To say that Slipknot is extreme may be an understatement. Without a doubt, several of
the behind-the-scenes tales about Slipknot are vile and disgusting, but it's important
to put those stories into context. Let's dig into the untold truth of Slipknot.
Slipknot's philosophy is all about enduring pain, hardship, and all sorts of extremely
uncomfortable conditions. According to MTV News, a major rule of the bandmates is to
just "sit in it," whatever "it" is. In particular, the band has this mentality regarding their
iconic masks. Especially in their youth, when the band was new, washing the masks was simply
not a priority when all that mattered was the music and their performances. Drummer
Shawn Crahan says he went years without cleaning his clown mask. The unhygienic practice is
even worse considering the fact that the masks are always filthy with a combination of sweat,
spit, and other bodily fluids.
With the intensity of their performances and the well-known injuries they have sustained
during them, it is unsurprising that blood has gotten in the masks, and even vomit as
well. Not only has Crahan said that they have all thrown up in their masks at some point,
but drummer Joey Jordison admitted that in the past, he would get sick at almost every
performance without missing a beat. This inevitability wasn't a problem but rather, according to
Crahan, "a rite of passage or a badge of courage,".
"This is Slipknot."
However, fame and wealth have made the band members slightly less hardcore when it comes
to their masks. For every new album cycle, the band gets new, clean masks to perform
in. Slipknot has also embraced their well-deserved rock star status by hiring people to work
on and clean their masks.
Lead singer Corey Taylor has been very vocal about his rough past and the trauma he endured
as a child, talking openly about the measures he was forced to take during this time in
order to survive. According to the book "Raising Hell: Backstage Tales from the Lives of Metal
Legends," Taylor as a child would steal candy bars and then sell them for a profit so that
he could buy some food.
The practice escalated in severity when he got older — Taylor began to steal beat-up
cars and then sell or trade them, often for drugs. The worse the vehicle's condition was,
the easier it was to steal, but the teenage thief got very little back in return. Taylor
recollects:
"The nicest car we ever got was a '78 Impala, which we probably got a grand for."
Slipknot bandmates are widely famous for the injuries they have sustained during their
intense performances. However, DJ Sid Wilson once lived through an experience outside of
one of their shows that reportedly nearly led to his death.
After a car pulled out in front of him from a side street unexpectedly, Wilson tried to
swerve his bike around and avoid a collision, but he didn't succeed. His bike struck the
back of the vehicle, and he went flying. After being thrown nearly 30 feet through the air,
Wilson landed on his face and slid into a nearby pole. Miraculously, he got up after
the accident, but he wasn't unharmed — two of his ribs were broken, and his lung had
been punctured. If he hadn't been wearing his helmet, the damage would have been much
worse — or, as Wilson put it, he "would have [ended up as] a squashed grape."
Considering the general vibe of Slipknot and the lyrics of the band's songs, it's not too
big a shock that one of the group's founding members is steeped in conspiracy theories.
In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2000, Shawn Crahan brought up several paranormal
and dubious-sounding topics, including airplanes leaving strange patterns in the sky, a link
between the pyramids and Orion's belt, the mysterious nature of a dark spot on "one of
the moons of Jupiter or Venus," and the supposed Sphinx head on Mars.
Joey Jordison also claimed that he and fellow bandmate, guitarist Mick Thomson, witnessed
a few paranormal events while the band was working on their album, "Vol 3: The Subliminal
Verses," at Rick Rubin's mansion. At 9 a.m., both of the doors to their rooms would swing
open all on their own. This led the drummer to believe that something terrible had probably
happened at some point at 9 a.m. in the time since the building was constructed in 1918.
Plus, Jordison would claim to see a floating "body shape," and witness lights constantly
turning themselves on and off. He enjoyed the experiences, though, and said:
"It was great for the creative vibe."
Even though the lead singer of Slipknot was never caught for the thefts of his youth,
Corey Taylor nearly faced some jail time later on in Los Angeles. After nearly getting banned
for life from the Rainbow Bar & Grill for drunkenly throwing shot glasses at someone
described as a former hero whom he once admired, Taylor was asked to leave the bar.
The thoroughly intoxicated singer then walked in front of the Viper Room, where his friend
dared him to kick through a window. Once he easily shattered the glass with his foot,
Taylor turned around to see a nearby cop car stopped at a red light. Accepting the circumstances,
Taylor did not attempt to run and instead just walked over to place his hands on the
hood. The police instantly, yet politely, took him into custody. The only reason the
famous musician went free was because he paid $500 to the owners that same night to replace
the window.
All of the other revolting Slipknot tales pale in comparison to the time that Shawn
Crahan left a dead crow to rot in a jar that he carried with him. The disturbing drummer
let the bird decay for so long that the jar eventually contained a gelatinous liquid.
During shows, Crahan would bring the jar out so that he and his bandmates could take huffs
from it, and usually throw up. Slipknot did this to, quote, "see what death smelled like,
have that inside you, [and get] you in that dark place," according to Sid Wilson.
Crahan had the jar for every performance, and according to former lead vocalist Anders
Colsefni, they were all afraid that it would break at some point and make them all sick.
Then, during one performance, the fans demanded to have the jar. After the band made the mistake
of tossing it down to them, Sid Wilson claims that the crazy fans opened the jar and did
much worse than just smell the disgusting substance: They ate it.
