The story of Slipknot

The Des Moines underground

Slipknot's story starts in Des Moines, Iowa, in the early nineties, when the local metal scene was a revolving door of bands. The biggest was Atomic Opera, whose guitarist was a young man named Jim Root. A drummer called Joey Jordison ran a thrash band, Modifidious, which played a club called the Runway. On Sundays the Runway opened to all ages, and an older drummer named Shawn Crahan went there to find young musicians to jam with. Crahan had his own funk metal covers band, Heads on the Wall. And a bassist named Paul Gray, who had moved to Iowa from Los Angeles as a child, was working his way through death metal bands with names like Vexx, Body Pit and Anal Blast.[1] [2] [3]

By March 1993 Crahan was jamming in Paul Gray's basement with Gray, a singer and drummer called Anders Colsefni, and a guitarist named Patrick Neuwirth. They wrote songs and argued about band names without ever choosing one. One of the songs they recorded that year was called Slipknot. Gray tried to lure Joey Jordison into Body Pit, and recruited a local guitar teacher named Mick Thomson, but that band soon fell apart. Jordison, meanwhile, had taken a night shift job at a Sinclair gas station in Urbandale. In September 1995 Gray walked in while Jordison was working and invited him to rehearse with a new project called the Pale Ones, started by Gray, Crahan and Colsefni.[1] [2] [3]

Jordison went to a rehearsal in Colsefni's basement and loved what he heard. He later said he tried hard not to smile, so he would not look too keen. He took over the drum kit, Crahan moved to percussion, and Colsefni sang while pounding a second percussion kit of his own. Guitarists Donnie Steele and Josh Brainard made it a six piece. On the fifth of November 1995 they played their first show, a benefit in Des Moines, under the name Meld, chosen because they wanted to mix many styles together. Late that year Jordison suggested a new name, borrowed from that old jam session song. They became Slipknot.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Those gas station nights became part of the legend. Jordison told Rolling Stone he was the night manager at the Sinclair station from 1995 to 1997, and that most of the first album was conceived there. He would finish band practice around ten, bring in a radio and a television and crank up the metal. Crahan would show up around half past eleven, and the two of them would plot the band's future until five in the morning. Kiss had been a huge influence on several members, for the music and the makeup alike. Jordison's heroes also included Mötley Crüe, Neil Peart and the jazz greats Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, and he credited a teacher who showed him jazz and R and B techniques.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. and the search for a voice

In December 1995 Slipknot went into SR Audio, a studio in Des Moines, with producer Sean McMahon. With no record deal, they paid for everything themselves, an estimated forty thousand dollars. The music was a strange stew of death metal, funk, jazz and even disco, and the title and many lyrics came from a role playing game called Werewolf: The Apocalypse, which Colsefni and Crahan both loved. In February 1996, during mixing, guitarist Donnie Steele quit. He was a Christian, and had doubts about the lyrics. Jordison brought in his old Modifidious bandmate Craig Jones on guitar. But the band had filled the recordings with samples it could not play live, so Jones switched to sampling and Mick Thomson became the guitarist.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album, Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat., came out on Halloween, the thirty first of October 1996. Only one thousand copies were pressed, and the band handed many of them out to fans, radio stations and labels. It won a little local airplay but no deal. Most of its songs were later reworked. The track called Slipknot became Sic, the song that opens their major label debut, and Killers Are Quiet grew into the long closing song Iowa. Even the barcode number of the demo, seven four two six one seven zero zero zero zero two seven, became the title of the debut album's first track. Original copies have since sold for at least twelve hundred dollars.[1] [2] [3]

Around this time the look took shape. Crahan had started wearing a clown mask to rehearsals, and by late 1997 the band decided that every member would wear his own mask and a matching jumpsuit. Crahan said he wanted everything to be about the music, and asked why anyone should need to see their faces. The jumpsuits led to barcodes on their backs, and the barcodes led to numbers, zero to eight. Crahan said he would have fought to the death for number six. Mick Thomson demanded seven, his lucky number. Jordison took one and Gray took two. The new singer would pick eight, for infinity, and when a DJ joined he chose zero, declaring that he was not a number, he was filth.[1] [2] [3]

