Music Radar got the guitarists of Korn (Munky and Head) and Slipknot (Jim Root and Mick Thomson) in a room to discuss their bands, each other's musical styles and just generally hang. It's definitely worth the read and here are some highlights:
When the Slipknot guitarists start discussing the first time they heard Korn, it suddenly morphs into a convo about how somebody threw a dead rabbit on stage at a Slipknot show:
What were your first impressions of seeing Korn?
Head: "Be honest!"
Mick: "I just remember seeing this [mimes Fieldy's vertical bass playing]. Just straight up and down."
Munky: "We used to get shit thrown at us. On that tour, I was jamming and I heard 'Bam!' I looked at the stage and there was an open Buck knife! I think it was sticking in the screen of my cabinet…"
Jim: "We had some shit like that in France. We got booked to play some hardcore punk festival. There were bricks, bottles of piss, a dead…"
Mick: "There was a dead rabbit! There was a rumour that went around that all the prices for tickets went up because our guarantee was so big. Which isn't even remotely true. But all these message boards got that shit rolling, and there were open knives, and someone killed a rabbit!"
The Korn guitarists shared their first impression of Slipknot:
Munky: "I remember [producer] Ross [Robinson] gave me the CD and was like, 'You've gotta check this out.' I had this 4×4 Suburban, and I'd just put a new stereo in it, and I cranked it up and couldn't turn it up loud enough.
"You could just feel the anger coming out of the speakers. I called him up and said, 'Holy-shit! You outdid yourself on this one!' It was like his masterpiece."
Head: "If Jonathan had the 'Why me?' thing – the emotional abuse and stuff – then Corey had the 'I'm gonna rip your insides out'. In all honesty, it was too heavy for me – I wasn't a heavy, heavy guy. I had to grow into it."
Mick Thomspon on getting his solos stripped out on the first Slipknot record:
Mick: "Ross! I was so pissed off. Before we did pre-production on the first record, I had a couple of leads – I had some sweep arpeggios, stuff I'd done my whole life, and it just got stripped out because 'Solos aren't cool.' I wasn't very happy, but what an amazing learning curve [with Ross]. He was right.
"And that's what I've learned since then: if it doesn't advance the song or have some sort of reference to it lyrically, don't do it just to fucking do it. I always want to know, 'What's Corey doing in this?' because you've gotta grab a phrase, a melody. Randy Rhoads would have a lyrical, singing beauty in every one of his solos."
Slipknot admire Korn's chord progressions:
Mick: "One thing that I think is a huge credit to you guys is that the heaviest shit isn't necessarily the simplest, but it's not verbose. You don't need loads of notes to be heavy. So you guys would come out and play just a few notes, but crushingly heavy.
"Clown and Paul used to have you guys louder than fuck in any car all the time! That's how I got to know you. Just single strings, heavy as shit. That's kind of like the Sabbath way!"
Jim: "And you make melodic stuff seem extremely heavy, too. Look at a song like Got The Life with that chord progression – it's huge."
Overall, lots of interesting stuff is discussed and it's worth reading the whole thing.
[via ThePRP]
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