SlipKnoT: ALL HOPE IS GONE

By Joel McIver

With no fewer than nine members and a unique stage image based on grotesque masks and boiler suits, Slipknot retained a mystique that was unprecedented in the metal world, never allowing their faces to become known – so that the focus would remain on their music.

The first edition of this book published in 2001 followed the band from their inception in Des Moines, Iowa in the mid-1990s through to the release of their second album: an updated edition followed in 2003.

It’s now a decade since the first volume appeared, and in that time Slipknot have evolved into a completely different band from the one that first emerged into the limelight in 1999. Everyone knows their faces now.

The band’s music is darker, deeper and more adult after four studio albums, three DVDs and a live release.

Most strikingly, the sudden death of their bass player Paul Gray in 2010 has changed the face and the attitude of the group, although their commercial profile is, if anything, greater than it was before.

Slipknot: All Hope Is Gone explores this unlikely and tragic evolution, with new chapters covering the band’s career to date – and it also asks what their future will be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9780857127723

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Chapter 1

Before 1995

Nothing really happens in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s a conservative place and everything is pretty much straight and above board. Life-changing events – in the musical field, at any rate – don’t come along very often, but when they do they make a hell of an impact. An infamous example was the banning of CW McCall’s 1976 ‘Convoy’ single by a Des Moines radio station. The reason? Because the song supposedly incited truck drivers to break speed limits. As an illumination of the cultural stance of the city’s establishment, this will do nicely. But worse was to come.

In late 1982, Des Moines was scheduled for a visit by one of the godfathers of heavy metal, Ozzy Osbourne, sometime singer with the British metal behemoths Black Sabbath and a hell-raiser of mythical fame. The show was notable for an incident that occurred towards the end of the set. It was common for fans to throw various items on stage during Ozzy’s shows in response to the general anarchy of his act. Often Ozzy found himself dodging raw meat but on this occasion, an unidentified member of the audience threw a live bat onto the stage. The species and overall condition of the unfortunate mammal is not recorded; however, it was clearly traumatised enough to lie still and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the singer assumed that it was made of rubber.

To the shock of the crowd, Ozzy picked it up and bit off its head. Although he realised his error instants later and spat out the offending mouthful, he was rushed immediately to the nearest hospital, where he had his stomach pumped and endured a series of precautionary anti-rabies injections. These are legendarily agonising, as the needle has to pass through the abdominal muscles in order to penetrate the stomach. Ozzy ruefully said in later interviews that he’d learned his lesson – no doubt a relief to pipistrelles everywhere – and continued his tour after a short recovery period. The incident only heightened his profile as a genuine metal nutter, and his profile has continued to rise ever since.

The effect of this show on the metal fans of Des Moines was electrifying. Among those who weren’t at the show, but wished he could have been when he came across radio and newspaper reports of the bat’s untimely demise, was a 12-year-old schoolkid by the name of Shawn Crahan. Born in September 1969 to real estate developers, Crahan was obsessed with exploring the city’s storm drains – dark, undisturbed tunnels big enough for an adult to walk through – and playing the drums. His earliest musical heroes were Kiss: the very first album he had ever bought was Dynasty, and it was Peter Criss who first inspired him to become a drummer. When asked in 1999 by the Seattlesquare webzine what the future members of Slipknot were like as children, Shawn said, I’d say we were all hyperactive, and depressed, and just always in trouble – you know, just doing our thing. I think we were all nutty little kids, and I think maybe some of us were really quiet and just looking out from the inside.

By the time he was 15, Shawn had honed his drumming skills enough to form a band at Des Moines’ Hoover High School, which he named Heads On The Wall. The line-up included an Asian teenager named Kun Nong – an excellent guitarist by all accounts – and a bass player named Doug, who also handled vocals. Proficient by high-school standards, the band exceeded most teenage groups’ ambitions by playing at venues all over Iowa. Musically, their funk-metal and thrash-metal influences were clear; their sets included eighties hits by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (whose early albums possessed a grittier edge than their later, more polished work) and went as far as covering songs by alternative acts such as Primus and Jane’s Addiction. Ultimately, however, they were limited by the fact that Kun Nong’s sympathies were far more inclined towards funk and soul – and after all, Heads On The Wall were still at school. As Crahan realised that the future for his band was limited, he began to look around for something more serious.

