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King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard surprised fans with Max Weinberg at a recent show in Queens – check out footage below.
The moment took place on Friday (August 21), during their show at Queens’ Forest Hills Stadium. The E Street Band drummer took to the stage to fill in for his son, former Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg, who is a longtime King Gizzard collaborator.
Speaking to the crowd midway through the performance, guitarist Joey Walker said: “In continuing with the tradition that we started over the last year or so, where we get our friend Jay Weinberg to come out and play a song with us – it’d be rude not to.
“But Jay’s busy, he’s down in Nashville, so Jay made a call: ‘Alright, I’m going to call dad.’”
“So, we got Max Weinberg, drove all the way from Atlantic City to come up and play a song with us, so give it up for fucking Max Weinberg,” he added. He then came out and joined the band onstage, playing alongside regular drummer Michael Cavanagh for ‘Hot Water’ from their 2014 album ‘I’m in Your Mind Fuzz’.
Jay Weinberg’s cameos on stage are part of a running bit since he first stepped in for the band during a 2024 Nashville show. He was last on stage with King Gizzard only a week earlier at the band’s Field of Vision II festival in Colorado, playing on ‘Hell’.
Earlier this month, Jay Weinberg spoke about all of his new musical projects, and said that he is now able to pursue them after a period of not having the “legal ability” to work with other artists while in Slipknot.
The drummer parted ways with the iconic metal band back in 2023, after they made a “creative decision” to go in a different direction. He joined in 2013, and said he was “heartbroken and blindsided” by the move at the time. He then revealed earlier this year that he thinks the decision “remains confusing”.
As for King Gizzard, earlier this month they released their 28th studio album ‘Alien Metal’. They had previously shared a snippet of the record that indicated a turn toward a techno-driven sound.
It comes after the band hit out at their apparent AI replacement on Spotify late last year. It came after they announced that they were pulling all of their music from the platform over their opposition to the company’s founder, Daniel Ek, funding the Helsing corporation.
Ek co-founded the investment company Prima Materia, which has invested over €600million in Helsing, a Munich-based company creating drones and artificial intelligence for military operations, per the Financial Times.
Following their withdrawal, a series of songs were uploaded to a Spotify page named King Lizard Wizard, with some believing they were AI-generated. King Gizzard frontman Stu Mackenzie was credited as the composer on the tracks.
On their alleged AI replacement, Mackenzie told The Music: “Trying to see the irony in this situation. But seriously wtf we are truly doomed”.
Mackenzie later explained their decision: “We’ve been saying fuck Spotify for years. In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented.”
He went on to explain that while he doesn’t consider himself an activist and was not comfortable “soapboxing”, it felt like “a decision staying true to ourselves, and doing what we think is is right for our music, having our music in places that we feel all right about.”
“The thing that made it hard was I do want to have our music be accessible to people,” he added. “I don’t really care about making money from streaming. I know it’s unfair, and I know they are banking so much. But for me personally, I just want to make music, and I want people to be able to listen to it. The hard part was to take that away from so many people.”
Since their decision, King Gizzard have put their albums up for sale on Bandcamp, allowing fans to name their price – and you can access their records here.