In December 2008, Slipknot and Machine Head teamed up for a three-night stand at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. Metal Hammer took the opportunity to bring together frontmen Corey Taylor and Robb Flynn for tales of bombing onstage, nearly getting into it with audience members and the worst bands they’ve ever toured with.
What are the best memories of your first tour?
Corey Taylor: “I just remember it was a lot of work right out of the gate. Chaos, chaos, chaos. We learned a lot of what not to do from the first year of doing that shit. The audiences got crazier and it just seemed like we were onto something which is what kept us from losing our minds. It was a lot of hard work but it was very rewarding.”
Robb Flynn: “On our first tour we opened for Napalm Death and Obituary and we really were not liked at all. People just wanted to fight us and threw shit at us. After that was Slayer in Europe and that was pretty amazing. We came back and played a lot of the same buildings we played with them. We toured America after that which we ended up nicknaming ‘The Disastour’! No one came to see us which was a real kick in the face after doing so well in Europe.”
When did you realise you needed to step up from support to headliners?
Corey: “It got to a point where we just had to. There weren’t a lot of offers coming in, so we had to out of necessity so we booked our own tours to keep the momentum going. Which in retrospect is the way to do it if you’re gonna carve your own way.”
Robb: “You’re nine dudes in a band, man – you were destined to be a headliner!”
Hammer: Machine Head seem to have done it the other way around.
Robb: “Yeah, for the last 10 years all we’ve done is headline! This is our first support slot since 1994 with Slayer in Europe. We love headlining but the challenge of playing to new people and winning fans over is cool too.”
Corey: “You get to the point where you get offered dream gigs! You’ve just gotta take that step up to headliner and take the risk, basically.”
What’s the best show you’ve ever played?
Robb: “Easy: Download 2007.”
Corey: “Yeah, I was watching these guys play from the side of the stage and it was just ridiculous!”
Robb: “It was unbelievable! I had goose- bumps the whole time just looking out at the crowd in awe!”
Hammer: What made it so special over all the other times you played there?
Robb: “There was an electricity in the air, man! People were fucking feeling it!”
Corey: “For us, it was probably Hammersmith with Slayer and Hatebreed. It was just out of control. I remember looking at Joey and even through his mask I could see it in his eyes, he was like, ‘Holy shit!’ There was just an energy there that I hadn’t felt in a long time. We got offstage and were like, ‘Fuck, what just happened?’”
What’s the worst you’ve bombed?
Corey: “Furyfest 2005 in France. That year the landlord raised the rent on the place so in turn the promoter had to raise the ticket price to cover the cost. And because we were headlining everyone assumed we’d asked for too much money. So we were pelted with everything from wrenches to glass bottles to dead rabbits to plastic bottles filled with dirt – it was dangerous. We stood our ground and played our set; we weren’t gonna take it away from the people who wanted to see us. We walked away with some serious bruises and cuts, but it was a rough fucking show.”
Robb: “We played in Asbury Park, New Jersey on the aforementioned Disastour. We were on a bill with a whole load of hardcore bands and there’s about 30 dudes from the East Coast hardcore crews mobbing us. Me and Adam [Duce, then-MH bassist] drove to a hardware store and bought a dozen hammers and we all walked in smacking the hammers in our hands. All these dudes were already on the stage, so we walked up, set our hammers on our amps and just started playing. We thought it was on for a second but as soon as we started playing they were like, ‘Yo! Look at me, I’m up onstage!’ I tried telling a couple of jokes to try and ease the tension but it was the roughest crowd I’ve ever seen.”
What’s the worst prank you’ve pulled on a bandmate?
Corey: “Usually we’re the ones having pranks pulled on us. Our crew usually fucks with us at the end of a big tour. One time our sound guy was triggering weird samples all through our set. There were moments it would go dead quiet and all of a sudden you’d hear this fart, and it was our sound guy playing these effects through our monitors. We went off to get ready for our encore and we come back and there’s this gigantic rubber dick sticking up out of my monitor. And I look over and they’d replaced Clown and Chris’s percussion with little baby rack toms. It was awesome though because it was one of those tours where your crew get to know your sense of humour. It was a lot of fun.”
Robb: “We had the bus driver from hell on the Disastour: he didn’t like us smoking or leaving our shoes in the hallway so we were constantly having confrontations with him. On the last day he calls the police and as we walked offstage there were all these cops dumping everything off our bus. They said, ‘Just grab your shit and leave and we’ll let you go.’ The bus driver chewed tobacco and we took his tobacco and me and the drummer peed in it and put it back, so he basically chewed our piss!”
Corey: “Ha ha ha! There’s nothing like a bit of piss in your cha!”
Who’s the worst band you’ve ever toured with?
Corey: “Pushmonkey. Ozzfest 1999. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
Robb: “Currently residing in the ‘Who the hell is that?’ file!”
