The shit’s twice as technical, three times as heavy.” “Wait till you hear our fuckin’ next record,” Jordison said in the run-up to the release of album number two. That epochal 1999 debut was followed by ‘Iowa’ in 2001. He was the group’s engine, but an exposed one: a hot rod tearing up tarmac. Jordison’s playing was precise, powerful, and sexy. It’s unfeasible to imagine Slipknot having anyone but the energetic Corey Taylor prowling the lip of the stage, but scan your eyes back – past Sid Wilson’s turntables and Mick Thompson’s stoic chugging – and the sinister, spooky, even androgynous Jordison was less playing his drums than attempting to distil thunder and lightning through mylar and chrome he was a syncopated spectre. The band were unusual in that their ferocity came from the rear of their set-up and not the front. At 51, Crahan remains not just the groups elder statesman, but its sole founding father. Gray, the group’s principal songwriter, passed in 2010. How tragic, after the abrupt, but reportedly peaceful passing of Jordison this week, at the age of just 46, that only one member of Slipknot’s Sinclair days remains. Masks, mystique and pulverising, pop-edged metal. The trio met regularly at the Sinclair gas station where Jordison worked nights. All had served their time on the Des Moines circuit. Slipknot had existed, in an evolving form, since 1995, after being conceived by percussionist Shawn Crahan, drummer Joey Jordison and bassist Paul Gray. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Alice Cooper, GWAR: rock and metal had seen shlock before, but a band comprised entirely of big bads plucked from the gnarliest horror movies never made? This was an entirely new proposition. They were Slipknot, and you were a Maggot. The other was adoration: if you felt different, strange or unique at the dawn of the millennium, few bands offered you sanctuary like the nine-piece did. One was a guttural disgust: this was a band that huffed the fumes of dead crows before stage time, who punched each other in the face onstage. When Slipknot roared out of Des Moines, Iowa with their self-titled debut some 22 years ago, they were greeted by one of two responses.
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