The feud between Axl Rose and Corey Taylor
Anyone who has ever worked with Axl Rose over the years usually has their fair share of horror stories to say about him. Suffice it to say that Rose does things the way he’s always done them, and anyone who disagrees with that will have a hard time adjusting to his brand of scheduling. When Rose decided to make his audience wait for a while, Corey Taylor was not going to take any of that lightly.
For years, Taylor had been known for making some of the most caustic heavy metal imaginable in Slipknot. Even though there may have been far heavier music out there, not many other bands could claim to have something that heavy on top of the charts, with Taylor making heavy songs sound commercial on tracks like ‘Before I Forget’.
In between Slipknot albums, the members had been known for playing in their own side projects, and Taylor had been hard at work working with Stone Sour. Formed before he had joined Slipknot, Taylor started gaining momentum from his old outfit again when he found himself playing a festival with Guns N’ Roses as the headliner.
For anyone of Taylor’s calibre, this was practically a dream come true. Prior to joining Slipknot, Taylor was a huge Guns N’ Roses fan and had even been rumoured to be the singer for Velvet Revolver alongside Slash and Duff McKagan before deciding to move on with his former band.
While working with Rose at a festival, Taylor took massive offence since Rose kept his audience waiting for so long. If you’ve been a Guns N’ Roses fan at any time in the past 30 years, this is practically expected. Rose can arrive hours after they are scheduled to perform. Then, he either plays well into the night or performs an abbreviated version of their set.
Even though Taylor had time to compliment the band for their legacy, he had zero tolerance for what Rose was doing, recalling, “I have no respect for [him]…I love Guns, dude. I love Appetite For Destruction; I think that’s a fantastic album. But when you make your fans wait that long — and I don’t give a fuck what hard-on just said: ‘Oh, we expect it.’ Well, you’re a fucking idiot then. All right? Figure it the fuck out.”
It’s not like Taylor can’t walk the walk, either. Throughout his time in Slipknot and beyond, the frontman has been known to put everything into his shows, including a few times in the group’s early days when they set one of his boiler suits on fire midway through a performance. Regardless of the abrasions, Taylor has still been able to come back stronger every time, even managing to preserve his voice while Rose’s pipes have long since started to crack.
For an outfit like Slipknot, though, getting hurt is more of an inevitability rather than a possibility. In the show Metal Evolution, Clown recalled that the thousands of moving parts in Slipknot’s stage shows are not designed to be comfortable, saying, “There is no member of Slipknot that isn’t willing to suffer some kind of serious injury, or potentially death [onstage].” Taylor knows that he has to put everything into his shows, so given his history of reckless abandon onstage, Rose seemingly has no excuse for his behaviour.
