It’s September 11, 1999, and Slipknot are on prime of the world. Scorching off a game-changing self-titled debut album, the masked nine-piece are in Cleveland, Ohio, collaborating within the monumental Livin’ La Vida Loco tour. They’re there as a part of a stacked invoice headlined by Coal Chamber and in addition that includes Machine Head and Amen. It ought to have been one other magnificent night time of what had been a massively profitable trek.
Besides it wasn’t. At a gig in Cleveland, Slipknot discovered themselves going through an unexpectedly aggressive viewers.
“Individuals got here down and threw all the things however rocks at us,” Slipknot singer Corey Taylor remembered of the set his band performed that night, discussing it years later at considered one of his solo concert events. “They hit Paul [Gray, bassist] within the face with a fucking padlock the scale of my fist, whereas we had been onstage!
“After we obtained performed enjoying, we took all our shit off and went into the viewers,” he continued. “There have been quite a lot of them, however there was all 9 of us, there was Machine Head and all our associates in Amen. Let’s simply say, we fucking dealt with it proper there.”
“Me and Jim [Root, guitarist] jumped offstage and took our masks off and began swinging at folks on the finish of 1 track,” Grey advised Revolver. “After we had been performed with that set, all the things got here off. One of many guys in our crew obtained maced by the cops and arrested.”
The gig-turned-brawl was the Iowans’ first time in Cleveland: a metropolis that occurred to be the hometown of Mushroomhead, a band with whom Slipknot had greater than somewhat in frequent. Each wore masks and boiler fits. Each even had a bassist that dressed up like a pig. Corey Taylor and co, nonetheless, had been the newer of the 2 – and so they had been already larger. A lot larger. And that was the issue.
Mushroomhead launched their first album in spring 1995, greater than 4 years previous to The ‘Knot. Regardless of this although, the latter had been a direct breakthrough after June ‘99’s Slipknot, eclipsing the Ohio troupe in a minuscule span of time. In pissed off followers’ eyes, a really shut imitation had not-so-subtly ripped off the real article and ridden their coattails for a fast buck, resulting in the violent boiling level that was Cleveland in September 1999.
That one night time was the peak of the Slipknot versus Mushroomhead feud, which might go on to develop into one of many greatest speaking factors of the period. For years, loyalist followers would cling tightly to their respective favourites, whereas on-and-off mud-slinging consumed the rock ‘n’ roll press. Everybody else stood on the sidelines, questioning what they hell it was all about.
The stage for the rivalry was set in mid-1998, when Slipknot signed a particularly enviable seven-album cope with Roadrunner Data. A 12 months beforehand, the label had been thinking about signing Mushroomhead, however the band turned them down. “Roadrunner had a man buying us,” ex-frontman Jeff Hatrix mentioned on a podcast in 2018. “And, on the time, we had been making extra at native reveals than they had been providing us upfront, and so they wished all of our merch… The cash simply didn’t make any sense.”
Hatrix had beforehand claimed outright that Slipknot had been a home made imitation of Mushroomhead. “They’re Roadrunner-invented clones of us, and all people is aware of it,” he mentioned in 2007. Drummer Steve “Skinny” Felton was extra aggressive in direction of the alleged rip-offs, when he ranted that Slipknot “traded a platinum report for dignity, honour and respect”: “Corey Taylor says, ‘You can’t kill what you didn’t create.’ Perhaps so – however I suppose you possibly can positive as fuck promote what you stole.”
Native journal Cleveland Scene reached out to Roadrunner’s A&R director to get their aspect of the allegations. “I truthfully [couldn’t] care much less about your article and I’ve nothing to say,” got here the reply.
Though Slipknot’s 1999 Cleveland present was the one time the debacle got here to physicality, the 2 bands would commerce vicious verbal barbs by way of the 2000s. Within the Might 2002 challenge of Rock Sound, Taylor accused Mushroomhead of encouraging their followers to violence on that night time. He brutally added, “I’ll fucking go to fucking Cleveland and seize each fucking considered one of them by their silly fucking masks and I’ll put a knee to their faces till they cross out from lack of blood!”