The label rejections convinced the band it needed a more melodic singer. Crahan felt Colsefni's voice was too guttural. So Jordison, Crahan and Thomson approached Corey Taylor, frontman of another Des Moines band, Stone Sour. Taylor had survived a rough youth. Raised mostly by a single mother who moved constantly, he had overdosed on cocaine twice by the age of fifteen and attempted suicide at seventeen, before settling with the grandmother he called his rock. He played his first Slipknot show on the twenty fourth of August 1997, wearing face paint instead of a mask. Colsefni moved to backing vocals and percussion, but in September he announced from the stage that he was leaving.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A percussionist named Greg Welts took Colsefni's place. In early 1998 the band cut a five song demo just for record labels, built around Spit It Out, and this time the industry listened. In February 1998 Ross Robinson, the producer of Korn's debut, came to their rehearsals in Des Moines and offered to produce them. A young local DJ, Sid Wilson, had been hanging around and impressing everyone, and he became the ninth member. In late June the band landed a seven album deal with Roadrunner Records worth five hundred thousand dollars, and signed it publicly on the eighth of July 1998. Two days earlier Welts had been fired. After a short stint by Brandon Darner, Crahan's friend Chris Fehn joined on percussion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Breakthrough and Ozzfest

On the twenty ninth of September 1998 Slipknot left Des Moines for Indigo Ranch studios in Malibu, California. Ross Robinson wanted to capture the chaos of their live shows. All the drums were recorded within three days, and he pushed them to cut experimental passages and guitar solos in favour of a harder, more direct attack. For the opening song, everyone played in one room with headphones tied to their heads, and Crahan remembered Robinson throwing potted plants at Jordison. While in California the whole band went to one of the first shows by Fantômas, Mike Patton's avant garde group. Patton, through Mr. Bungle and Faith No More, was probably their biggest single influence, from the masks to the music.[1] [2]

By November the album seemed finished and the band went home for Christmas. That was when guitarist Josh Brainard left. He said only that some decisions had been made that he was not happy with. Crahan, Jordison and Robinson asked Jim Root, then in Stone Sour, to replace him. Root first said no, then a friend talked him round, and he called Crahan back to ask whether the offer still stood. On the debut he played on just two songs, Me Inside and a new track called Purity, which became a live staple. Jordison and Robinson mixed the album on analogue equipment, and spent almost a month on Purity alone, using it as the template for the rest.[1] [2] [3]

The album Slipknot came out on the twenty ninth of June 1999. That summer their first tour was Ozzfest, and the travelling metal festival put them in front of a huge new audience. The singles Wait and Bleed and Spit It Out got some airplay, but touring and word of mouth did most of the work. Rolling Stone called them the first death metal jam band. It became the fastest selling metal debut in SoundScan history, and on the second of May 2000 it went platinum, a first for any Roadrunner album. Wait and Bleed earned their first Grammy nomination, losing to Deftones. The record kept selling for decades, and in September 2025 it was certified triple platinum.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was one problem. Purity and its spoken prelude, Frail Limb Nursery, were inspired by a story on a website called Crime Scene, about a girl named Purity Knight who was kidnapped and buried alive. The site presented fiction as real crime cases, and at first carried no disclaimer, so Taylor believed it was true. When copyright claims arrived, the band removed both tracks rather than risk the whole album being pulled, and pressings from December 1999 replaced them with Me Inside. Meanwhile their shows were becoming notorious. In the early years members set each other on fire and dived from high balconies, and Crahan went into the crowd to tie fans up with his microphone cable.[1] [2]

Success brought feuds. In spring 1999 Taylor was disgusted to see Korn drummer David Silveria in a Calvin Klein campaign on sale at truck stops, and he burned copies of the magazines on stage. Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, a friend of Silveria's, took offence and in June 1999 insulted Slipknot's fans by calling them fat and ugly. Taylor fired back that insulting his fans might mean insulting Limp Bizkit's too. Yet the two bands shared many British festival bills in 2000. A longer running rivalry came from Mushroomhead, a masked band from Cleveland whose fans accused Slipknot of stealing their image. Taylor said both bands had started at the same time, neither knowing about the other.[1] [2]

Iowa, the darkest chapter

Expectations for the second album were enormous, and the pressure nearly broke the band. Jordison and Gray wrote most of it together from October 2000, while the others rested after endless touring. Recording began in January 2001 at Sound City and Sound Image in Los Angeles, again with Ross Robinson. Taylor was drinking heavily, other members were using drugs, and management problems added to the strain. Crahan later said that when they made Iowa they hated each other, they hated the world, and the world hated them. Jordison admitted they were all on drugs and drink. During the sessions Robinson broke his back in a dirt bike accident, and was back in the studio after one day of hospital treatment.[1] [2] [3]