Another successful local band was the death metal act Vexx, who later went under the name of Inveigh Catharsis. The drummer was the thick-set Anders Colsefni, an intimidating figure with a Mohican haircut. Colsefni had developed an uncompromising percussion technique, which became a high point of Vexx shows. The bassist was Paul Gray, a superb player who had mastered the guitar before moving onto bass: originally from Los Angeles, Gray had recently wound up in Des Moines and – perhaps wanting to recapture the positive, do-it-all vibe of California – had thrown himself into the band with gusto. On guitar was Josh Brainard, another accomplished musician who was initially from New Mexico but had moved several times before his teens, finally ending up in Des Moines after a move from the nearby town of Waterloo.

Vocals were initially handled by Josh, whose skills as a multi-tasking frontman were temporarily put on hold in 1990 when Anders started to sing: Colsefni had a powerful baritone voice – rather like that of Soulfly’s Max Cavalera or Testament’s Chuck Billy – which suited the music perfectly. Vexx spent some years playing low-key gigs with a measure of success: however, on looking back, Colsefni now describes it pointlessly technical, claiming that they would play for the sake of complexity alone. They never recorded.

Josh Brainard later hooked up with a guitarist called Joey Jordison, who had put together a band called Modifidious in 1992 with another six-stringer called Craig Jones. The three swapped bass and guitar duties, and Brainard also handled vocals. The music they played was straight-ahead thrash metal: not as demanding as the heavier material of Vexx, but light years ahead of the funk-rock of Heads On The Wall. Modifidious had the dubious distinction of being labelled Monkey Fungus Dick and other ‘humorous’ nicknames by visiting musicians; however, Jordison (who had invented the name – it was meaningless nonsense) saw the funny side. The high point in Modifidious’ career was a Des Moines support slot with Type O Negative in 1995.

The most extreme of the early-nineties Des Moines bands related to the Slipknot story was the superbly named Anal Blast. The band was formed partly as a publicity stunt and partly as a serious grindcore outfit by Jordison, Vexx’s Paul Gray, a guitarist named Donnie Steele and the late concert promoter Don Decker, who was involved in setting up metal shows and festivals throughout the Midwest. The band’s lyrical themes revolved around matters pornographic and faecal, as reflected in their live act. Jordison, Steele and Gray would play while Decker indulged in such onstage antics as reaching into his trousers, pulling a tampon from his rectum and throwing it into the crowd. Occasionally, if this failed to elicit the desired reaction, Decker would step offstage, return with a toilet bowl and defecate into it.

Despite these antics, they appear to have been more than just a joke act. An album, Vaginal Vempire, was recorded; Jordison has claimed that he and Gray wrote much or all of the material on it. Its cover is a pornographic spoof of the Vempire: Or Dark Fairytales In Phallustein album by the British metal band Cradle Of Filth. Gray and Jordison remained in Anal Blast for some time. As amusing as it undoubtedly was, however, Paul was unhappy with his career in Des Moines and left Iowa in late 1994, returning to California where he hoped to join a band with staying power.

As talented – or not – as these bands all were, the Des Moines music scene in the mid-nineties was in thrall to one act only: an alternative rock outfit named Stone Sour, named after a popular American cocktail. Stone Sour regularly gigged in the city’s handful of venues, and could raise a loyal following even out of town. Their singer was a young man named Corey Taylor, who worked in a porn shop.

Taylor was and remains a fascinating, tortured character, revealing his inner demons through the lyrics he wrote and the exertions of his stage act. In his teens he had both sides of his neck tattooed; one with the Chinese kanji symbol for Death and the other with the character for Father (his dad had abandoned his mother before Corey’s birth). Taylor once claimed that between the ages of four and 11, he had lived in 25 different states. No wonder he was looking for something, and found it in music: originally trained as a drummer, he decided to move to vocals after hearing the Nirvana song ‘Bleach’, in which Kurt Cobain indicated his dissatisfaction with the world in no uncertain terms.

Despite the local success of Stone Sour – Corey later described their music as half originals, half cheesy Top 40 crap – he evidently regarded the band as a stepping stone towards Slipknot, and indeed this can be said of all the early bands mentioned here: Jordison has referred to Slipknot as a supergroup in various interviews. This is not to say that these other acts were incompetent or unprofessional; for example, a prominent local outfit at the time was Atomic Opera, which Anders Colsefni has described as the band that set the standard for all Iowan metal bands at the time. The Atomic Opera guitarist was James Root, a gifted player with impressive onstage presence.

The last of the bands which led to Slipknot was another death metal outfit called Body Pit which Anders Colsefni described as: "very heavy death metal. Very intricate – too intricate. Eight-minute long songs, with 25 different riffs in each song. Nuts. Heavy, but nuts." Before departing for Los Angeles, Paul Gray contributed heavily to Body Pit’s songs: the band also featured Colsefni on drums and guitarist Mick Thomson, an intimidating figure who gave guitar lessons at the winsomely named Ye Olde Guitar Shop on 70th Street, and Donnie Steele.

