APPARENTLY COREY TAYLOR AND JOEY JORDISON DON’T HAVE ONE ANOTHER’S DIGITS OR SOMETHING

Back in July, our Number One Homie, Rob Pasbani, wrote a typically droll piece for Metal Injection. Entitled “Slipknot Vocalist Says It’s Too Early To Talk About Band’s Future; Drummer Talks About Band’s Future,” it pointed out that while ‘Knot vocalist Corey Taylor was running around saying he was unsure about the group’s future in the wake of bassist Paul Gray’s untimely passing, drummer Joey Jordison was running around assuring everyone that the band would live on.

And even though you would think that  in the intervening time, someone would notice the contradiction in statements and politely tell Taylor and Jordison to either a) figure out if the band is really going to continue or not so they don’t keep contradicting one another in public, or b) start telling everyone who asks about it “no comment” so that they don’t look foolish, this continued throughout August, when Jordison told a reporter that “There will be another Slipknot record, of course,”and into September, when Taylor told a different reporter, “I’m very conflicted about whether or not I want to do anything with Slipknot, because to me, Paul was such an integral part of the band… it just doesn’t make sense [to continue without him].”

I know that losing Gray was a major blow, and I’m not really suggesting that Slipknot should know if and how they are going to move forward right now. But you’d think that between the six other surviving members of Slipknot, their managers, their publicists, and maybe even someone from their label (Roadrunner), to say nothing of Taylor and Jordison themselves, someone MUST have noticed the disparity in public remarks and decided to have the singer call the drummer, or vice versa, and, like, hug it out n’ stuff.

But hopefully the situation has been resolved at this point, ’cause Metal Injection, ever on top of this story, has alerted me to the fact that Jordison isn’t just continuing to promise fans a new album, but is making very absolute statements regarding Gray’s replacement — or lack thereof.

In an interview published yesterday, Jordison tells Billboard that plans for new ‘Knot are “already in motion,” and that “I think it’s gonna be a really, really great record because everyone’s really involved in the process.” Regarding the bass player situation, he says:

“We’ll have a bass player that’s right next to me, to the right behind the stage, to lock in with me. But there’s no one right now who will go on stage.”

That sounds pretty definitive, and saying that “everyone’s really involved” in the creation of a new record more than implies that Taylor is now fully onboard. But I wouldn’t be at all shocked if next week Taylor says he knows nothing about continuing on with Slipknot. I hope that doesn’t happen, ’cause it blows to keep yo-yoing the fans’ excitement like this… I’m just saying that, as always, past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior.

In any case, the good news is that Jordison and Taylor each have a 50/50 chance of being right — there will certainly either be or not be another Slipknot album.

But the dude who got it wrong might look mighty silly in the end.

-AR