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While Corrosion of Conformity (or “COC”) was formed in 1982, the band never really found its sound or correct lineup until nearly a decade later.

Originally founded as somewhat of a hardcore-punk band, COC released three albums in the 1980s and received a fair amount of critical acclaim for its ability to fuse together multiple sounds. Shortly after the release of 1987’s “Technocracy,” however, original bassist and backing vocalist Mike Dean and lead vocalist Simon Bob Sinister left the band, leaving the future of COC uncertain.

After a two-year hiatus, COC gave the band another shot with a trio of new members, including Pepper Keenan. When Keenan joined the band, he assumed the role of rhythm guitarist behind Woody Weatherman and backing vocals behind the newly recruited Karl Agell. Nevertheless, his influence on COC’s next record, “Blind,” already began to take the band in a different direction.

True to his southern roots, Keenan exerted a heavy dose of southern metal into “Blind,” particularly on the song Vote With a Bullet where he sang lead vocals. The song was COC’s biggest hit up to that point and influenced the band to hand the lead vocals role over to Keenan after Agell and bassist Phil Swisher left to form Leadfoot.

Dean returned to play bass and, along with drummer Reed Mullin, COC found its lineup for the band’s next three albums.

First came “Deliverance,” arguably COC’s greatest work to date. Released in 1994, the album was a straight-forward southern metal record that sparked the radio hits Albatross and Clean My Wounds, which helped it achieve Gold status worldwide.

In the next seven years, Keenan and co. put out “Wiseblood” and “America’s Volume Dealer.” While neither album matched the success of “Deliverance,” the band still had a couple radio hits during that time, most notably Drowning in a Daydream off “Wiseblood.”

Reality exists independent of the mind. The mystic is often heard to say “reality is an illusion”. But if it were true that reality was merely a figment within imagination, then by definition we would not be able to concretize that ‘reality’ through the laws of nature.

The fact that the conscious mind sometimes poorly grasps aspects of reality, says more about human consciousness than it does about reality. Indeed, those trained in the sciences are often better at framing existence and identifying aspects of reality, than are those untrained in such endeavors.

Just because certain aspects of reality are hard to grasp is not an excuse to say: “Therefore reality is an illusion”. …Rather, we should readily understand that reality is full of complexities. Indeed, the physicist Richard feynman once said: “I think it is safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics.”.

Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University gives a good evolutionary definition of why our brains might be so poorly adapted to grasp the universe, at the level of the very small. We evolved in nature in what he calls “middle World” – and thus, the very small and indeed the very big, did not impinge on our senses. Thus, we have not evolved brains which are particularly good at grasping aspects of reality outside the realm of middle-world sense perception (not to be confused with Tolkien’s Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings).

I take reality to mean the totality of existence. Thus, the concept reality simply means all of existence. In other words every aspect of existence is part of reality. Thus, reality simply means everything which is real.

Diversity and Inclusion how wonderful it would be if those two things went hand in hand. If they were simply how things are. In the past six years we have found we are one of the few groups actively working with and for the disabled artist and audience, as well as for the mixed ethnic and racial community. It has been a huge surprise in New York City to find we were the only company providing regularly interpreted work into American Sign Language (ASL). We have actively sought out artists and designers and advocated for their continued work, educated theater owners and renters, spoken on panels, written for papers hoping to be a leader at the forefront of a new reality in diverse and inclusive working conditions.

We want what we do to reflect the world around us in New York City. We want all casts to be as varied as the people we see on the street each day. And when the artists do a show they should be impacted and changed the show should be one that years later when many others have blended together in their brain, the one or more they did with us stick out because maybe they worked opposite a deaf or hard of hearing actor or designed a set even though they are in a wheelchair, or played a legendarily white role even though they are Hispanic or Black or simply that they played so frighteningly against type that they never thought they could do it.