The musicians began to coalesce at the end of 1994. Steele was looking for a serious band, and had got to know Crahan and Colsefni through the spaghetti-junction-like local metal scene. The first move towards the formation of Slipknot took place in early 1995, when Colsefni, Crahan, Steele and Heads On The Wall’s Kun Nong met at Colsefni’s house with the vague aim of jamming together. Although they had grown up playing in different bands, Crahan and Colsefni had been friends since the early nineties, when they had attended metal gigs together: the pair first discussed a music project after Shawn called Anders and recruited him for a photo shoot. They wanted a scary-looking person, recalls Colsefni today. The shoot was for a paper company, who were using some kind of ‘intolerance’ theme for their advertising. I had a mohawk haircut and they thought I looked right for the photo. I got to put my arms round an intolerant-looking girl. It was fun.

The two men (Colsefni: Me and Shawn looked just alike – both with mohawks that we tied back in ponytails, both kinda mean-looking) had also developed a mutual interest in the role-playing game, Rage: The Apocalypse, a bloodier extension of the RPGs that had flooded the market since the success of Dungeons & Dragons in the eighties. Issued by the White Wolf company, Rage’s central theme was the conflict of a werewolf race, the Garou, with the Wyrm, an evil tribe. Other characters, including vampires, play prominent roles. According to the singer: The attraction was being able to play a different person, to be able to do something different. This was the founding of Slipknot – that was it, right there. It’s not hard to see how Colsefni, who held down a gruelling job in construction, and Crahan, who paid the bills as an office worker, could find a more attractive reality on the Rage cards.

After working on some welding at Shawn’s garage in the winter of 1994 to 1995, the two began talking about putting a new band together. This wasn’t the first time that Crahan and Colsefni had tried to form a band; they had attempted to recruit musicians before, but the project had fallen apart before it began after the drummer became temporarily involved in his father’s real estate business and had lacked the time for a full rehearsal schedule. This time, however, the situation was different: both men were tired of being in limited, unprofessional bands and agreed to make a no-holds-barred attempt to form a serious group.

Colsefni called Paul Gray in California and after some persuasion the bassist agreed to return. The singer told him that a real band was taking shape and that this time – finally – there was a genuine possibility of making an impact. Fortunately, Gray had hardly settled in Los Angeles and was able to return without too much inconvenience. With the bass player installed, the musicians began to meet two or three times a week at Colsefni’s house, where they played in his basement. This became their regular meeting place for the next two years.

The next decision was to invite Jordison to join in the early summer. Anal Blast were sporadically active, and Modifidious was also a part-time project, so Jordison was happy to accept. In fact, the only band that could claim very much of his time at this point was a glam-rock project called The Rejects, which Jordison had wanted to develop as much as possible. However, Colsefni and Crahan didn’t want their new band to be a mere side-project for Jordison and persuaded him to put his plans on hold. Colsefni became the group’s voice, while Crahan took over a second set of percussion. Joey didn’t regret his decision: in fact he later said, When I first came into the band I was like, I have to be either in this band or I have to destroy it because it’s so good.

The music was relatively unsophisticated at this stage: Kun Nong quit after a few sessions ("He was a phenomenal, crazy guitar player – but not a metal guitar player, says Colsefni) and Steele’s guitar playing had become the main focus. He was a fan of soul and jazz as well as metal, a fact that made itself clear in one of the early songs, ‘Confessions’, which was more or less a pop workout – except for Colsefni’s vocals, which were melodic but guttural. However, the band agreed that, while progress was definitely being made, another guitarist was needed to fill out the sound. Jordison immediately suggested the Modifidious guitarist Josh Brainard, who remembers, Joey told them I could play, I could sing and I had stage presence. So they called me up and asked me to go watch them rehearse."

Brainard duly attended a band practice and was impressed by the ability and commitment of the musicians. As he watched, Shawn asked him if he would like to bring a guitar to the next session. He was only too pleased to oblige and meshed rapidly with the other players: Donnie already had the riffs done, he remembers. I just learned them and played my own contributions over the top. He’s being over-modest – his role in the early Slipknot songwriting was significant – but what’s certain is that he was accepted into the band with little hesitation. A further link with the band had been forged many years before in any case, because Colsefni says that Brainard was the very first musician he had ever played with: the pair had known each other when they were a mere 14 years old. Furthermore, Brainard knew Crahan from way back: they had met at gigs by yet another local band, Shockhead.