Corey: “They handled themselves as if they were so much better than everyone else and I’d never even fucking heard of them! Who has?! But their music was so bad. We would always wake up to them and it would immediately put us in a shit mood, and we would take it out onstage. I’m glad they didn’t go anywhere… Urgh!”
Robb: “For me it would be Coal Chamber when us and Slipknot toured together.”
Corey: “Urgh… yes.”
Robb: “We were ready to kill them every day. We’d wake up and we were ready for it.”
Corey: “I think everyone was ready to kill them…”
Robb: “We’d toured with them before and they were cool, but they had crossed the ‘we’re rock stars’ line by this point and just… enough!”
What’s the dumbest thing you’ve said onstage?
Corey: “What day?!”
Robb: “I get Tourettes as soon as I walk onstage, man!”
Corey: “I learn different languages if I have time. Sometimes I forget what country I’m in and just whip some random shit out thinking the crowd is gonna dig it. We were in Switzerland and I just spaced where we were and said something in French when we were clearly on the German side. They just looked at me as if to say, ‘Er… what?!’ I held up the French flag in Belgium once. That was in 1999 and people still remember that! As soon as I did it I thought, ‘Oh fuck… this is so the wrong flag!’”
What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had onstage?
Corey: “I recently did one of the keg hits on Duality with Clown and the motherfucker bounced back and hit me in the fucking head. That stung like a bitch!”
Robb: “I’ve had drumsticks in the eye when Dave’s thrown them into the crowd. And Adam used to run across the stage with his head down never looking where he was going and once I turned around and he ran right into me – his headstock hit me right in the temple. That hurt. I’ve paralysed my wrist after misjudging a Pete Townsend windmill and thwacked my hand on my guitar. I had to get Martin from Meshuggah – who we were touring with at the time – to fill in ’cos I couldn’t play. That was probably the worst.”
Mime for the rest of your career for fame and fortune or play live and remain eternally obscure?
Corey: “I’d rather play. There’s a satisfaction that comes out of that that’s eternal. If you lip synch onstage you may as well just be doing karaoke. That’s why I don’t have any respect for all these people with their headsets and their dance moves… it’s basically an acrobatic show and you’ve just got to remember when to move your mouth? Fuck you. For me it’s the creation that’s awesome, it’s always going to be different every night. Anything can happen. So hell yeah, I’d rather play live for the rest of my life.”
Robb: “Totally! And playing live is a release that I need every day. It helps keep me sane. When I’m off the road I start climbing the fucking walls! If I’m home for a month my wife makes me go down to the practice room, like, ‘You’re driving me fucking crazy! Get out of here!’ She’ll be talking to me but I’ll have a melody or lyric in my head and I’ll be looking at her but with a blank look in my eyes and she’ll know – ‘You’re not even fucking listening to me, are you?!’”
What’s the drunkest you’ve ever been onstage?
Corey: “Hamburg in 2002. It was also the worst show. Our gear was too much for the venue basically. We thought in our infinite wisdom that since we couldn’t do our regular show we would put on something special for that night only. We started throwing ideas around and decided to play the song Iowa for half an hour and make it really crazy and then leave the stage and do a six-song encore. The more we thought about it the drunker we got and it got to the point where we were just out of our minds. We go out onstage and open with Iowa, which we had never done before and we actually played it faster than it was on the goddamn album, so it was done in about 10 minutes! And I am blitzed at this point, I’ve got no shoes on and I’m leaning into the monitors going ‘Haaaaaaahhhmbuurg! Haahmmmbuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrg! Haaaaaaaaaahhhmbuurg!’ Just fucking gone and you get to the point where you’re so drunk you can’t even sing properly. We came back out and we did six songs and they were brutal, not good. Then we left and the crowd started to realise that was it and they were not happy. They were on the verge of starting a riot. It was baaaad. We’ve played there since and we’ve done a bit to make it up to them but that was a really baaaaaaad night.”
Robb: “I’m generally a little buzzed when I go onstage. It’s kind of throughout the show I have to be careful. I’ll be necking the brown eyes [vodka and Coke] and be like, ‘Man you are fucked up, aren’t you?!’ I find it hard getting too drunk before I go onstage. My brain gets to a point where it knows it can’t get more fucked up because we’ve got a show to do and the adrenaline takes over. We played With Full Force in 2008 and Phil [Demmel, then-MH guitarist] and I watched the video for it and it was a fucking awesome show. However… Phil and I were pounding the brown eyes before we went onstage and I’m doing long rants between songs chugging the things! And I got to a point where I’d think, ‘What’s this next part we’re gonna do? Ah yeah, end of Davidian, that’s how it goes!’ It’s always fun, never a disaster.”
Originally published in Metal Hammer 188, Jan 2009
