Here’s How Corey Taylor Thinks Live Concerts Will Eventually Return
Former MetalSucks video correspondent / current Rock Feed head honcho Brian Storm, bless his heart, has landed an interview with Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor and his wife, Alicia Dove of The Cherry Bombs, via live video from their home. Taylor has stayed off social media of late, surely good for his mental health but ultimately bad for MetalSucks’ bottom line, so thank you, Brian, for doing the lord’s work during these crazy times and making sure everyone working in the metal media can eat this month!
Brian asked Corey and Alicia how and when they see live entertainment coming back once the coronavirus pandemic is under control, and here’s what Corey offered:
“It all depends on how we open this back up. You almost have to attribute it to the way casinos are opened [in Las Vegas], with a soft opening. They basically do an opening before the grand opening and people wander through and it’s not packed, it’s not huge. It’s just seeing what people are going to be into and seeing if they are into what’s being provided.
“That’s basically what they’re going to do with this industry. There’s going to be a soft opening. There are going to be handful of acts. They are going to be the litmus test to see what the world is ready for. It will probably be in smaller venues. Because people will be fucking scared, man. Or, maybe outdoor venues, where people don’t feel like they’re confined. They don’t feel like they’re too stuck together. There’s going to be a sense of paranoia for a while, even after there is a medicine developed, or a vaccine.
“So it’s going to take time. There will be some acts that have to fall on the sword. If we do it right, and build that enthusiasm, probably within a year, maybe a year and a half, we’ll see the same enthusiasm for live shows that we did before. Because, I think that once people realize everything is going to be okay, people are going to realize that they take for granted that they haven’t been to a live show in a long time, and the live concert experience will be something they come back to. They’ll be tired of watching it on YouTube, watching it on their phone. They’re going to want to be in the experience. I think there will be a real renaissance of live entertainment.”
I know what I think about this topic — we’ve been talking about it here on MetalSucks for weeks — but now that I know what The Most Important Person in Metal thinks, I can finally rest confident in my assessment.
Storm pointed out that that smaller venues might be allowed to open before larger ones, and asked if Slipknot would ever scale down their show to perform in such a setting. Here’s how Corey responded:
“I don’t know, maybe. It helps when it’s a room that long, where we can get all of our crap in. We have so much crap now, we’d have to go to Guitar Center and start finding shit – like ‘Clown, you take that kit and Frankenstein it. We’ll just put it in there. No, you can’t shit on it! [laughs].’ It’d be funny, it’d be insane.
“We’ve actually talked about doing something like that for years, and doing a throwback show. And doing a throwback show in a way where we wear the old gear as well. But that’s… I mean, I don’t know, few and far between. We’d have to make sure that we could do it in a safe way, obviously. Not just from a coronavirus standpoint, I mean that would be IN – SANITY. But, we’ll see. It would be insane.”
That would certainly be insane, and fans would no doubt flock to buy tickets in spite of any post-virus-related paranoia. It seems unlikely events will unfold that way, but you never know!
Meanwhile, Slipknot’s early summer North American tour hasn’t officially been canceled yet but it seems like a foregone conclusion that’ll happen any day now. We’ll keep you posted.
Watch the full Rock Feed chat below. Thanks to Metal Injection for the transcription.
