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You gotta understand the background that we come from, man," says Corey Taylor, a.k.a. 8, singer for the Des Moines metal band Slipknot. "In Des Moines, you either sit around and stagnate or you figure out how to get into shit by yourself. You end up getting crazy and destructive like kids anywhere, but in a very creative way. You say 'Well, I'm not gonna go bowling, I'm not gonna go roller-skating, so I think I'll set this fucking car on fire,'" Say what you will about Slipknot, but give'em points for thinking outside the grid. The band performs in freakish self-designed masks and coveralls with bar codes on the back. In lieu of stage names, they refer to themselves by single-digit numbers. Oh, and there are nine of them. A full one-third provides some sort percussion. Musically, Slipknot ratchet the clamor of Korn-fed millennial metal up a few more notches, with everything from home-welded percussion kits to furious DJ scratching and samples from the Harmonie Korine film Gummo. Since Slipknot earned a slot on last year's Ozzfest, followed by their second album has gone gold and counting. The band's home video, "Welcome to Our Neighborhood," debuted at Number One on Billboard's Top Music Videos chart last November, beating out new releases from Shania Twain and Madonna. "Kids relate to it because so many people are disenfranshised with everything," says 8, whose mask resembles a dreadlocked burn victim. "Today's underground hero is tommorrow's fucking Calvin Klein jeans commercial. That's hard to take when you're a kid. I was lucky. I got to wait until I was twenty-three for Metallica to cheese out." Slipknot's percussionist, founder and evil Bozo, Shawn Crahan-6 to you, Clown to his friends-formed the band five years ago, drawing members from the Des Moines metal scene. The group started out as an unmasked five-piece. "We never sat down and said, 'We wanna get as many fucking people in this band as possible,'" says 8, who replaced the band's original singer in 1997. "It just took this many people to get the noise out of our heads." 6 had owned the clown mask for years, carrying it around as a sort of unnerving security blanket-hanging it over his drum kit while playing. One day he wore it to band practice and, 8 recalls, "went completely psycho." They all got masks. Despite the theatrics, the unrelenting rage of songs like "Wait and Bleed" and "Surfacing" boasts real-enough roots. 8 had OD'd twice on cocaine by the time he was fifteen (he says he's been clean for the past eleven years), and he penned many a song while working the graveyard shift at a porn shop. "You wanna see some bizarre shit, work a porno shop in Iowa," he says. "I had a guy walk in completely naked except for leather chaps. It was three in the morning. Nobody else was there. I was like, 'What are you doing, dude?' He was like, 'Huh?' I started throwing wooden blocks at him to get him out of my store." While 6 says he had a great childhood and that he loves his hometown for its "good morals," it's a whole different story onstage; The Slipknot stage has born witness to broken, bodily fluids, and 6's won shoes hurled at members of Sevendust standing in the wings. Most recently, 6 and 0-Sid Wilson, the band's DJ-have taken lighting each other on fire. "Last night he burned his leg-his red coveralls are ruined!" 6 exclaims. "It started one night when Sid was just going out of his mind, and he grabbed this thing of lighter fluid off a drum-tech box and lit the drums on fire. Then he lit the front of himself on fire. I was laughing and lauhing, 'cause it was just so fucking crazy. So he's like, 'You think that's funny?' And he squirts it on me and lights me on fire! "Which is a really liberating feeling," 6 adds matter-of-factly. "If you've ever been on fire." � Rolling Stone Magazine. The article was written by Mark Binelli. I take no credit for this article. |