(SLIPKNOT) Send In The Clown

Q Magazine

August 2001

QUICK! HIDE! IT'S SLIPKNOT!

Will Clown make good his threat to hunt down and kill Q's writer!

Be afraid: Slipknot have anger "issues"; a habit of on-stage crapping and a taste for rotting beavers. But how will they stay true to the cause of puke with two million album sales and counting? "Our children need direction," they tell Michael Odell. 

The one they call Clown pokes a finger as fat as a pork sausage into my face. "You're a fucking virus because you work for them!" growls the wild-eyed redneck. "Fuck it! Fuck you! Society tries to dictate. Fuck society!" He shakes his lank hair and smashes a polystyrene carton with his fist. 

  Shawn Crahan, Slipknot's chief ideologue, believes that magazine "images" torture the youth. Q is a magazine. Ergo, I am scum. He calls over DJ Sid Wilson and asks him to show me the stumps of the two amputated sixth fingers he was born with. "They cut off his goddamn fingers cos society doesn't like them!" yells Crahan, caressing what look like two warts. "Think what a DJ he could have been with those extra fingers! We've been deprived of that cos of those motherfuckers!" A fist hits the table. The big bovine head shakes disbelievingly. Welcome to the writing angst, the festering pain, and the anti-everything world of Slipknot. And they haven't even shat on each other or licked any dead animals yet. 

 IN THE CAVERNOUS Xeel Arena in Minneapolis, the world's scariest band is unveiling a new look. Roadies work to erect a gantry of flashing red lights. When illuminated they read 666. Other flabby men puzzle over a severed goat's head, which they're sticking on a speaker rack, while a pyrotechnic team nod with satisfaction as they flick a switch and a pentangle bursts into flames. The artists arrive: nine masked men dressed in black boiler-suits with Nazi-style red-and-white-armbands. As they begin to play, the intensity ripples the fat on the onlookers cheeks. It's a track called People = Shit. 

  Slipknot hope their new show and the accompanying album, Iowa, will surpass all previous efforts. This is some claim, since last time their "act" included shitting, pissing and masturbating over each other as well as setting fire to each other's clothes and sniffing the rancid corpses of dead animals. On their last tour they amassed 45 broken ribs between them, and needed 240 stitches applied to mostly self-inflicted wounds. "People think of pigs and corn when they think of Iowa," reflects singer Corey Taylor. "We've called the new album Iowa because we want people to know it's about being fucked up and enraged and wanting to kill people as well." 

  Not since gangsta rap's cop-baiting heyday has a group managed to disgust and frighten like Slipknot. There are extreme metal like Marilyn Manson, Rammstein and Cradle Of Filth, of course, but even they are trumped for sheer noise and nihilistic panto. Last year "shock jock" Howard Stern's powers of speech failed him when Sid Wilson crapped in his studio during an interview. But outrage alone can't explain how Slipknot came to sell in excess of two million albums. Infusing the music with rap and drum'n'bass influences, they're more than just featureless thrash metal.

  Back in Minneapolis, the day's biggest thrill is the arrival of new masks. Slipknot's old ones are now too vomit-encrusted and ruined. A pretty young "mask tech" first blackens their eye sockets with the tar used on baseball player's faces. She then primps and tucks the new disguises and the band brush and caress the new black overalls designed by Marilyn Manson's costumer. After a few minutes sporting his new proboscis, drummer Chris Fehn, aka Dicknose, refuses to wear it because it's too tight. 

  There is some concern, too, that the modification to Clown's mask are not quite right. His new one features an exposed section of brain. Band members feel that this cerebral matter should shimmer with skull juices.  "Brains don't look dry," frowns drummer Joey Jordison. Crahan removes his mask and spits on it. "There!" he sighs and then begins a prolonged moan about the standard of welding in the world today. A former practitioner of the art, he's not satisfied with the new custom mic stands. "I threw one at the wall and it fucking broke," he grunts. "I need to be able to beat the crap outta someone with one and have it still work."

