How a fake murder story buried alt-metal’s finest songs for a decade
Alt-metal has always had links to the nightmare realm because psychological horror stories lend themselves perfectly to the abrasive, scratchy dissonance of the genre, while the guttural shrieks and gurgles in place of usual vocals are best suited to sharing tales of death, doom, and darkness, and Slipknot’s Corey Taylor knew this better than most.
So, when Taylor was ravaged by a nightmare about a creepy murder story he had read online, he knew the material was perfect for a track on the band’s eponymous debut album. The material came from a crimescene.com report on a Mississippi woman called Purty Knight, which talked about how she was kidnapped and buried alive. The internet was crawling with police documents, photos, and audio that proved this, to Taylor’s untrained eye, to be harrowingly true.
According to the case information available online, Knight and her roommate, Lee Perez, were the victims of a stalking incident after a man took to loitering outside of their apartment windows in a tree, late at night. Several days after their neighbour spotted and reported this to the police, Knight disappeared. An odd answering machine message, a Geological Survey map mailed to a detective, and several Polaroids later, Knight was found dead, after being buried alive near her home.
Bullshit, of course, but back in the early days of the internet, Taylor wasn’t aware of fake news or verification tools and mourned the girl. He ran with the feeling of waking up sweating and afraid, and put himself in the fake student’s shoes, writing ‘Purity’ with urgency and sheer paranoia.
On the standout track, Taylor exemplifies all the best attributes of Slipknot to come. He cries in the pre-chorus, “Put me in a homemade cellar, put me in a hole for shelter, someone hear me please, all I see is hate, I can hardly breathe, I can hardly take it”. It was originally paired with a prelude title track, ‘Frail Limb Nursery ‘, which took direct audio samples from the website, never a good move.
Some months after the album’s 1999 release, Taylor found himself in a living room with the promise of the new millennium quickly fading into a long road of judicial specifics; the vocalist battled with the possibility that every single copy of their critically acclaimed debut album would be yanked from the shelves should he say the wrong thing. Crimescene.com had filed a copyright infringement against both ‘Purity’ and ‘Frail Limb Nursery’.
After all of the legal matters were tied in a bow, Taylor reflected on the ridiculous story, exclaiming, “He’s a judge! What the fuck do I say?! I’m 26, I don’t know shit at this point about the legal system!”
While ‘Frail Limb Nursery’ never got re-released, live versions of ‘Purity’ were eventually included on Disasterpieces and 9.0: Live before becoming a bonus track on a tenth anniversary Slipknot reissue in 2009.
The older and wiser Taylor, since the ordeal, when asked to cite the key influences on ‘Purity’, has a better answer: Horror films, of course, and more specifically, 1965’s The Collector and 1993’s Boxing Helena. Knight’s name will never leave his lips again.
