I have an immeasurable amount of respect for Corey Taylor for toughing it out on the current Slipknot tour, just a few weeks after having some serious spinal surgery.
With only about a month of recovery time, Taylor was back out on the road playing with his band, although avoiding jumping around and headbanging. By all accounts, the band still deliver live. Taylor recently spoke to radio station 93x about the surgery and revealed some new info. He revealed he actually broke his neck quite a while ago and was in severe pain:
“It’s been the last few years of my life, just something physically wrong. The strength in my ride side was completely gone. I had the strength of an 80-year-old, basically—In fact, I probably would have lost a fight to an actual 80-year-old. That’s how bad it was—and it sucked.”
How long ago? Taylor traces his neck problems back to 1999:
“There was a host of different things, but essentially what had happened was, and the only thing I can think of is, I fell offstage in ’99 and landed on top my head. I fell four feet off stage, landed. Being 25, I just kind of brushed it off – ‘I can still feel everything, I must be fine.’ Meanwhile what had actually happened was my C5 and C6, basically it was compound fracture, compressed together, crushed the disc, and then slowly but surely started growing into my spinal cord. The doctor couldn’t believe that I was walking. He was like ‘I don’t know how you walked in here.’ It literally was, we went from zero to surgery like that. That’s why it was emergency spinal surgery.”
In retrospect, Taylor feels he should've waited a little longer to get back on the road:
“The doctor told me that I could go out and sing after two weeks. I waited three, you know? I made sure that I could do something. Yeah, I probably should have waited a little longer, but I didn’t want to.”
Also, he revealed his recent on-stage fall was not as bad as it looked:
“It looked worse than it was… Yeah, I jumped up, and as soon as I jumped I knew, ‘I’m not going to clear this’, It was wet, and that’s why. And my feet went out from underneath me, hit my leg first and then fell over… The reason I took my time was because I just wanted to make sure I didn’t break anything and that I didn’t reaggravate anything. The video looks terrible—but I’m laying on the ground just laughing my ass off.”
Good to hear Corey is doing okay and still kicking ass on tour. Get remaining Slipknot/Manson dates here.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/25PIOrRRLBQ[/youtube]
[via ThePRP]
