Interview

Corrosion of Conformity's Woody Weatherman: "We Were Striving To Be Black Sabbath, But We Played Everything Ten Times Faster."

Corrosion of Conformity is one band that could never be found guilty of releasing the same album over and over again. One reason for that is the group has experienced many lineup changes. With each lineup change comes a different sound. Their career can be broken down into periods—each period with a succinct sound. Mike Dean (bass/vocals), Woody Weatherman (guitar) and Reed Mullin (drums) have been the core members of C.O.C. since their hardcore punk rock inception in the early eighties, although all three members have left the band and returned sometime throughout the band’s history.

Starting as a hardcore punk band, C.O.C. released two LPs, “Eye for an Eye” (1984) and “Animosity” (1985) and the “Technocracy” EP (1986). Each record featured a different singer such as Eric Eycke (“Eye For An Eye”), Mike Dean (“Animosity”) and Simon Bob Sinister (“Technocracy.”) They brought in Karl Agell to man the mic on their next recording “Blind” (1991). This album showed a transition from punk to metal and also introduced the singer of their next four albums, Pepper Keenan.

On “Blind,” Keenan sang on the track “Vote with a Bullet,” and was the sole singer on the following albums, “Deliverance” (1994), “Wiseblood” (1996), “America’s Volume Dealer” (2000) and “In the Arms of God” (2005), which saw a greater reliance on heavy blues and southern rock. The band also received its greatest commercial achievement with the “Deliverance” album. After being on hiatus for a few years, the group returned in 2012 with their self-titled effort. This album marked the return of three-piece lineup that comprised the punk-addled “Animosity” record—Dean, Mullin and Weatherman. In addition to the self-titled effort, the three created another full-length “IX” (2014) and the “Megalodon” EP (2012). Although these albums were punky, they still retain much of the groove of the Keenan years.

Back in the spring, Mullin got with Karl Agell to tour as the “Blind” package, which the group performed the said album. Even more recently, Pepper Keenan rejoined Mullin, Weatherman and Dean for tours such as their U.S. jaunt with old buddies, Clutch. Now, the group has a contract with Nuclear Blast records to record another album with Keenan. Before starting another tour with a killer stoner rock package that includes Saviors, Mothership and Brant Bjork and the Low Desert Punk Band, the band stopped off in San Antonio, Texas to play Phil Anselmo’s Housecore Horror Film Festival. Woody Weatherman and Reed Mullin were kind enough to lend a few minutes of their busy schedule to talk about C.O.C.’s history, current tours and what the future holds.

Rex_84: Is this your first time playing Housecore Horror Film Festival?

Woody Weatherman: It is, but this is the only the third year of the festival.

Rex_84: Are you taking in any of the films or bands?

Reed Mullin: I’m going to be taking in some of the bands.

Weatherman: We just got here a little while ago. We just kind of rolled in. We’re waking up and having the first beers of the day.

Mullin: We played Shreveport last night. Fuck! That was a bad ass show. Jesus Christ! It seemed everybody in that fucking club knew every lyric. It was bad as hell!

Rex_84: That was with Yob and Black Cobra, right?

Mullin: No, we played with those two guys in Atlanta. This was local bands here. Crackfight and some other bands played (Choke, Black Summer Rain).

Rex_84: How was the tour with Clutch?

Weatherman: That was awesome! We’ve known the Clutch dudes forever. Since day one. I think their first show they ever played was opening for C.O.C. a million years ago. It was the first or second show they ever did, so we’ve been friends forever. We’ve done touring together through the years. Those guys are doing great and it was fun for us to head out on the road with them. It was good for us because it was our first real tour with Pepper in America in years. We went over to Europe three or four times this year, but this was our first U.S. run. It was awesome!

Mullin: Like Woody was saying, we’ve known those guys forever. It was a good opportunity for people to come check us out us with Clutch and later us, Clutch and Mastodon and every place was packed. It was killer. Really fun. I got to watch JP [Jean-Paul Gaster] play drums and your boy from Mastodon [Brann Dailor] play every night, so that was a bonus for me.

