Rob Halford of Judas Priest

Halford, the band’s magnetic leather-and-stud-clad frontman from 1971 to 1992, who sang such hits as “Living After Midnight” and “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming,” quit the seminal heavy metal band a dozen years ago to explore musical directions he didn’t feel were open to him in Judas Priest.

But as much as Halford admitted in a recent interview he had wanted to rejoin Judas Priest for some time, he also voiced no regrets over leaving, noting that it was an important move for him on a creative level and renewed his appreciation for his longtime band. “It’s just if you’re sitting in the office behind a desk for a long time, you just want to see what’s up the street. That’s what it was with me quite honestly,” Halford said, explaining why he left Judas Priest.

“You have no control in life in the sense that you can make your plans and your dreams and your ambitions, something to look forward to, but beyond that, you just have to let life take you where it takes you,” Halford said. “And life took me off for 10 years, and it was important because now I’ve come back with more conviction and more energy and more dedication and more creativity, and I just feel that those years away made me stronger.”

Clearly Halford was not as enthused about being in Judas Priest when he left the band. He approached the band about his desire to do a solo album and had originally hoped he would be able to remain in Judas Priest while also making time for solo projects. That turned out to be impossible. So Halford left in 1992, first forming the group Fight, which found him exploring more of a thrashy modern metal sound and leaving behind the more fantasy/science fiction type of lyrics he’d been known for writing in Judas Priest in favor of lyrics that were more personal and topical.

Fight lasted for two studio CDs before Halford joined forces with guitarist John Lowery for the short-lived band Two. He then formed Halford, a group whose two CDs found the singer bringing back some of the classic metal trademarks of Judas Priest.

Judas Priest, meanwhile, went through a considerable period of uncertainty over whether the band — which includes guitarists Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing, bassist Ian Hill and drummer Scott Travis — would stay together. But in the mid 1990s, they found a vocalist, Tim “Ripper” Owens, who, ironically enough, was fronting a Judas Priest tribute band called British Steel in Akron, Ohio.

By the time Halford (the band) released their first CD in 2000, he was already trying to reopen the lines of communication with his former Judas Priest bandmates. The first step was an emotional letter sent to Tipton, Downing and Hill around 1999. “I just felt so down and I just wanted to pour out all my feelings and my emotions in a handwritten letter that I sent up to Ken [that’s Downing’s first name], Glenn and Ian,” Halford said. “That really was the beginning of the, ‘OK, there’s the spark. Let’s see if we can make it into some smoke and maybe a flame will come out of it. We’ll see if it turns into a roaring bonfire,’ which it did some years later.”

In fact, Halford said it took several phone calls, a number of in-person meetings and lots of water being allowed to flow under the bridge for the reunion to actually occur. “I think all of us felt in our hearts that we would hope that that day would happen, but none of us knew when and where and how,” Halford said. “It was a long process, the healing process of actually coming to the point where we could comfortably sit down and look at each other in the eyes and say, ‘Yes, let’s reunite. Let’s get back together.’

“The family was apart for a long time, the full true family, and I think it was difficult for all of us, even though we were all working consistently, through that long period of being away from each other,” he said. “I always missed Ken and Glenn in front of me, and probably moreso than the music at that time. It was just so difficult for me to be away from them. It’s like not seeing your relatives for a long, long, long, long time.”

In the early stages of writing music for Slipknot’s newly released third CD, Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), vocalist Corey Taylor was already hinting that the record would answer a lot of questions about whether these masked marauders of heavy metal would have much more of a future as a band. In an April 2003 interview with this writer, Taylor, who also sings for the band Stone Sour, wasn’t optimistic about Slipknot’s longevity.

“If I had my way it would be one more album with Slipknot and then call it a day and see what happens,” Taylor said in 2003. “The great thing about Slipknot is you don’t know how long it’s going to last. It’s just one of those things where if it lasts too long, it becomes less than it was. And I don’t want to see that happen.”

Taylor’s thoughts were based around knowing Slipknot had fallen into a tightly defined genre — extreme metal. The only way for the band to last, Taylor said, would be to find fresh directions for their sound. And accomplishing that within the narrow confines of extreme metal would be a major challenge.

Now, a full year later, Taylor feels Slipknot faced up to that challenge. Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), he said, may alienate some of the extreme metal fans who first embraced the band’s platinum-selling 1999 self-titled debut, but that’s a risk the members of Slipknot needed to take. “The best thing about it is this. I love it, the whole band loves it,” Taylor said about the new CD, which was released May 25.

“We are completely happy with what we got. Now let’s see what the kids think. Let’s see what the kids decide. “This album could either go down in history or down in flames,” he said. In Taylor’s view, the new CD presents some distinctly new angles in Slipknot’s previously thrashy and screamy sound. “I think this is probably the best thing we’ve ever done,” Taylor said.

“It’s definitely more mature. It’s a whole different kind of vision of what we wanted to do. I mean, the heavy stuff is still there, obviously. We’ve always been able to write the heavy stuff really well. But this time we’re branching out. We’re trying to break out of a box that for better or worse we got tied into, which was extreme [metal] … We’re going to show the world that we do different [stuff]. I think it’s a really good thing. And everything on this album flows really well together. There’s the heavy stuff, there’s melody. It’s great. There are guitar solos. There are solo passages. Man, it’s awesome. It’s going to blow peoples’ minds. It’s definitely an album with many flavors,” he said.

The new CD comes at a time when Slipknot had reached a crossroads — not only creatively, but in popularity, as well. The beginnings of the band stretch back to about 1995 in Des Moines, Iowa, when drummer Joey Jordison, bassist Paul Gray and percussionist Shawn Crahan began working together and adding band members to realize the sound they wanted to create.

The lineup eventually came to include Taylor, Jordison, Gray, Crahan, percussionist Chris Fehn, guitarist Mick Thomson, guitarist Jim Root, sampler Craig Jones and DJ Sid Wilson. Early on the band members began wearing masks that made them look like escapees from some twisted haunted house — a look that combined with the group’s aggressive sound and dark lyrics made Slipknot a controversial presence in the Des Moines area.

Despite the resistance, Slipknot pressed forward, releasing a self-made CD, Mate, Feed, Kill, Repeat, in 1996. That CD caught the attention of Ross Robinson, a noted heavy metal producer for groups such as Korn and Machine Head. He signed Slipknot to I Am Records, his label which has distribution through the respected independent metal label Roadrunner Records. With Robinson serving as producer, Slipknot in 1999 recorded their self-titled debut album.

It didn’t take long for metal fans to take notice.

Slipknot landed a side stage slot on the 1999 Ozzfest tour and quickly became the most talked about newcomer on the festival bill. Eventually Slipknot sold 1.5 million copies — a huge number for an extreme metal band.