SLIPKNOT drummer Jay Weinberg discovered the band when he was a pre-teen, through his father Max, of Bruce Springsteen's E STREET BAND, and leader of the house band on Conan O'Brien's talk show. 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 2013.

Asked what his father's initial reaction was when he told him that he was joining SLIPKNOT, the now-28-year-old drummer told the official SLIPKNOT fan club Outside The 9 (see video below): "I don't know if he believed me, to be honest. No — when we had conversations about that's what had happened, I actually couldn't even tell him what band I had auditioned for, truthfully, for a while, till I asked the band if I could tell my dad. But once I did, he was very happy considering this is a band that he introduced to my life. I'm sure I would have crossed the path of SLIPKNOT's music at some point, but he really made that initial connection between myself and the members of the band. So, for him to have done that for me and did me that solid of introducing me to these guys at nine or 10 years old, and then 13, 14 years later, I joined the band, he was overwhelmed and overjoyed, I'm sure. It's something we still talk about to this day when certain benchmarks are met, or certain interesting things are happening, like playing on late-night TV, where I grew up watching him work and stuff like that, and now we're on a late-night TV program. It's very interesting. So, yeah, when I first told him I was joining SLIPKNOT, I think he flipped his shit."

For the first few months after the release of 2014's ".5: The Gray Chapter", the members of SLIPKNOT had declined to name the musicians who were playing drums and bass on their tour, despite the fact that their identities were revealed as Weinberg and bassist Alessandro "Vman" Venturella by a disgruntled former drumtech for SLIPKNOT who posted a picture of a backstage call sheet on Instagram.

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.