Hatrix later admitted that he was certainly concerned in orchestrating the occasions in 1999. “I do know all of the individuals who did it and I did personally paint [their] ‘Cleveland Helps Mushroomhead’ and ‘Slipknot Go Residence’ indicators. However I wasn’t there and I didn’t know the entire extent of what they had been going to do. However, hey, these guys are males, proper? […] Welcome to Cleveland, bitches!” The singer additionally accused Slipknot and their touring crew of harassing his girlfriend for sporting a Mushroomhead t-shirt close to the venue earlier that day.
Hatrix et al. aggravated issues even additional in 2005, going as far as to carry out concert events of their dwelling state that mocked Slipknot. The eight males (along with considered one of their touring crew) dressed as The 9 onstage, enjoying samples that repeated, “The entire thing, I feel it’s stolen” – a parody of the phrases that open their debut album.
“Individuals began chanting, ‘Fuck Slipknot!’,” one concertgoer advised Blabbermouth. “Waylon [Reavis, vocalist] then screamed, ‘Come on, don’t be afraid to say it,’ which made everybody begin the mantra again up. The gang was brutal and I beloved it.”
By 2007, Mushroomhead had been nonetheless persevering with their campaign, slinging insults resembling “straight-up frauds” and “the NSYNC of heavy steel”. Nonetheless, they hadn’t been met with any additional response from their rivals, who had been changing into the mainstream face of a era of rock music. Slipknot’s newest album, Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses, had climbed to No.2 on the American charts, whereas Mushroomhead’s most up-to-date launch, 2006’s Savior Sorrow, had reached No.50.
By that time, Slipknot themselves had been traying to take the extra diplomatic route, refusing so as to add gas to the fireplace. “I’m uninterested in it,” Taylor mentioned in a 2005 radio interview. “We’ve tried all the things that we might to squash this between ourselves and Mushroomhead. I’ve even come out and mentioned I want them nothing however luck. I don’t care. It’s not that huge a deal to me.”
The last decade-plus-long tensions appeared to have lastly come to an finish by 2010, as Mushroomhead, each publicly and privately, despatched their condolences to Slipknot after the tragic demise of Paul Grey. Since then, Taylor has expressed curiosity in performing alongside his band’s former nemeses, desirous to curate a tour that may see the duo share phases with fellow masked rockers Mudvayne and Gwar.
Talking to Steel Hammer in 2023, Mushroomhead’s Steve ‘Skinny’ Felton might look again at with a way of perspective. “A little bit of it over time has been inflated,” he advised us. “I wasn’t there personally and I’ve heard 20 totally different variations over time. And let’s not neglect that it was in style in that period to have beefs in bands and stack folks in opposition to one another. It was enormous with the West Coast and East Coast rappers. The media fuelled it and followers purchased into it.”
Requested if Slipknot stole his band’s thunder by signing with Roadrunner after Mushroomhead didn’t, Skinny was equally measured. “No, as a result of there have been numerous folks signing numerous bands within the day. It wasn’t like we obtained the very same provide by the identical man who signed Slipknot. And I’ve quite a lot of compassion for them, as a result of they’ve put up with quite a lot of bullshit simply to make music and artwork, and so they’ve misplaced good folks. I commend them for all the things they do and it simply goes to point out that I wasn’t that far off a few years in the past that any such factor was going to be larger than we even knew. I wasn’t flawed. It simply wasn’t my band.”
Greater than 20 years after all of it kicked off in Cleveland, the sustained Slipknot/Mushroomhead rivalry stays one of many 90’s most talked-about discords. It was the Metallica versus Megadeth of the nu steel period, escalated by fistfights, arrests and the web. Immediately, each bands attempt to dismiss their previous skirmishes as fan- and media-driven, every making an attempt to downplay their very own involvement in what was essentially the most over-the-top feud in nu steel.