Rex_84: Do you share a lot of fans with Clutch? Do you think you’re stylistically similar?

Weatherman: I think it’s a good match because we’re similar enough to have some of the same fans, but we’re different enough so it’s not the same shit all night long. It’s a good match up. People are always asking for that kind of stuff, which is cool.

Rex_84: You have a killer stoner rock package that you’re touring with right now. Saviors, Brant Bjork and Mothership. How do you feel about this overall package?

Weatherman: Brant is another dude we’ve known for a million years, of course Kyuss, Fu Manchu.

Rex_84: Did you plays shows with Kyuss?

Weatherman: We did with Fu Manchu. We never played with Kyuss back in the day.

Mullin: We saw Kyuss a bunch of times with Brant playing. Then later, what was his name? Armondo [Acosta]. No, that’s Saint Vitus (laughs).

Weatherman: Brant and the three piece we were doing a couple years ago—the three-piece version of C.O.C.—we were out and we had Brant And The Low Desert Punk Band out on that. If we find new bands that we haven’t heard of before that we like, like Mothership from Dallas, if somebody is cool we like to take them out with us. It just makes for a good package and people want to come see it.

Mullin: With Brant’s band, too, their guitarist (Bubba DuPree) was in a punk band in D.C., a hardcore band called Void. They were one of our favorite bands back in the day. Their bass player Dave Dinsmore is brothers to a guy in the band BL'AST!, an old band from Santa Cruz. With him in particular, it’s like old bros, you know what I mean? We’ve known those dudes for years and years.

Rex_84: When you first started out, you were a crossover band, right?

Weatherman: When we started out, we were a bunch of hardcore kids. We loved Sabbath, Maiden, Scorpions, all that kind of shit, but we also loved Flag, Bad Brains. We were striving to be Black Sabbath, but we played everything ten times faster. That was our gig back then. That was our thing.

Mullin: One of the songs on our first album is a Sabbath song, just sped up. It’s a song called “Rednekkk.” It’s like “Symptom of the Universe” played a million miles an hour. The orthodox punk kids hated metal. It was oil and water with a lot of those punk kids.

Weatherman: It was vice versa, too. A lot of the metal kids hated punk rock, but then all of a sudden bands like Venom came out and of course there was Metallica that borrowed stuff from punk rock. Slayer is the same thing. Then punk rock bands were borrowing stuff from metal and then all of a sudden it turned into a brother hood. Then there was the crossover thing that you’re talking about. It turned into that. People started giving it a name.

Rex_84: So when you started it wasn’t called “crossover?”

Both: No.

Weatherman: That term did not exist yet.

Mullin: People would fight each other. Punks and metal heads would fight each other. It was a big deal.

Rex_84: Were you pushing towards being a metal band, which started with the “Blind” album?

Weatherman: I don’t know if we were pushing towards being metal. It was just the thing that we did. As we learned a little more about recording, a little more about playing our instruments, it just kind of evolved that way. That was our stuff to begin with. We just couldn’t quite pull it off in the early days. It was just more aggression and speed and stuff. We just evolved into different things. We tried to incorporate all of the things that we liked into what we do.

Rex_84: Did the band change when you brought in Pepper? Did it change your vision when you brought him in?

Weatherman: Pepper would come see C.O.C. when we went down as a three-piece in New Orleans, so he knew the band and was a fan of the early stuff. It was just a natural thing to get him in because he was into the same shit we were into, the same kind of music. We came from sort of the same scene, so it just made perfect sense when he first came in. That was in ’89. Pepper has been in the band a long fucking time (laughs).

Mullin: He was in a band called Graveyard Rodeo. We would always play with him down at the punk rock shows at the YMCA that the swamp rats would put on down there. He actually came out to try to sing for us because Simon Bob had quit or whatever. That didn’t quite work out, but he was a super cool dude and he was our buddy there and he knew how to play guitar.

