SLIPKNOT will perform its 2001 album "Iowa" in its entirety at the Ozzfest Meets Knotfest festival on Sunday, September 25 at San Manuel Amphitheater and Festival Grounds in San Bernardino, California.
Says SLIPKNOT in a statement: "Fifteen years ago, something quite extraordinary happened. Nine men from Iowa went in to a studio in California and created one of the most chaotic and destructive albums ever made. It was, and still is, a shockingly physical and ferocious recording.
To this day, it has never been performed in its entirety.
That is about to change.
"On Sept 25, 2016, at Knotfest in San Bernardino, 30,000 people will experience an event that has NEVER been done before. It will be a dense and serious spectacle, both visually and sonically.
"But you'll be able to say 'you were there."
"So... Will you be there?"
"Iowa" went on to become a huge international success, spawning hits including "Disasterpiece", "The Heretic Anthem", "People = Shit" and "Left Behind".
Regarding what SLIPKNOT was trying to achieve with "Iowa", frontman Corey Taylor told Metal Hammer that the band did not want to put out a rehash of its 1999 self-titled debut and the LP's hit single "Wait And Bleed".
"Everyone and their mom was trying to get us to write ten more 'Wait And Bleeds', but fuck you, we've already done that," he said. "Why would we want to do it again?
"For us, it was really about being rabid, being wasted, and still being young enough to back it up. Our whole goal was to go in and make this dense, destructive album. We had no idea how destructive it was going to be."
Taylor believes SLIPKNOT more than accomplished its goal with "Iowa". He told Metal Hammer: "You can hear the bile in it, you can hear the frenetic passion for what we were trying to do. I think we overshot it… I think we bypassed what we were trying to do and achieved something completely different, which was to create the heaviest album that would be picked up by a popular audience who didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into."
Ozzfest Meets Knotfest is a combination of the two hard rock and metal events that will take place on Saturday, September 24 and Sunday, September 25 at San Manuel Amphitheater and Festival Grounds. BLACK SABBATH will top the Ozzfest bill on September 24, while SLIPKNOT will lead the Knotfest lineup the next day. Also on the Ozzfest portion are DISTURBED, OPETH, BLACK LABEL SOCIETY and others, while the Knotfest lineup includes SLAYER, TRIVIUM, ANTHRAX, SUICIDE SILENCE and many more.
Taylor explained how the meeting of the festivals came together. "You know, building our own festival, it just made sense if we could put this together and make the last North American show for BLACK SABBATH absolutely monumental," he said. "So we made some calls and we were able to put it together and once it was done, it was done like that. So I'm very, very, very proud that we could put this together."
Both days will feature three stages, with one of them named after late MOTЦRHEAD frontman Lemmy Kilmister.
The San Manuel Amphitheater and Festival Grounds is where Ozzfest began in 1996 and where Knotfest was staged last year.
Ozzfest, which began in 1996, has not been a traveling festival in the U.S. since 2007's "free" edition. The show morphed into a one-off event in Dallas in 2008, took 2009 off and played just six cities in 2010. Knotfest, meanwhile, staged its third annual event last year and second as a Southern California weekend destination festival.