Taylor pushed himself to extremes for his performance. He told FHM that while recording the closing title track, a song over fifteen minutes long, he was naked, vomiting and cutting himself with broken glass, because he believed you had to break yourself down to build something great. The opening track, named after central Iowa's telephone area code, five one five, used a recording of Sid Wilson screaming in grief shortly after learning his grandfather had died, something Wilson chose to record. The album was named after their home state, which they called their greatest source of energy. And the cover showed a goat. Its name was Eeyore.[1]

Iowa was released on the twenty eighth of August 2001. It went straight to number one in the United Kingdom and number three in America. Before release they gave away a free track online, limited to six hundred and sixty six copies. Left Behind and My Plague were both nominated for Grammys, and My Plague appeared on the Resident Evil soundtrack, while the band played I Am Hated in the film Rollerball. The Iowa World Tour took in Ozzfest, a joint headlining run with System of a Down, Japan and Europe. Their London show in February 2002 was filmed with twenty six cameras for the video Disasterpieces, which went quadruple platinum.[1] [2] [3]

In February 2002 a Guardian writer followed them to Glasgow. About two and a half thousand teenagers queued for a signing, the band stayed almost four hours, and mounted police were needed before they could leave. Several young fans told him the music had pulled them through dark times, and one said it had stopped him taking his own life. Backstage the stories got wilder. Crahan admitted he had broken two of Chris Fehn's fingers on stage, simply out of boredom. Taylor claimed that on one tour the band had racked up forty five broken ribs and two hundred and forty stitches between them. And Crahan was said to sniff a jar holding a dead crow, to make himself vomit inside his mask.[1]

By mid 2002 the internal conflict forced a break. Taylor and Root revived Stone Sour, Jordison switched to guitar for the horror punk band Murderdolls, Crahan formed To My Surprise and Wilson went solo as DJ Starscream. Taylor and Jordison even appeared on MTV without masks. Fans feared the band was over, and on the twenty fourth of January 2003 the official website had to deny it. Jordison said publicly that he had no problem with anyone, and had no idea what Taylor meant about things that needed resolving. It was a tense silence, but not a split. Crahan would later describe the next album as the band's healing process.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Healing: Volume Three and All Hope Is Gone

In mid 2003 the band moved into a Los Angeles house known as the Mansion, which Jordison called the Houdini mansion, to make their third album with Rick Rubin. At first almost nothing happened. Jordison said they barely spoke for three months, just wasting money. Taylor was at his lowest. He admitted drinking from the moment he woke up until he passed out, and later said that in 2003 he came close to jumping from an eighth floor balcony of the Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard. Eventually the band sat down with a few beers and wrote an odd, arty song called Happy Ending, and the dam broke. Halfway through the sessions, Taylor began his fight against drinking.[1] [2]

Volume Three, The Subliminal Verses, arrived on the twenty fifth of May 2004 and entered the American chart at number two. It was a leap. For the first time, songs like Circle and Vermilion Part Two were led by acoustic guitars, there were guitar solos, and Taylor sang far more than he screamed. Stung by claims that he relied on swearing, he wrote lyrics clean enough to avoid a parental advisory sticker. The video for Duality was shot in a fan's house in West Des Moines that the crowd tore apart, and the family later sent the band a long list of things to replace. In 2006 Before I Forget finally won them a Grammy, for Best Metal Performance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The members stayed busy and sometimes in trouble. In 2003 Paul Gray crashed his Porsche and was arrested for drug possession, and his leaked mugshot gave fans a rare look at a Slipknot face. At the 2004 Download Festival, when Lars Ulrich was taken ill, Jordison sat in with Metallica for eight of their thirteen songs. In 2005 the band threatened Burger King with legal action, claiming a mock metal band in its adverts, called Coq Roq, copied their masks to sell chicken fries. Burger King argued that plenty of bands wore masks, from Kiss to Gwar, and in the end the campaign and the dispute were dropped. Slipknot toured until late 2005, then took a second break.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Work on the fourth album began in February 2008 at Sound Farm Studio in Jamaica, Iowa, with producer Dave Fortman. It was their first album made at home, partly to escape the distractions of Los Angeles, and Taylor drove home every night to see his son. All nine members wrote, producing more than thirty songs, though Root later called the process rushed and it became the least favourite record for several of them. All Hope Is Gone was released on the twenty sixth of August 2008 and gave them their first American number one. Billboard first reported that the rapper The Game had won by thirteen copies, but a recount twelve hours later put Slipknot ahead by more than a thousand.[1]

