Kerrang! November 2nd 2002. Shot on film in Amsterdam.
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07 Mar 2010 - Morat
Speedealer in Calgary around 99
Category: A-Z OF ROCK N ROLL, PUBLISHED WORK, S
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06 Mar 2010 - Morat
Skin Deep Magazine April 2001
Category: A-Z OF ROCK N ROLL, PEOPLE, PUBLISHED WORK, S, WRITING
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06 Mar 2010 - Morat
Skin Deep October 2001
Category: A-Z OF ROCK N ROLL, PEOPLE, PUBLISHED WORK, S, WRITING
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06 Mar 2010 - Morat
Kerrang! January 15th 2005
Category: A-Z OF ROCK N ROLL, PEOPLE, PUBLISHED WORK, S, WRITING
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02 Mar 2010 - Morat
These were shot at the House Of Blues, LA 18th Jan 2009.
What Seattle is to grunge so Los Angeles is to ozone destroying heavy metal and to own the Sunset Strip is to own Los Angeles. Every night of the week the planet dies a little as men in spandex and very big hair try their luck at getting rich and famous at such legendary venues as the Whiskey A-Go-Go and the Roxy, before trying to scrounge together enough for a Jack and Coke at the Rainbow and maybe talking Lemmy into listening to their demo. It’s not an easy life: few bands get signed and even fewer will make it, but those who do, like the venues they started out in, become the stuff of legend. Guns N Roses, Motley Crue, Poison, Warrant, Ratt, Pretty Boy Floyd. Need we say more?
It’s difficult to imagine, looking at them now with literally tens of dollars in their pockets and a car with a working cassette player, that the mighty Steel Panther were ever anything less than rock gods, but, like us mere mortals, even the current kings of the Sunset Strip had to start out somewhere. Hair like that doesn’t just happen overnight! As we’ll find out, in this most candid of interviews with the stars themselves, AC/DC were right when they said it was a long way to the top if you wanna rock n roll. They were also right about certain venereal diseases.
Though he clearly has the best hair in the band, thanks in part to getting fired from numerous salons who failed to see his genius and complained that he was “wasted all the time”, bassist Lexxi Foxxx had perhaps the hardest road to the top. Despite his looks he was thrown out of school at an early age and would hang around outside, smoking and waiting for his female admirers.
“Sometimes I’ll still do that,” says Lexxi. “I probably shouldn’t say that. A guy like me can get into trouble waiting outside schools.”
Like many aspiring stars Lexxi decided to head from his hometown, in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, to the mecca of things metal, Los Angeles. It was a difficult journey: with little money for gas Lexxi was “helped by a lot of truck drivers” in return for “special favours”.
“I had to do some sexual things I’m not too proud of to get out here,” he says today, with a devastating flick of his hair.
And it was hair that came to Lexxi in his time of need. By night he became “Mercedes” and worked on Santa Monica Boulevard, but by day his talent for hair got him noticed in one of the aforementioned salons by none other than Steel Panther frontman Michael Starr. Call it kismet.
“I was totally fucking high,” says Lexxi, “and I remember someone yelling at me “quit putting bleach in my hair!” I think Michael was getting his hair done and he said “dude, you look bitching! Why don’t you be in a band?” I knew I wanted to be in a band because you get so much pussy, but I don’t really have that much ability. I’ve not written a song in my whole life and I knew that was part of being in a band. Satchel (guitar) will tell you I’m not the best bass player and shouldn’t even be in a band. I hate music! Well, no, I love music, but it’s more important for me to look as bitching as I can so I don’t really care how my bass sounds. They helped me get my first bass and it didn’t even have strings on it. We just put all the bass on tracks and then I could just move around and look bitching.””
That said, Lexxi is keen to hone his craft, a master craftsman in the twin worlds of hair and metal. When he’s not “fucked up” or looking in the mirror he’ll practice at least once a month, though he’ll admit he doesn’t want the hard work to show too much.
“I don’t want to get too good because chicks know I’m not the smartest dude in the band, but they feel sorry for me and shit and I get more pussy so I don’t wanna be too good. I want them going “oh how cute!” while I fuck their asses.”
It’s difficult to imagine, looking at them now with literally tens of dollars in their pockets and a car with a working cassette player, that the mighty Steel Panther were ever anything less than rock gods, but, like us mere mortals, even the current kings of the Sunset Strip had to start out somewhere. Hair like that doesn’t just happen overnight! As we’ll find out, in this most candid of interviews with the stars themselves, AC/DC were right when they said it was a long way to the top if you wanna rock n roll. They were also right about certain venereal diseases.
Though he clearly has the best hair in the band, thanks in part to getting fired from numerous salons who failed to see his genius and complained that he was “wasted all the time”, bassist Lexxi Foxxx had perhaps the hardest road to the top. Despite his looks he was thrown out of school at an early age and would hang around outside, smoking and waiting for his female admirers.
“Sometimes I’ll still do that,” says Lexxi. “I probably shouldn’t say that. A guy like me can get into trouble waiting outside schools.”
Like many aspiring stars Lexxi decided to head from his hometown, in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, to the mecca of things metal, Los Angeles. It was a difficult journey: with little money for gas Lexxi was “helped by a lot of truck drivers” in return for “special favours”.
“I had to do some sexual things I’m not too proud of to get out here,” he says today, with a devastating flick of his hair.
And it was hair that came to Lexxi in his time of need. By night he became “Mercedes” and worked on Santa Monica Boulevard, but by day his talent for hair got him noticed in one of the aforementioned salons by none other than Steel Panther frontman Michael Starr. Call it kismet.
