FROM THE ARCHIVE: SLIPKNOT

A mind-blowing album-by-album oral history of metal's masked masters of disaster

By Jon Wiederhorn
Photo by P.R. Brown

The night before the Slipknot’s video shoot for “Psychosocial,” DJ Sid Wilson split his head open on a door in what he refers to as “a “Tyler Durden ‘Fight Club’ moment”; the gash took five staples to close. Call it a sign of things to come.

A couple weeks later, during the third song of the band’s opening show in Seattle, the DJ left his perch, ran around the stage and up a ramp behind drummer Joey Jordison’s kit. Then, he clambered up a railing 15 feet off the ground and jumped back down to the ground. It was a move he’d done for years with no ill effects, but this time, instead of landing with his weight on his toes, he hit the ground on his heels, breaking bones in both.

”It felt like I had jumped on two long construction nails that went straight up into my legs,” Wilson says backstage in Denver, from the moderate comfort of the wheelchair he’s now confined to. After the accident, Wilson limped back to his booth in excruciating pain and finished the show standing. Despite needing splints and casts, he hasn’t missed a show

All nine members of Slipknot haven’t survived such spectacular mishaps, but the best description of Slipknot’s credo is still probably “pain as art.” Whether it’s bone-shattering agony of onstage accidents, the slow burn of substance abuse, or the isolation and alienation that results from negotiating messy breakups, manipulative industry folk, and ugly inner-band turmoil, Slipknot transfer their most unpleasant experiences into a haunting, harrowing and totally unique brand of metal.

“We thrive on misery. That’s what we love,” says drummer Joey Jordison from the tour bus a week after the show. “We’re gonna kill ourselves more than any other band. Slipknot is absolutely the most painful thing you could endure.”

By all accounts, surviving in a band with nine often hot-headed members is not an exercise for the meek or squeamish, but as Jordison points out, the members of this particular band are neither: the last time anyone quit Slipknot was in 1998 when guitarist Josh Brainard exited and was replaced by Jim Root. Since then, the same nine guys have willingly accepted all of the punishment fate and foes alike could dish out.

Slipknot’s first three albums were written and recorded during periods of nearly unbearable personal and musical conflict, and their new disc, All Hope is Gone (Roadrunner), continued the tradition. This time around Slipknot were pressed for time, battled each other and their producer, and emerged with an album that combines the hunger of Slipknot, the brutality of Iowa, and the melodic innovation of Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses.

Improbably, it’s already been almost 10 years since Slipknot entered the studio with Ross Robinson to record their first album for Roadrunner Records, so it seemed like a good time to sit down with eight members of the band (sampler Craig Jones doesn’t do press) and a few key players from the group’s organization to chronicle what has certainly been a most tempestuous decade.