Back in 2015, we sat down for a roundtable discussion with a quartet of guitarists who had come to shape the sound of modern metal. From nu metal pioneers Korn, we had James ‘Munky’ Shaffer and Brian ‘Head’ Welch and, from Slipknot, Jim Root and Mick Thomson.
Between them, the four men had been responsible for conjuring those all-important riffs that had formed the indomitable foundation of their respective bands’ sound.
For this special, one-off summit, the four men traded perspectives on such topics as why guitar solos weren’t always a requirement, oddball effect choices and those early days when playing a gig could be hazardous affair…
Slipknot’s Mick Thomson recalled how he’d seen Korn playing at the Milwaukee Metal Fest in 1995, which triggered some particularly alarming tour memories of that era from 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 Root chimed in, “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…”
“There was a dead rabbit!” Added Thomson. “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!”
So far so terrifying (would you really have expected anything less?) But, in a warmer moment, Korn’s Munky enthusiastically remembered how he felt when he first heard Slipknot’s 1999 debut, “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 made an apt comparison between the two bands; “If Jonathan [Davis] 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.”
An interesting point in the conversation came when the topic turned to soloing – and both Korn and Slipknot’s respective axe-men’s initial reluctance to do so.
“I don’t know if it [soloing] wasn’t cool, it’s just we were influenced by Faith No More and all these bands that weren’t [playing solos],” recalled Head. “It was a shame, because I practised soloing my whole life! But our approach was to create a bridge section that everyone can do whatever. Get creative, make the weirdest sounds you can, and there’s Korn – so a lot of kids were influenced by us that were like, ‘Man, I could do this!’”
Slipknot’s Mick Thomson deduced why it was that Korn’s early material worked so well from a guitar perspective; “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 f** 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!”