  There are no grumbles about the new boiler suits, although their Nazi armbands will doubtless make the forthcoming tour a placard wielders. "We can't be Nazis, our manager's Jewish," shrugs Jordison a mite lamely. "We just want to make as many enemies as possible. We're here just to piss people off with whatever we can find."

  As their creator, only Shawn Crahan is willing to confront Slipknot's questionable choice of imagery. He prefaces his comments with a warning that he will hunt me down and kill me if I make him look like a Nazi-lover.

  "What Hitler did was crazy...it was bad," he says, "I'm sorry, but if he walked in here today, I'd get him a soda. We'd talk. He's a human being. He had an idea and...You know what? We played Nuremburg and his energy was still there. Frightening." 

Slipknot evolved in the mid '90s from several bands in a local death/thrash metal scene in Des Moines, Iowa, a Bible Belt town in a sea of cornfields and pig farms. Shawn Crahan had formed Heads On The Wall at high school with original vocalist Anders Colsefini. Together, they recruited bassist Paul Gray and guitarist Mick Thomson from local thrashers Body Pit as well as drummer Joey Jordison and programmer Craig Jones from Modifidious. By April '96, they had taken the name Slipknot from one of their songs. Crahan found an old Hallowe'en mask and wore it to rehearsals. Jordison borrowed a Japanese kabuki mask belonging to his mother and followed his lead. By the time of their first gig at Des Moines' Safari club*, Gray was wearing barbed wire, Craig Jones some tights and Thomson an executioners hood. In August 1997 Slipknot recruited Corey Taylor from rival band, Stone Sour, preferring his mid range to Colsefini's unforgiving growl. 

  Early Slipknot shows featured Taylor inhaling the stench of a dead crow in a jar and making himself vomit. As their reputation spread, legions of Slipknot fans (or "maggots") have made the offerings of dead animals as part of fan culture. "I got sent a beaver and chewed its tail," boasts Taylor. "We've had cow parts and a snake too. You Brits are cool. In Manchester, a guy came wearing some real pig's ears."

  Six months after a local radio producer put them in touch with nu metal studio maestro Ross Robinson (Sepultura, Korn), they were hard at work in Des Moines on their second album, Slipknot. Their first - Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat - is a collectors item, with only 1000 existing. 

  "He'd throw plants at us," remembers Joey Jordison. "We were from a backwater and Ross was a big name so we were a bit, like, overawed. He saw that and would say, 'Where's the fucking hatred? And throw shit'.

 Spend a little time with Slipknot and the source of their demonic angst isn't immediately apparent. In their dressing room, they'll chat about cars or "the big game." They'll even show you their stinking masks, encrusted with months of puke. "It's a little difficult to get to those little bits," notes Root as though in some macabre Daz advert. "So all that shit just stays right there." Root and Thomson are a pair of six-foot-plus country lunks redolent of big steaks and brawls won with one punch. They dress respectively in zippered jester's mask and a Hannibal Lecter-style shield, but freely admit to pumping Journey and Stevie Wonder on the car stereo on route from Des Moines. Thomson used to be a guitar teacher at Des Moines' Ye Olde Guitar Shoppe and perhaps betrays a longing for more old school "axe" work by performing Layla and J Geils Band's Centrefold at soundcheck. At all times he talks as though giving emergency evacuation instructions through a bullhorn. "The pike fishing in Minnesota is great!" he booms jovially through his serial killer mask. "I can club a fish but I couldn't kill an animal."

  There is weirdness but little malice in DJ Sid Wilson, who was born to English parents from Oxford. Behind his gas mask, he is an angel-faced boy* with a shorn head and rat's tails and "Must Kill" tattooed across his knuckles. He says he suffers from "organic brain syndrome", a mental/visual impairment incurred after swallowing 73 tabs of LSD in one go. Now he sees objects with multi-coloured trails. 

