In 2007, Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor was on the precipice of joining metal titans Anthrax, following the departure of John Bush and Joey Belladonna.
The rocker recently sat down with Talk Is Jericho, in a discussion that saw him illuminate the contractual obligations that stopped him from joining the band.
“The day I got told that I couldn’t do it – by Roadrunner – was the day I was getting ready to go to Chicago to work with Scott [Ian] and Charlie [Benante],” Taylor began.
“I was actually kind of trying to find out – because at the time I wasn’t sure what Anthrax’s contract was – ‘Maybe we can release it on Roadrunner,’ I was kind of reaching out like that, not on Anthrax’s behalf, but just for my own.
“I’d even gone through with my manager it was like, ‘OK – we’ll just treat this as an album full of guest appearances,’ because there was no way I was going to be able to get a contract with them. Contractually, I was trying to work out the nuances – the loopholes, basically.”
Taylor went on to reveal that the day he was set to board a plane to start recording with Anthrax, he was pulled into a conference call. In which the label essentially barred him from recording with the band, threatening to take legal action against Anthrax should they release the material.
“It was like, ‘You can go ahead and go record all that stuff – and we will sue them and not let them release anything,'” he continued.
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“And it was all because they wanted another Slipknot album – it really didn’t have anything to do with Anthrax or me necessarily. They wanted another Slipknot album, and that was All Hope Is Gone.
Taylor detailed the shared devastation that he and Scott Ian experienced upon realising that their grand plans had been thwarted by the industry machine.
“That was the hardest phone call I had to ever make. And Scott’s got a heartbreaking, great story about it, where he was, flying back from Europe. He had gone over there to see Metallica do something really cool, and he was on his way back.
“And he was flying right into Chicago to go to work with me and Charlie; and he lands and he gets that voice message. He’s standing at the airport, and he’s just like, ‘Fuck…’
“So that sucked. And for the longest time, I thought that Charlie was really mad at me. I felt horrible.”
It wasn’t all for nothing, Taylor ended up using material he penned for Anthrax on All Hope Is Gone.
“Some of the stuff that I was writing for Anthrax, I ended up using on ‘All Hope Is Gone,’ lyric-wise. I changed some of the melodies and stuff, but the lyrics for ‘Dead Memories,’ I was actually gonna use for Anthrax,” he mused.
“There’s a handful of other things, but I had written a bunch of stuff down and I liked those lyrics so much that I ended up going, ‘You know what? I’m gonna use this.’ That was an absolute reality, man.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Taylor touched on almost joining Velvet Revolver.
“That and the Velvet Revolver thing are the two biggest ‘what ifs’ of my life, like, ‘What could’ve happened…?’ That [Velvet Revolver] was different because they were auditioning a bunch of people,” he continued.
“And I think I was one of maybe three or four people who had gone in and who were writing music with them. I got a whole bunch of stuff that we had done together, it’s actually rad. If I had gotten to really focus and work on it, I think it could’ve been huge.”
Check out ‘CMFT Must Be Stopped’ by Corey Taylor:
Corey Taylor unleashed his debut solo album, CMFT, on October 2nd.