The tour was brutal. On the ninth of July 2008, the first night of the Mayhem Festival near Seattle, Sid Wilson leapt from a raised platform during Disasterpiece and broke both his heels. He hauled himself onto Chris Fehn's percussion rig to finish the song, then played the rest of the tour from a wheelchair, dragging himself across the stage. Weeks later Jordison broke his ankle, forcing them to cancel Reading and Leeds. Meanwhile four members, Taylor, Root, Crahan and Wilson, had been quietly recording melodic, experimental music in a farmhouse near the studio. And Snuff, a ballad Taylor wrote about a crushing heartbreak, reached number two on the American rock chart, largely because Paul Gray fought for it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Losing Paul Gray

On the twenty fourth of May 2010 Paul Gray was found dead in a room at the TownePlace Suites hotel in Urbandale, a suburb of Des Moines. He was thirty eight. He had been planning to tour with a side band called Hail, alongside members of Judas Priest and Sepultura. Police said there was no sign of foul play. The next day the eight surviving members did something they had never done before. They faced the press without their masks, next to Gray's widow Brenna and his brother Tony, and took no questions. Gray was remembered as the member who most wanted everyone in the band to get along. Brenna was pregnant, and their daughter was born in August.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty first of June 2010 the autopsy confirmed an accidental overdose of morphine and the synthetic opioid fentanyl, and also found significant heart disease. Gray had struggled with addiction for years. In 2012 his doctor, Daniel Baldi, was charged with involuntary manslaughter over Gray's death and several others, accused of repeatedly prescribing him strong narcotics despite knowing his history of addiction. In May 2014 a jury found Baldi not guilty on all counts. In January 2018 Gray's family received an out of court settlement in a civil lawsuit against Baldi and his former employers, and two months later the Iowa Board of Pharmacy permanently barred Baldi from prescribing controlled substances for chronic pain.[1] [2] [3]

Grief split opinions about the future. Taylor said he was deeply conflicted, while Jordison said another record was already taking shape. Taylor told NME that Pantera's Vinnie Paul, who had lost his brother Dimebag Darrell, reminded him he was now living for two people. In 2011 Slipknot returned to the stage in Europe, headlining Sonisphere at Knebworth, where fans held two minutes of silence, and played Rock in Rio on a bill with Metallica. Donnie Steele, the guitarist who had left in 1996, played bass, hidden behind Jordison's kit. Crahan said the fans needed to focus on the eight grieving members, not someone new. Gray's jumpsuit and pig mask stood on a stand beside a bass guitar.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2012 the band released a greatest hits album, Antennas to Hell, and launched their own festival, Knotfest, with their longtime manager Cory Brennan. The first editions, on the seventeenth and eighteenth of August 2012 in Iowa and Wisconsin, promised a dark carnival of fire pillars, circus tents, stilt walkers and a Slipknot museum, with Deftones and Lamb of God on the bill. Crahan told Rolling Stone he wanted Knotfest to be so much their own that it could exist without them, and it grew into a brand reaching the Americas, Europe, Japan and Australia. At Download in June 2013, Taylor twice stopped their headline set when crowd surges threatened the front barrier.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then, on the twelfth of December 2013, the band announced on its website that Joey Jordison and Slipknot were parting ways for personal reasons, after eighteen years. Jordison replied that he had not quit, and was shocked and blindsided. For years neither side explained. In 2016 Jordison revealed he had developed transverse myelitis, a neurological disease that took away the use of his left leg and his ability to drum. He said he learned he was out through an email, with no band meeting, and claimed his bandmates had mistaken his illness for drug abuse. He fought back with physical therapy, and was soon drumming again, with the extreme metal group Sinsaenum.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rebirth with new faces

