Slipknot percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan has revealed that there were serious tensions when the band made second album Iowa.
“When we did Iowa, we hated each other,” Clown said. “We hated the world. The world hated us.”
In the new issue of Metal Hammer magazine, Slipknot look back at the making of Iowa, and how relations in the band had splintered and started to fester as they struggled with the almost overnight transition from working dead-end jobs in their hometown of Des Moines, to becoming the most famous metal band on the planet.
“We were just all at odds with each other,” said frontman Corey Taylor. “I don’t know if it was jealousy or if it was just insecurity; ‘Am I pulling my weight? Is this person getting more attention than me?’ It was just dark, and it really spit in the face of everything the band tried to accomplish on the first album.”
Coming after Slipknot’s seminal 1999 self-titled debut, Iowa was the sound of a band refusing to play the game, a ‘fuck you’ to an industry they felt was trying to control their vision. It started with cries of grief from DJ Sid Wilson, who had just learned of his grandfather’s passing, on unnerving opener (515). It ended with Corey Taylor screaming in pain, as he cut himself with glass, naked in the vocal booth on the album’s demented, horror-soundtrack eponymous closer.
“It was a backlash for our dream,” recalls Clown. “We spent 18 months on that first cycle doing all these interviews, agents, managers... it was all performance.
“By the time we got to the second album, people needed to be curbed and understand their place and that their opinion didn’t matter as much as they thought it did. Just because we were the first platinum band on Roadrunner doesn’t give everyone the ability to start advising. When we were home to take a breath, it was clear that [the second album] was gonna be disturbing and force fed to the world.”
Read more on Slipknot and Iowa in the new issue of Metal Hammer magazine, out now.