Brainard joined the band in September 1995. Within a month the musicians had assembled a set’s worth of songs, and the question was inevitable: when would they play their first gig? All were seasoned veterans of the Des Moines live scene, which meant two things. Firstly, they were professional enough to know exactly how much practice they would need before they were ready to play. Secondly, they were all well aware of a simple disheartening fact: at this time, the range of live venues in Des Moines was unimpressive. In fact, it was pathetic. Apart from a large concert hall called the Supertoad, which hosted gigs by international bands and was far too big for the Crahan/Colsefni outfit, there was a mere handful of clubs which were prepared to showcase new original bands. This lack of a suitable venue, as well as the fact that the line-up was still relatively new, meant that no great efforts were made to secure a live date. Ultimately, however, the decision was made for them when a friend asked them to perform at a benefit concert in aid of a local charity. The location was to be a club called the Crowbar, a venue which Brainard remembers as a multi-level place with a hip-hop place in the middle, a country place upstairs and the metal and rock at the bottom.

After some deliberation, the band agreed to perform, recognising that an appearance would have to be made at some point and that the experience would be useful for the band. However, they still needed a name, and after some fruitless discussion, Brainard suggested the name Meld. As one of the band’s declared aims had been to mix any genres of music they liked, the name was received with approval, although Brainard was later humiliated to discover that a ‘meld’ is also a move in a card game: It was like calling ourselves Blackjack or Poker – totally tacky, he says now.

On December 4, 1995, the band made their live debut. We weren’t technically ready to play, says Colsefni. But it was a good gig. We didn’t have costumes or anything, but we freaked the hell out of everybody. He later added that a Slipknot performance is a primal feeling. I’m transformed into an animal, and that’s the reason we wear what we do on stage. The set was short and brutal, including the songs ‘Slipknot’, ‘Tattered And Torn’, ‘Rights And Rage’, ‘Some Feel’, ‘Only One’ and a soon-to-be-dropped thrash-metal effort called ‘Part Of Me’, which featured a rapped vocal from Brainard. ‘Confessions’, a difficult song to perform live, wasn’t attempted. The band managed to disguise their inexperience through sheer exuberance, and it’s generally thought to have been a good concert. Brainard remembers a child in a wheelchair sitting in the audience in front of him, but not which charity benefited from the proceeds, or whether the gig was particularly polished: We’d been playing together for a month or two, there was a whole different bunch of stuff we’d been trying to do and we hadn’t really got it nailed – so it was kind of disjointed.

It was the last chance a live audience ever had to see the band fully unmasked. Although it was an uncertain performance, with the new songs played in their rawest form, if you were there, you witnessed a milestone in modern music.

Chapter 2

1995–1996

As 1995 ended, the six-piece band continued to rehearse at Anders Colsefni’s house. Although the gig at the Crowbar had been a success, they were experienced enough to know that intense practice was the only way forward. The issue of a band name had also become more pressing: Brainard had unearthed the card sharp’s definition of the word ‘meld’ and, embarrassed, was keen to find a better alternative. Lacking inspiration, the band turned to their song titles for help; Colsefni’s lyrics were both evocative and aggressive, laced with references to entities from Rage.

Between them the musicians settled on the title of the opening song of their Crowbar set as the band’s new name, although they might not have done so had they known how many journalists would later plague them for its meaning. We don’t actually think about what a ‘slipknot’ is, said Jordison much later. Over the years, fans and press have come up with all kinds of possible interpretations of the word, given that it can imply choking, gagging or hanging, with all the murder and S&M connotations you might expect. The band have always insisted that the choice was arbitrary, although one or two hints have been dropped here and there. Funnily enough, it turned out some years later that a Grateful Dead covers band of the same name existed in the Deep South. Coincidentally, they also had two drummers.

When you have six motivated musicians in a band, things move rapidly, and at the end of the year Crahan, Jordison and Brainard visited a recording studio, SR Audio, in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale, with a view to recording an album. The owner, a man experienced in the ways of the music business, was Mike Lawyer, who took the musicians around the building and arranged for one of his producers, Sean McMahon, to visit Slipknot at a practice session. Mike takes up the story: "Sean went to see them at a rehearsal. He came in the next day and his eyes were wide open – and he said, ‘Last night I saw the most original band I have ever seen in the Midwest’. And McMahon worked for 10 years in the Bay Area in San Francisco, he worked at Memphis, he worked at St Louis, he’s worked everywhere – and he said, there’s something here. McMahon later described himself as floored" by Slipknot. Colsefni, who made a point at the time of rehearsing in a wolfskin loincloth, had made an enormous impression on the producer. His werewolves-and-vampires lyrics were quite unlike anything McMahon had encountered before, and the mighty barrage of sound courtesy of the Jordison/Crahan/Colsefni percussion team was a new and intimidating experience.