Slipknot went back to work with Greg Fidelman, who had mixed Volume Three. Donnie Steele played in early sessions, but chose to leave to start a family, though some of his bass parts survived on the record. For the new drummer and bassist, Crahan designed two almost identical masks to set them apart, and the band refused to name them. Fans identified the bassist as the English musician Alessandro Venturella from a distinctive tattoo on his hand. In December 2014 a former crew member posted a tour personnel list naming the drummer as Jay Weinberg, son of Bruce Springsteen's drummer Max Weinberg. Jim Root only confirmed both men officially in May 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first new song in six years, The Negative One, arrived on the first of August 2014, with a video directed by Crahan that did not show the band at all. The album, titled Point Five, The Gray Chapter, in honour of Paul Gray, came out that October and debuted at number one in America. Critics praised how openly it faced grief. Behind the scenes, trouble continued. On the eleventh of March 2015 Mick Thomson was stabbed in the back of the head during a drunken knife fight with his brother Andrew at Thomson's home in Clive, Iowa. Both men went to hospital with injuries that were not life threatening, and both were charged with disorderly conduct.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

That August, in Hartford, Connecticut, a show was halted when Venturella collapsed and was rushed to hospital with severe dehydration, and the band finished without him. In September 2016 they played Iowa in full for the first time, at a combined Ozzfest and Knotfest in California. Crahan made his debut as a feature film director with the action thriller Officer Downe. Taylor, long open about his troubles, revealed in 2017 that he had been sexually abused at the age of ten by an older friend, and he recorded a message for young people about his teenage suicide attempt, telling them pain is temporary. In 2019 Crahan suffered a devastating loss when one of his children died, aged twenty two.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In March 2019 percussionist Chris Fehn sued the band, claiming he had been denied his share of profits from touring and merchandise. He accused Taylor and Crahan of setting up separate companies that collected the band's money, and demanded a full forensic accounting. Taylor replied on social media that people should wait until the truth came out. Days later the band said Fehn knew why he was no longer in Slipknot and accused him of manufacturing claims, though that statement was soon taken down. His replacement wore a mask that fans thought looked like a tortilla, and he was nicknamed Tortilla Man. Only in March 2022 did the band confirm he was Michael Pfaff, from Crahan's side band Dirty Little Rabbits.[1] [2] [3] [4]

We Are Not Your Kind came out on the ninth of August 2019. Crahan and Root had begun writing in 2017, and Crahan dreamed of an art record in the spirit of Pink Floyd's The Wall. The sessions produced twenty two songs and a pile of interludes, and the result was hailed as one of their most experimental and heaviest albums. Taylor called it his most autobiographical work in years, shaped by depression and by the end of what he called a toxic marriage. It gave them their third American number one in a row and topped the British chart too. The lead single Unsainted opened with the voices of a Los Angeles choir, the Angel City Chorale.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The End, So Far, and a new line up

On the twenty sixth of July 2021 Joey Jordison died in his sleep at the age of forty six. His family did not give a cause of death. Tributes poured in from Lars Ulrich, Dave Lombardo and Mike Portnoy, and even from Fred Durst, whose Limp Bizkit honoured him at a show in Iowa. Readers of Rhythm magazine had once voted him the best drummer of the previous twenty five years, ahead of Portnoy and Neil Peart. Shortly before he died, Jordison said he was still holding demos he had written for Slipknot, and would never give them to any other band. Slipknot dedicated their next album to him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

That seventh album, The End, So Far, was released on the thirtieth of September 2022. It opened with Adderall, a synth driven song with only clean singing, which Crahan said he and Michael Pfaff built from modular synthesisers and cut in a single take. The album reached number one in Britain, edging out a George Michael reissue by three hundred and forty copies, and number two in America. The first vinyl and cassette pressings were misprinted with the title The End For Now, which Taylor blamed on someone failing to check. It was their final album for Roadrunner Records, whose contract with the band expired on the first of April 2023.[1] [2] [3]

2023 brought more upheaval. On the seventh of June the band announced it had parted ways with Craig Jones, the silent sampler who had been a member since 1996, then deleted the posts within the hour. That same day a new masked player took his place on stage in Austria, and his identity has never been confirmed. On the fifth of November Slipknot announced it was parting with Jay Weinberg, calling it a creative decision. Weinberg said he was blindsided and heartbroken. In April 2024 the band confirmed that Brazilian drummer Eloy Casagrande, who had just left Sepultura, was the new drummer, and he debuted at a warm up gig at Pappy and Harriet's in California.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band spent 2024 on a twenty fifth anniversary tour celebrating the debut album. Then in 2026 a long lost record finally surfaced. Look Outside Your Window, the melodic, experimental album that Taylor, Root, Crahan and Wilson had made during the All Hope Is Gone sessions back in 2008, came out on Record Store Day, the eighteenth of April 2026, under its own name rather than as Slipknot. The four had recorded frogs and crickets, and coaxed Taylor into singing from the bottom of a farmhouse well. Root's then partner Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil recited a poem in Italian. Taylor had once said he hoped it would never come out, fearing it could never live up to the hype.[1] [2] [3]