Weatherman: A second guitar player (laughs). Then it turned into our second guitar player/singer shortly after.

Rex_84: How did that all go down because you had Karl Agell sing on the “Blind” album?

Weatherman: We buckled down and started writing music for what would become the “Deliverance” album. It was a different monster. It went in a different direction from what we had done before. It just turned out. Pepper had lyrics, riffs, he had vocal ideas for it and it just kind of turned into that. Karl left the band and then we were the four-piece that we were.

Rex_84: Was it a transition from Pepper singing “Vote With a Bullet?”

Weatherman: That song showed him that he could stand out front and do it. Before we started doing the “Deliverance” record we were looking for another singer because Pepper wasn’t sure he could do it. We hadn’t really even thought about it, and then, I think it was Mike Dean [bass] who said, “You know, why don’t you just sing?” We were looking for singers and nothing was working out. I think Mike said, “you can sing, right?” Pepper was like, “ok, let’s try it out.” And it worked.

Mullin: “Vote with a Bullet” definitely gave him…you know, it was one of the best songs on the “Blind” album, it definitely gave him the confidence, it gave all of us the confidence, that he could pull that shit off, easy. And he did. He fucking kicked ass on it and “Deliverance.”

Rex_84: I saw you play in Austin last spring with the “Blind” lineup.

Weatherman: I wasn’t on that tour.

Rex_84: What was going on then? Why didn’t you go on tour with them?

Mullin: Woody was getting ready to have a kid. I needed to make some money. Our booking agency asked, “hey, do you want to do this?” “Ah, sure, as long as it’s just this. As long as it’s just a month thing.” We went out and did the “Blind” album. Me and Karl did, and Karl’s buddies. Karl is in a band called King Hitter, so it was basically the King Hitter guys and me performing C.O.C. karaoke. It was fun. I like playing all the drum stuff because it’s kind of like “Look At Me!”

Weatherman: A lot of crazy riffs.

Mullin: We’ve had so many lineups. We have the old punk rock version. Then we had “Blind” lineup for that one album. Then we’ve got the Pepper thing. You know, right now we haven’t played the Pepper stuff. We have the last couple of months, but we hadn’t played that for a while. This has just been the best! There is a lot of great material. How many albums? We have “Deliverance,” “Wiseblood,” “Arms of God” and “Volume Dealer.”

Weather: And of course we do two off “Blind” on this trip. So there are a lot of great songs that I haven’t played in a while.

Rex_84: C.O.C. took a break for a little while and then you came back out with the self-titled album. Did people expect you to come out and be punk rock again?

Weatherman: I don’t know. We were doing the three-piece and it was Pepper’s idea to kick us in the butt and get us going again. We were talking to Pepper and knew when the time was right we would be doing what we’re doing now. We were doing what we called the “Animosity” lineup, which is me, Reed and Mike. We were a three-piece. We had a great time doing that playing those songs that people were asking for. It was good to do that. It is kind of like, we did it and now we’re going to do this (laughs).

Rex_84: You played some Pepper material, too, right?

Weatherman: We did a little bit. No, not really. The only song from “Deliverance” that we did was the title track because Mike sings that on the record. So we did that and it was kind of about it. If it wasn’t off the “Animosity” or “Technocracy” albums we were doing new stuff. We did those two records and an EP over the last couple of years as a three-piece. We did “Megalodon,” “IX” and the self-titled record.

Rex_84:Didn’t you release “Megalodon” on Scion?

Weatherman: It’s cool because I know they’re a car company but they have this whole underground thing. They’ll pay for you to go and do a record. Pay for your studio.

Rex_84: So they plaid for everything?

Weatherman: Yeah, they paid for it all and they put it out. They made it free for people. That was why we were into it, because it’s free. We gave it away. It’s like “ok, cool. You’re going to pay for us to go record it and then you give it to people. That’s killer!” So it was kind of cool. It was a one-off thing for us. It was a cool deal.

Rex_84: What was it like when you played the show in 2011 when Pepper came up on stage?

