(from left) Reed Mullin, Woody Weatherman, Pepper Keenan and Mike Dean with a vintage Dodge Challenger“We knew eventually it would happen—it was just a matter...
(from left) Reed Mullin, Woody Weatherman, Pepper Keenan and Mike Dean with a vintage Dodge Challenger“We knew eventually it would happen—it was just a matter of when the time was right,” says Corrosion of Conformity guitarist Woody Weatherman about reuniting with singer and guitarist Pepper Keenan. “And I guess the time was right now.”
For fans of the band, that time has been a long time coming. Corrosion of Conformity began life in North Carolina more than 30 years ago, and spent their first few years building a name for themselves as one of the most ferocious units on the hardcore punk scene. And while members came and went around the core trio of Weatherman, bassist and singer Mike Dean and drummer Reed Mullin, the band had their greatest success in the early and mid Nineties when they were fronted by Keenan and were churning out sludgy, Sabbathy, southern-tinged anthems like “Albatross” and “Drowning in a Daydream.”
Following 2005’s excellent In the Arms of God, however, things went side-ways. “We made a slammin’ record, and then our label [Sanctuary] just kind of fell apart and left us hanging,” Keenan says. “I moved back to New Orleans, and then Hurricane Katrina hit and tore a bunch of shit up, and I had to get my life together down there and rebuild.”
COC went on a hiatus, and in time, Keenan began focusing primarily on his other project, the New Orleans–based, Phil Anselmo–led sludge-metal super-group, Down (when asked about the current status of that band, Keenan says that he’s “spoken with the other guys a couple of times, but everyone’s just busy at the moment”). The rest of COC, meanwhile, eventually continued on, returning to their mid-Eighties three-piece configuration. But, Keenan says, when it came to Corrosion