Then the line up shifted again. At the end of July 2026 TMZ reported that Sid Wilson, the DJ who had joined in 1998, had been removed from the band. Jim Root urged fans not to believe everything they read. But on the fourteenth of August 2026 Slipknot posted that, effective immediately, it would no longer be associated with Wilson, and wished him the best, before deleting the statement. No reason was given. On the ninth of September the band released a new single, Arsenal, its first song with Casagrande and its first on its own independent label, called Sickest Records. As of 2026 the band is recording an eighth album and has announced a stadium tour for 2027.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Legacy of the nine

Slipknot have sold around thirty million records worldwide. Their debut remains their biggest seller, and readers of Metal Hammer once voted it the best debut album of the previous twenty five years. They have been nominated for eleven Grammys and won one. Writers often place them among the big four of metal in the two thousands, alongside Avenged Sevenfold, Lamb of God and System of a Down. Taylor has always resisted the nu metal label, arguing they were closer to the new wave of American heavy metal. And he admits that on paper none of it should have worked: nine men in masks and coveralls from Des Moines, playing crazy heavy music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their fans call themselves maggots, a name the band gave them, and the stitched leather mask on the cover of Volume Three was named the maggot mask in their honour. For many outsiders the band offered a place to belong. Taylor has called their audience an island of misfit toys, and has spoken out against racism in metal, saying the band welcomes everyone. A long list of younger acts name Slipknot as an influence, from Knocked Loose and Code Orange to Bad Omens and Sleep Token. And the family carries on quite literally. Taylor's son Griffin sings in the band Vended, whose drummer is Crahan's son Simon.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Through it all, Shawn Crahan has been the constant. As of 2026 he is the only founding member left, and Mick Thomson, who joined in 1996, is the next longest serving. Along the way the band has lost two former members to death, parted with many others, and outlived its own predictions. Back in 2001 Jordison told Rolling Stone he did not think Slipknot could last more than four or five albums, because the music was so physical it was trimming years off their lives. Seven studio albums later, with an eighth on the way, the masks still change with every new era, and the machine keeps running.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Slipknot

Corey Taylor and Jim Root. They first played together in Stone Sour in the Des Moines of the nineties, and in 1999 Root followed Taylor into Slipknot. They revived Stone Sour in 2002 as a second band. In 2014 Stone Sour dropped Root, who said it was not his decision. Taylor admitted the split strained their friendship, but they repaired it by pouring their frustrations into new Slipknot music.[1] [2] [3]

Joey Jordison and Paul Gray. Gray invited Jordison into the band in 1995, and the two became Slipknot's main writing team. They wrote most of Iowa together while the others rested, and Jordison said songs like Psychosocial and Vermilion grew from their demos. Gray's death in 2010 hit Jordison hard, and within four years he was out of the band himself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Shawn Crahan and Joey Jordison. Their late night plotting sessions at the Sinclair gas station shaped the early band, from its sound to its image. Crahan was the visionary behind the masks, Jordison the musical engine. Their partnership ended badly in 2013, when Jordison said he learned of his dismissal by email and felt the way it happened was simply wrong.[1] [2] [3]

Corey Taylor and Fred Durst. Their feud began in 1999 after Taylor burned magazines showing Korn's David Silveria in a fashion campaign, and Durst hit back by insulting Slipknot's fans. Taylor later called Durst a great businessman but not an artist. By 2010 they had made peace, Durst gave Taylor a shout out on a Limp Bizkit song, and Limp Bizkit later played Knotfest.[1]

Slipknot and Ross Robinson. Robinson, known as the godfather of nu metal after producing Korn, saw Slipknot rehearse in Des Moines in 1998 and signed them to his own label before helping them reach Roadrunner. He produced both the debut and Iowa, stripping out solos and chasing raw live energy, and even returned to the Iowa sessions after breaking his back.[1] [2] [3]

Corey Taylor and Rick Rubin. Rubin produced Volume Three in 2003 and 2004. Taylor later said Rubin was hardly ever in the studio and called him overrated, while Jim Root defended him. Rubin also left a lasting mark through his open lab approach, a separate space for experiments, which Crahan said became a staple of every Slipknot album that followed.[1] [2]