  Computer and samples expert Craig Jones, meanwhile, is a genuine and social concern. A sexless baldie with murderous piggy eyes, he is impressively rude when approached. When I ask whether the nails in his spiky helmet stick into his head, he looks me straight in the eye and simply walks away. "Don't worry, he even scares me," says Root. "I kind of feel I am doing a service to the community by knowing where Craig is from day to day."

  Out of character, vocalist and lyricist, Corey Taylor is an affable, porcine shorty* with black hair and glasses. The only hints as to his alter ego are the words "Truth" and "Dogma" tattooed across the inside of each arm, and a bracelet fashioned from little skulls. Taylor, you feel, could be normal if he put in a little more effort. The dreadlocks on his mask are his own, a memento of the long blonde locks he used to sport as a singer in a rock covers band. Off duty in Des Moines, with his fiancée Scarlet, he mows the lawn, takes out the trash and they play Trivial Pursuit, he says. Their special song is Stealer's Wheel's Stuck In The Middle With You and they hope to marry next year. 

 "He came up to me at a party and said, Can I touch your tits" Scarlet recalls. "But he's a regular guy really. He only gets into Slipknot mode in the car when he practices his growling. I don't like that because he gets spit all over the goddamn dash-board." Examine Taylor's lyrics and his credentials as a regular citizen are severely undermined. Take last album's Prosthetics, a graphic account of him killing his ex-girlfriend and fucking her corpse.

  "That's just a normal reaction to being fucked over," he protests. "Everyone goes through that. The girl in question fucked me over, big time. Since she found out the song was about her she hasn't talked to me, which is no great loss. But I'm not a misogynist. I love women."

  Taylor was born in Waterloo, 20 miles from Des Moines. He never knew his father, became a cocaine addict at 15 and was adopted by his grandmother on a Des Moines trailer park as part of his recovery strategy. As a lyricist, he sets the tone of Slipknot, and the new album, he says, will be his most personal yet. 

  "If I didn't have Slipknot," he says, studying his black varnished fingernails. "I'd probably be climbing up some clocktower with a rifle taking aim at a bunch of kids." 

THUS FAR, we have the ingredients of a slightly twisted metal band. But add drummer Shawn Crahan, aka Clown, to the mix and the boundary between gross-out entertainment and serious anarchic intent is blurred. Crahan conceived the band and it's image, he designs the set and is responsible for all matters outside music. While others relax, Crahan is found backstage, welding. Today it's some curved serrated spikes which will jut from Wilson's DJ booth. "I want them sharp enough I can ram a cow's head on 'em," he explains. "If someone runs into 'em, they're gonna get fucked up real bad."

  In character, at least Clown smiles. Out of costume, you imagine him sullenly eating hanks of meat from a bowie knife or riding Burt Reynold's naked butt through a wooded glade shouting, "Soooo-ey".

  He burns with visceral intensity and is disgusted by all aspects of modern life - magazines, society, Limp Bizkit. Oddly tacked on to his list of life's disappointments is Sammy Hagar's appointment to his favorite childhood band, Van Halen.

"That's more bullshit! Hagar's good but that wasn't fucking Van Halen!" he screams. He believes Slipknot are on the verge of huge global impact and he wants to ensure that this translates into maximum teen rebellion and rock carnage rather than fizzling into music biz cliché. 

  After declaring, "I'm a perfect father and a fucking psychopath, OK? No contradiction," he invites me outside to see some ants. "Bugs! That shit is incredible, dude. Life! More incredible than any of this stupid shit."

  Crahan is the band's engine, the core of the madness. He rouses them into action and rants like a redneck Richey Edwards. There are slogans: "I don't push the envelope. I AM the envelope!". There is darkness. "I want to do a documentary on the slaughter and sectioning of livestock carcasses." But most of all there is the splenetic hatred of society's rules. "Be a boy! Ride a bike like this! Breathe air! No, dude, I've had enough! Fuck that! I'm checkin' out!"

  Crahan says he had a happy youth. His parents financed Slipknot in the early days and he professes nothing but the utmost respect for them. In the early '90s he had a drink problem, exacerbated when he bought a Des Moines bar*. Frustrated by lack of success, he says he would have killed himself if he hadn't met his wife, Chantal. "My saviour, my hero," he says. "She saved my life."