When asked what had struck McMahon, Lawyer explains: "It was just how different they were. First of all they were great musicians: they didn’t sound like anything anybody else was doing, especially not in Des Moines, Iowa. The closest thing they might have sounded like at that time might have been Sepultura. A little bit. And the way they merged all these styles – jazz, disco, whatever – really impressed him."

The Sepultura reference is a response to the deep baritone of Colsefni (whose voice has often been compared to that of the Brazilian thrashers’ first singer, Max Cavalera) and the uncompromising riffing of Brainard and Steele. While Slipknot’s music rarely accelerated to thrash speed, their precision and power certainly bears comparison to Sepultura – and this, as speed metal fans will know, is a compliment indeed, especially when describing such a new band. As for Lawyer’s mention of the bizarre juxtaposition of styles that had so impressed Sean McMahon, this is directly attributable to the broad tastes of Steele, Jordison’s wide-ranging preferences (he has namechecked bands as diverse as Fleetwood Mac and the Cars) and the musical ability of the other players. Most significant of all, however, was Crahan’s insistence that Slipknot would be a band who would play in whatever style they wanted, without bowing to conventional restraints.

Colsefni – who remembers Sean McMahon as very professional, very prim and proper – explains the producer’s reaction as follows: The diversity and the technicality of Slipknot astounded him, and the fact that we had so many layers in the music. He was pleased because we were a good band, and because it was going to be a challenge like he’d never had before. This was in 1995, remember – we had only played one gig, and we hadn’t even planned to play that. But we still impressed him.

Despite the various musical genres in which the band dabbled, Slipknot were first and foremost a metal band – and one with serious power. McMahon’s years of work in the San Francisco Bay Area had been spent immersed in the heartland of thrash metal: the extreme metal scene of 1983 to 1987 had revolved around Californian pioneers such as Metallica, Exodus, Forbidden and a host of other speed-obsessed acts. The very first death metal band, Possessed, also came from the area. McMahon was no stranger to heavy music, which makes his astonishment at the Slipknot experience even more significant.

Des Moines was not known for the innovation or visual imagery of its musicians. As Lawyer points out, In my lifetime – and I’m 39 years old – there have only been three groups from Iowa that have been signed to what would be considered major record deals. One was the Jan Park Band, a pop band back in the late seventies, the second was the Hawks, who were on CBS and lasted two albums, and the other is Slipknot. He adds with justifiable pride, One of the goals I set myself 10 years ago was to see if we could be a part of getting a band to break out of Iowa. And Slipknot has accomplished that goal.

This is not to say that Des Moines is entirely without cultural value. Lawyer laughs and adds, The picture that Slipknot paint in interviews makes it sound like the whole reason they are who they are is because Des Moines is so terrible. But, in all honesty, I wouldn’t choose to live here if it was so terrible. I’ve travelled all over the world, and it doesn’t have the activities that London or LA or any multi-million-person metropolis has – but the people are good, you know. It depends what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for an exciting, LA-style lifestyle, it’s not that. But it’s definitely not a hole in the bottom of a pit, like it’s portrayed nowadays.

Lawyer also describes the band, especially Jordison and Crahan, as absolute workaholics – an important asset for any fledgling act, especially one with plans to record at a studio such as SR Audio, a professional organisation with important clients. The consequences of Sean McMahon’s meeting with Slipknot were twofold. Firstly, the band were booked into the studio in December to record a debut album. They funded this themselves and, as they were mostly supporting themselves with day jobs, the sessions took place at night. Secondly – and more significantly – McMahon went on to sign a production deal with Slipknot, in which he agreed that after producing the album, he would work with the band towards a record deal in return for a share in any future profits. What’s crucial is that McMahon – an experienced, versatile producer – recognised that Slipknot had enough talent and motivation to make a serious impact.

In due course McMahon welcomed Slipknot to SR Audio in December 1995, to lay down tracks for the first album, the bleakly titled Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. Colsefni later explained the title as a representation of the cycle of life: You mate to reproduce, feed to survive, kill the opposition – and then the cycle repeats itself. Finding out exactly what went on over the three-day session is difficult: Colsefni and Brainard recall the sessions as confused, chaotic and anarchic, but extremely productive. They must have been, since the contributions of six players over eight songs were recorded in a