Jim Root and Cristina Scabbia. The Slipknot guitarist and the singer of the Italian gothic metal band Lacuna Coil were together for thirteen years, one of metal's best known couples. During the 2008 All Hope Is Gone sessions she visited the farmhouse studio and ended up on Look Outside Your Window, reciting an Italian poem and surprising Corey Taylor with a powerful vocal.[1] [2] [3]

Sid Wilson and Kelly Osbourne. They met at Ozzfest in 1999, when Slipknot toured with her father's festival, and stayed close friends for decades. They became a couple in 2022 and had a son later that year. In July 2025 Wilson proposed backstage at Ozzy Osbourne's farewell concert with Black Sabbath in Birmingham.[1] [2]

Jay Weinberg and Max Weinberg. Jay's father is the longtime drummer of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, and he took his son to Ozzfest to see Slipknot when Jay was a boy. In 2009, as a teenager, Jay filled in for his father on Springsteen's tour. Five years later he replaced Joey Jordison in the band he had idolised.[1] [2]

Chris Fehn and Corey Taylor and Shawn Crahan. Fehn was an old friend of Crahan's who joined in 1998 after asking to be Jordison's drum tech. Twenty years later he sued, accusing Taylor and Crahan of taking money through separate companies. The band dismissed him in March 2019, accusing him of manufacturing claims.[1] [2] [3]

Corey Taylor and Paul Gray. Gray was the band member who fought for Taylor's heartbreak ballad Snuff to be recorded. After Gray's death Taylor collected a Kerrang award for services to metal on his behalf, played Snuff in tribute at solo shows, and had a tattoo of Gray and his number two inked on the back of his leg.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Slipknot