  Behind the radicalism, sometimes there is a small-town conservatism. "Pussy?" he asks unbidden. "I couldn't care less. Women show me nothing." He will, though, go some way defending the right to smell his own shit. "Why not?" he glares. "It's my fucking shit! I bet you smell yours but you're a fucking hypocrite because you think mine is disgusting."

  And when the spleen subsides, and you ask him carefully, levelly, why he actually sounds like Tony Blair. "Our children have no direction," says Crahan leaning back presidentially. "They're mutilating themselves with crank and meth and ectasy. I want kids to question why and not settle for what they're given. I put myself on the cross for them." 

  He says he will eventually leave Slipknot and commute with like-minded people. But whatever his ideology, Slipknot is already battling to keep their integrity. Current merchandising opportunities include a top-selling lunchbox and $120 boiler suits. There is talk of Slipknot dolls and Wilson is planning his own clothing line. Crahan says he'll have nothing to do with it. But Slipknot does not speak with one voice. "We won't get a Pepsi deal," laughs Corey Taylor. "But if the right thing came along, I'll do it. My conscience says. "You fucking greedy dick. But another side says, Five million dollars?"

THE LATEST opportunity to come Slipknot's way is a Hollywood movie. They are to appear in the remake of cult '70s movie Rollerball and director John McTiernan (Die Hard, Hunt For Red October) has jetted in with a crew of 70 to film 10 seconds of Slipknot lip-synching in full dress. Guitarist Mick Thomson only found out an hour ago. "No one tells me shit," he grunts, as he and Jordison watch a hockey game on telly. Once their called to the set, all is madness. 

  For reasons never made clear to the band, Slipknot's scene involves them playing to a crowd of Mongolians in traditional dress. Yesterday visiting devotees of the Dalai Lama, by chance in Minneapolis, were approached and recruited as extras. In return for $100, around 200 oriental men and women have agreed to file past the band in Mongolian costume. As new track I Am Hated blasts from the speakers, the extras visibly cower. After 20 or so takes one of the "Mongolians" seems interested. "Hey when are you guys playing next?" one of the Dalai Lama's less committed disciples calls up to the stage. 

  While McTiernan organises his cameras for another shot, Crahan summons me up on to the stage to continue the interview. He wants me to know, "the shit he has to go through." He puts me on his flying drum platform, a roadie flicks a switch and I'm launched into the sky.

"That's the risk I'm taking" he snarls. Once lowered, I'm told to jog up a ramp, past the pyrotechnic equipment and the glazed stare of the goat's head. "Look at that," says Crahan. "Evolution?"

Then, we're running again, this time past the big metal spikes. "If I cut myself on these fucking spikes, that's it!" he barks as though I'd put them there. 

  "You wielded them" I squeal weakly. 

  "Who cares?" he screams. "One false move, my wife and kids gets a fucking phone call...daddy's not fucking coming home tonight!" He makes me scamper across a further ramp and down the other side of the stage. We stop at some lights and he points. 

  "I'm fucked off. I can't piss on these ones. I'd be electrocuted. Danger! Death! We're playing with fucking fire, dude!" For perhaps the hundredth time I find myself clasping the side of my head and asking, But...why? Crahan stops running, stares with proprietorial air into the empty auditorium and says, "For my children. Some of them are fat. Some might be ugly. They are in pain. They need. They feel. I must show them the way."            

Notes

Safari Club (the Des Moines bar mentioned): This was owned by Shawn Crahan and his father, as nowhere else would book Slipknot according to Sid Wilson in a 2026 interview.

"Angel faced boy": Sid, as the youngest member of Slipknot, would have been about twenty-two or twenty-three at the time of the article. 

"Shorty": Corey is about 5'7. Even in his books he refers to himself as "diminutive". During a line up of the band according to height, it went 5'4 Joey, and then 5'7 Corey.