the band, sort of coming back. But I’m left with no explanation, just that ‘It’s a creative decision and you’re no longer the drummer in Slipknot.’”

Management would then ask him to take the day before releasing a joint statement, only to then share their own statement shortly after informing Weinberg about his firing.

“My world just kind of bottomed out from under me. This thing that I have been dedicated to with complete focus and drive and attention and love and holding on to a dream, despite the difficulties, despite all the things that happen with entering a volatile environment like that and a dark environment at that, to having nothing but questions.”

When further asked to expand on how he felt about his firing, Weinberg replied:

“I mean, how would anybody feel about that? It perfectly encapsulates the confusion of that. And like I said, it came after an extraordinarily tense year for the band, things that I could only see as an outsider in relationships that are 25 years deep. It came without an explanation, no reason. It was confusing then. If I’m perfectly honest, it remains confusing.”

“I applied myself in every way possible. As a newcomer, and like you mentioned, you’re like ‘Are you in the band? Are you not in the band?’ How do you define that after 10 years? It’s not a short amount of time. But it’s easy for a newcomer, for myself, to be caught in the crossfire there. Maybe I became a scapegoat for certain things.”

Thankfully, Weinberg would share that he’s been treasuring more positive experiences with other bands. He would note that King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard‘s drummer Cavs, visited him during one of Weinberg’s Infectious Grooves, and showed him “what a positive creative environment could feel like with mutual respect.”

Slipknot have yet to acknowledge Weinberg’s claims, but if you’re a long-standing fan of the band who’s been hoping for an answer regarding the drummer’s departure, this may be the best closure you’ll get for some time.