• Joey Jordison planned much of the debut album while working nights at a Sinclair gas station in Urbandale, Iowa. Jordison was night manager there from 1995 to 1997. Shawn Crahan would arrive around half past eleven at night, and the two would plot the band's future until five in the morning.[1] [2]
• The band's name came from a song, Slipknot, recorded at a 1993 basement jam before the band existed. Joey Jordison suggested switching to it in late 1995. The song itself was reworked into Sic, the opening song of the 1999 debut album.[1] [2] [3]
• The title and most lyrics of their 1996 demo came from the role playing game Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Singer Anders Colsefni and Shawn Crahan both loved the game. Colsefni said its attraction was getting to play a different person, which he called the essence of Slipknot.[1]
• Only one thousand copies of Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. were ever pressed. The band handed out copies themselves before a distributor took the last three hundred and eighty six. Originals have sold for at least twelve hundred dollars.[1]
• Craig Jones got his nickname, one three three, from the speed of his computer's processor. His machine ran at one hundred and thirty three megahertz, then considered state of the art. He was first recruited as a guitarist before switching to samples.[1]
• Sid Wilson chose number zero because, he said, he was not a number but filth. Corey Taylor picked eight for infinity and Mick Thomson took seven as his lucky number. Crahan said he would have fought to the death for six.[1] [2]
• Joey Jordison's kabuki style mask came from a childhood fright on Halloween. When he was about eight, his mother jumped out at him wearing a pale white kabuki mask and a long robe. The memory stayed with him, so he made it his mask.[1]
• Mick Thomson's first Slipknot mask was a hockey mask bought from a store. His mask has changed only slightly since. Before the band he taught guitar at Ye Olde Guitar Shop on Seventieth Street in Des Moines.[1]
• Chris Fehn originally asked to be Joey Jordison's drum tech, and was offered a place in the band instead. Before Slipknot he was a kicker on the Wayne State College football team and worked as an electrician.[1]
• Sid Wilson's DJ name, Starscream, comes from a Transformers character. He is a devoted Transformers fan with tattoos to prove it, and his robot style mask for All Hope Is Gone had eyebrows he could move animatronically.[1]
• Jim Root first turned down the offer to join Slipknot. A friend urged him to reconsider, and he called Crahan back to ask if the offer still stood. He played on only two songs of the debut.[1]
• Producer Ross Robinson threw potted plants at Joey Jordison while recording the debut album's opening song. The whole band played in one room with headphones tied to their heads, and Crahan called it the most insane thing he had ever seen.[1]
• A free Iowa era track was limited to exactly six hundred and sixty six copies. The song, first called Heretic Song, was given away on their website from the fifteenth of May 2001, and the number matched a line in its chorus.[1]
• The goat on the cover of Iowa was named Eeyore. Crahan said the cover was shot soon after the one for the debut album. Eeyore is also the name of a hidden track on the first album.[1] [2]
• Iowa's opening track uses a real recording of Sid Wilson screaming after learning his grandfather had died. The track is named after central Iowa's phone area code. Wilson chose to let the recording be used.[1]
• Ross Robinson broke his back in a dirt bike accident while producing Iowa. He returned to the studio after one day of hospital treatment, and the band admired him for pouring the pain into the album.[1]
• Volume Three was the first Slipknot album that did not need a parental advisory sticker. Taylor avoided profanity after critics said he relied on it. The standard edition contains only two mild swear words.[1]
• The Duality video was filmed in a real fan's house in West Des Moines, which got wrecked. The house was due for renovation, but the fans went further than planned, and the family later asked the band to replace a long list of things.[1]
• Advance review copies of All Hope Is Gone were labelled with the false name Rusty Cage. The trick was meant to stop the album leaking online before its release in August 2008.[1]
• All Hope Is Gone's first number one was decided by a recount. Billboard first said The Game's album had won by thirteen units. Twelve hours later the recount put Slipknot ahead by one thousand one hundred and thirty four.[1]
• About eight million people visited a website on a single day in 2008 to see Slipknot's new masks. The masks were unveiled on the first of July 2008 on Spinner dot com, ahead of All Hope Is Gone.[1]
• Even Shawn Crahan did not know what the word Psychosocial meant. He said he had to ask Corey Taylor, who would not tell him.[1]
• Joey Jordison drummed with Metallica at Download in 2004 when Lars Ulrich fell ill. He played eight of their thirteen songs, and was hailed as the hero of the day.[1] [2]
• On stage Jordison played strapped into a kit that spun and tilted to ninety degrees. The BBC reported the rig when he topped a Rhythm magazine poll of the best drummers of the previous twenty five years in 2010.[1] [2]
• The Disasterpieces concert film was shot with twenty six cameras, some mounted on the band's masks. During Spit It Out, Sid Wilson's camera was stolen while he was in the crowd, sparking a fight with Corey Taylor. It was returned by the end of the show.[1]
• Paul Gray's 2003 police mugshot was one of fans' first looks at a Slipknot member's face. He was arrested after crashing his Porsche, and reportedly tried to write the other driver a cheque for a thousand dollars.[1] [2]
• Corey Taylor's mother once moved to become a security guard on Burt Reynolds' ranch. In 1983 she and her boyfriend set off for Florida for the job, with nine year old Corey, but got stranded in Georgia on the way.[1]
• Corey Taylor says Faith No More's performance at the 1990 MTV awards saved his life. He was recovering from a suicide attempt when he saw them play Epic, and it inspired him to start writing and performing again.[1]
• Roadrunner Records blocked Corey Taylor from singing on an Anthrax album. He had planned to record vocals for Worship Music, but his label would not allow it.[1]
• Corey Taylor was once asked to sing from the bottom of a well. During the Look Outside Your Window sessions they opened an old farmhouse well for its natural echo. Crahan said it held a dead rat and dead bugs.[1] [2]
• Cristina Scabbia's Italian poem on Look Outside Your Window was about batteries that cannot be recharged. Shawn Crahan gave her that theme, and says he has never read the paper since, preferring to just hear it.[1]
• Sid Wilson finished a 2008 tour on two broken heels, crawling across the stage. He shattered them jumping from a platform on the Mayhem Festival's first night. Some fans thought his dragging himself around was an act.[1]
• The first vinyl and cassette copies of The End, So Far were printed with the wrong title. They read The End For Now. Corey Taylor said the name had always been The End, So Far, and someone simply failed to check.[1]
• Michael Pfaff, the percussionist fans called Tortilla Man, holds a master's degree in music. He studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Sid Wilson introduced him to Shawn Crahan in 2007.[1]
• Alessandro Venturella was a guitar tech for Mastodon before he was Slipknot's bassist. He also worked for Coheed and Cambria and Architects. Fans unmasked him through a tattoo on his hand.[1]
• Paul Gray's daughter was born in August 2010, less than three months after he died. His widow Brenna was pregnant when she stood beside the unmasked band at the press conference the day after his death.[1] [2]
• In 2001 Joey Jordison predicted the band would not last beyond four or five albums. He told Rolling Stone the music was so physical it was trimming years off their lives. As of 2026 they have released seven studio albums.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.