As you might expect, fans who'll willingly eat a jar of decomposed crow probably aren't
the cleanest people. Knowing this, Shawn Crahan decided to start wearing a latex glove when
shaking fans' hands at events 一 which might come as a shock, given the thoroughly sickening
antics of the drummer. He chose to take the precaution because he'd reached a point where
he'd witnessed too many gross habits from a lot of people who clearly looked like they
should bathe more often.
Understandably, his bandmates chided him for wearing the glove, but Crahan would be proven
right. The drummer says that at one event in Cincinnati, he encountered around 4,000
people, according to Spin. By the end of the day, the glove wasn't just dirty — it was
pitch black from shaking nearly all of the fans' hands.
Decades ago, when Slipknot was new, Shawn Crahan used to receive numerous morbid gifts
from fans, which were mostly dead birds or other creatures in jars. But a girl on the
East Coast made a deeper impression when she approached Crahan, slapped him to get his
attention, and then threw either a pig or cow heart on the table in front of him, according
to Spin. Once she had his attention, the fan asked Crahan to sign the organ.
Yet these macabre interactions were dwarfed by a different fan in another country who
gave Crahan a human femur with the Slipknot song title "People = Sh-t" written on it.
Since the bone was dirty and brown, it looked like it had come from a grave. As someone
who believes in respect for the dead, the gift troubled Crahan, though he is firmly
behind the Slipknot ethos of "Don't ever judge me." So, the drummer sat down and had a deeply
personal heart-to-heart with the fan.
There is no denying that Slipknot have a significant corps of devoted followers, but the band has
also had their fair share of negative encounters with the public. One of the worst occurred
during a performance in 2005. When Slipknot was set to perform at Fury Fest in Lamont,
France, they were blamed for the excessively high ticket prices, even though the pricing
for the event wasn't their fault. According to "Raising Hell: Backstage Tales from the
Lives of Metal Legends," the racetrack venue raised the rent, so the promoters were forced
to increase the ticket prices in response. Since Slipknot was such a popular band at
that point, the promoters figured that people would be fine with forking over some extra
cash.
The situation escalated when a local radio station publicly blamed Slipknot, increasing
the hostility toward the band. This resulted in many concertgoers launching a barrage of
whiskey bottles, dead animals, wrenches, and all sorts of other projectiles throughout
their performance. Slipknot overcame the onslaught and finished the show, with Corey Taylor rubbing
it in the audience's faces that they couldn't stop the band from performing. The last act
of defiance while standing still in the spotlights left him open to take a direct hit from a
9-volt battery to the head, along with a glass bottle and a "fistful of coins" that almost
struck him in the face. Taylor later admitted that it was one of the most difficult performances
of his life.
"I mean, time has not spared us the hardships, obviously."
A lot of the time, Slipknot is responsible for any hostility that arises around their
concerts, especially with other bands. Joey Jordison admitted that the band would actively
seek out fights by menacingly standing in the way of rival musicians. The other bands'
members would typically avoid confrontation, laughing nervously while exiting out of the
nearest back door.
In a much more lighthearted manner, Corey Taylor would prank other bands by pulling
a joke called the "rhino" in which he would confront the band wearing nothing but a sock.
Usually, he would freak out the opening band by running onstage this way while jumping
up and down, but one time he took the prank a step further. Still dressed up as the "rhino,"
Taylor once entered the stage with a case of cold beer while a band was performing and
began to hand the drinks out to the performers.
Slipknot members aren't safe from their fellow bandmates, either. Since Taylor is terrified
of sharks, Jordison once scared him by leaving a 6-foot prop shark in his bunk, causing him
to nearly faint from the scare. On the more extreme side, Crahan supposedly once trapped
Jordison in a wooden box for three hours before a show.
The public feud between Slipknot and Limp Bizkit is well-known. It's also pretty simple:
Fred Durst once called Slipknot fans, quote, "a bunch of fat, ugly kids," so Corey Taylor's
response was:
"When you talk sh-t about Slipknot and our fans [...] we will kill you."
However, Taylor also had a mini feud with the lead singer of GWAR. After Taylor stated
that he did not want Slipknot to become irrelevant like GWAR, band leader Oderus Urungus took
offense and gave a lengthy response, according to Blabbermouth.
Not only did Urungus tell Taylor to shut his, quote, "whining trap," but he also went into
detail explaining that the rival singer was full of himself and should just stick to making
music instead of talking about himself all the time. But then the GWAR frontman took
it a step further and said:
"People will eternally remember you as the scary clowns who had the lead-singer that
whined like a little b-tch every time he got in print."
The feud was resolved amicably, but the barrage of insults still infuriated Slipknot fans.
Drummer Joey Jordison was with Slipknot at the very beginning, as a founding member who
helped shape the band into what it became.
According to Rolling Stone, it was Jordison in 1995 who suggested the infamous band name.
He left the band in 2013, but not for acrimonious reasons: he'd been diagnosed with the neurological
disease transverse myelitis and was unable to play the drums anymore. It took years of
physical therapy before he could return to music. The experience was something that he
said he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy.
Tragically, on July 27, 2021, it was announced Jordison had died in his sleep the day before.
He was just 46 years old. No cause of death was initially given, but his family released
a statement:
"Joey's death has left us with empty hearts and feelings of indescribable sorrow. To those
that knew Joey, understood his quick wit, his gentle personality, giant heart, and his
love for all things family and music. The family of Joey have asked that friends, fans,
and media understandably respect our need for privacy and peace at this incredibly difficult
time."
The outpouring of support throughout the music world following the announcement showed the
extent of Slipknot's impact, and that Joey Jordison was an inspiration for so many.