Weatherman: We did several shows as a three-piece, there were at least two or three festivals over a year or two where we were on the same bill as Down and on the same day, so Pepper would come up and play songs with us on those days. That was sort of the first taste of getting ready for this. That happened three times. We did it at Hellfest, another festival in Spain and somewhere else.

Mullin: One of the best was Chile. He came to our set with us. It was one of the best shows we’ve ever played! It was so good! The place was packed and we knocked that shit out of the park!

Weatherman: Pepper came up and did like four songs with us, so that was killer.

Rex_84: “Deliverance” seems like your break-out album. Why do you think this album was so successful?

Weatherman: I think there were a lot of reasons. It had great material on it. We were on Columbia and they were into the band. They were really excited about the band, so they pushed it, which is unusual. It was a “commercially successful record” because it got played on the radio and we did videos. It was a good spearhead for us to move on to the next record “Wiseblood.” Not to mention, we were out on the road with Metallica for like a year and a half, like literally. We did a lot of touring with those guys. A year and a half, for real. It was like forever.

Rex_84: Were they fans of your old punk rock stuff?

Weatherman: Yeah, they were. In the really early days those guys would come to our punk gigs, way, way, way back.

Mullin: I was talking to a guy not long ago who was at that farm show we did with GBH. The whole band of Metallica was there in the pit watching us. Cliff Burton right up front.

Rex_84: You’re planning on writing a new EP. Can you give us some details?

Mullin: It’s going to be an album.

Weatherman: Nuclear Blast has stepped up. Monte [Conner] and the gang signed us. We’re working for Nuclear Blast. I feel stoked. Those guys are on top it. I think for us, right now, that is thee best label for C.O.C. We couldn’t have picked a better label. We’re fucking stoked! They’ve got a killer roster of bands. They’re good people. They’re stoked to have Corrosion. We’re stoked to have them.

Rex_84: They get a lot of the older bands on the label.

Mullin: They have Slayer, right?

Rex_84: Yes, their new one is on there.

Mullin: I’ve seen Monte Conner off and on for the last couple of years. He caught wind when we were talking to Pep about doing this again, and I swear to god, every month he would call me, text me and email me: “What’s going on? Are you getting any closer because I’m going to sign you. I’m going to be the one that signs you!” Sure enough. It showed how stoked he was on the whole idea. For sure, man, he and the whole company are into working C.O.C. record. There are a lot of C.O.C. fans working at that label. That goes a long way. Getting signed to a label and having people do their job is always cool, but when they know that band it makes a difference. They’ll go the extra mile. They’ll think of different things that will help the band. So yeah, it just worked out perfect. Monte got what he was looking for. That’s for DAMN sure!

Rex_84: How much have you written of the new album?

Weatherman: It’s like infancy stages. We’ve been on the road quite a bit, but we’ve got riffs. We’ve been jamming a little bit, we have pieces. Coming up soon, we’ve got to get in a room together and really get the beginnings of it going. We’re not going to rush it. The Nuclear Blast guys are not rushing us, either. Make the record that we want and we’re not in a rush. If it happens this upcoming year that will be killer. We’ll shoot for that, but we’re not in any rush.

Rex_84: Are you going to work on it after this tour?

Weatherman: We’re working on it all the time. We’re thinking about riffs and stuff.

Rex_84: But I mean will you get together to record?

Weatherman: Yeah, we have a couple of festivals coming up that are going to happen in early 2016, but we’ll be getting in a room together and hashing some stuff out before too long.

Mullin: Everything is embryonic in terms of riffage and that kind of stuff. Like Woody said, when we get into a room things will get more cohesive.

Weatherman: We already got the game plan for the record. We know what we’re going to call it. We know what the direction is. We want to leap off where we left off last time.

Rex_84: Is it going to be “Deliverance” kind of stuff?

Weatherman: Some of it might be. I think “In the Arms of God” was a great record and we’ll be leaping off from where we were going there and what we’re doing now. I think it’s going to meld together.