“I was totally fucking high,” says Lexxi, “and I remember someone yelling at me “quit putting bleach in my hair!” I think Michael was getting his hair done and he said “dude, you look bitching! Why don’t you be in a band?” I knew I wanted to be in a band because you get so much pussy, but I don’t really have that much ability. I’ve not written a song in my whole life and I knew that was part of being in a band. Satchel (guitar) will tell you I’m not the best bass player and shouldn’t even be in a band. I hate music! Well, no, I love music, but it’s more important for me to look as bitching as I can so I don’t really care how my bass sounds. They helped me get my first bass and it didn’t even have strings on it. We just put all the bass on tracks and then I could just move around and look bitching.””
That said, Lexxi is keen to hone his craft, a master craftsman in the twin worlds of hair and metal. When he’s not “fucked up” or looking in the mirror he’ll practice at least once a month, though he’ll admit he doesn’t want the hard work to show too much.
“I don’t want to get too good because chicks know I’m not the smartest dude in the band, but they feel sorry for me and shit and I get more pussy so I don’t wanna be too good. I want them going “oh how cute!” while I fuck their asses.”
Lexxi wasn’t the only Panther to head for the big city, though moving from Fresno, California, Satchel was already blessed with a leg up the entertainment industry from his mother who worked in Chuck E Cheese entertaining the kids.
“She was also a hooker on the side,” says Satchel today, talking of his formative years. “She made a lot of good cash doing that, but at some point you have to give up because your tits get too long, so she put me to work. I don’t really remember much about school because I was so high all the time, but I can remember early stuff, like when I was in kindergarten, that’s where I got laid for the first time. I had long hair and I used to wear spandex and shit and the other kids used to make fun of me but they were just jealous because I was getting more pussy. I had my first threesome there. It was bad ass! The teacher went all the way but the other kid didn’t know what she was doing, she couldn’t give head or anything. I’m mean, the teacher’s probably 70 years old so I wouldn’t fuck her now and I wouldn’t fuck a five year old now.”
Perhaps not surprisingly Satchel was voted ‘most likely to fuck the teacher’, something he says almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy, though he was disappointed when his third grade teacher was male.
“I didn’t wanna break the streak,” says Satchel, “but I don’t really wanna talk about that and I’m sure he doesn’t want to either. The thing I learned at school was even if you don’t know anything you’ve got to totally pretend that you know what’s going on and that way people will respect you.”
Like the rest of the band Satchel soon figured out that he would “get to put his penis in a lot more vaginas” if he was in a band and he dived headfirst into the rock n roll lifestyle, sniffing paint when he wasn’t grooming his hair or shredding on guitar.
“I don’t remember my earliest overdose,” he says, matter of fact, “but I remember the last one; I overdosed on Viagra and I’ve actually still got a boner. You probably can’t tell because it’s not as big as I’d like, but I’ve had it for two weeks. You can totally die from having a boner for two weeks!’
Such a loss to music is too great to imagine and we can only hope that Satchel recovers, but in the meantime his ambitions are rather bigger than his boner. He insists that Steel Panther are going straight to the top of the charts just as soon as they find the right songwriter and that, some day, some day soon, his band will be touring the world with Def Leppard, Van Halen and Aerosmith opening for them.
“At some point,” says Satchel, “ those bands are going to realize that if they’re going to keep touring then they might as well open up for the greatest band in the world and they’re gonna have to hand over the baton to Steel Panther. They’re still bad ass, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure those bands are fucking lots of bitches, but what are we going to catch from Def Leppard that they haven’t already caught from us? Thankfully the one arm thing isn’t contagious, but our drummer only has one testicle and he has more sperm in his load than all of us combined, just like the drummer from Def Leppard rocks harder than he normally would. I’ve seen him shoot a load six or seven feet across the room and still hit a girls face!”
As if on cue the man himself, drummer, Stix Zadinia, strolls into the dressing room. Despite being voted ‘most likely to be a loser’, he is obviously the brains of the operation, a rare thing in the drumming world. An LA native, he was the one band member to hold down a job that didn’t involve hair or burgers, DJing in a strip club called Wrinkles. It was his idea to record all Steel Panther’s demos on cassette to keep it authentic (and so they could listen to them in Michael’s car). After all Guns N Roses didn’t record their first demos on CD. It was his idea too to keep changing the name of the band, (Danger Kitty, then Metal Shop, then Metal Skool, then Steel Panther), not to avoid being sued by other bands with the same name, but so their true fans had to rediscover them every time.
“We’ve always been Steel Panther,”he reflects, “but for a while we just didn’t know it. But why fight it? It’s like when a guy goes “I’m 42 and I’ve been gay the whole time but I’ve been living as a heterosexual.” Why fight it? Be who you are! And we’re Steel Panther! But not gay Steel Panther, just Steel Panther.”
Stix is an old school LA rocker. He remembers a time when hair metal ruled the world, a time when you could walk the streets of West Hollywood looking like a girl without getting whistled at by men. He likes his drummers old school too, Keith Moon for partying and driving, Tico Torres for hair and John Bonham for inserting fish into groupies.
‘I’ve tried to put all sorts of shit in chick’s pussy’s, but I haven’t managed a fish yet,” says Stix. “I’ve put drumsticks in there! An octopus would look cool if you could put the head inside the pussy and have the tentacles out there! That’s probably where they got Octopussy!”
Clearly the thinker of the band, Stix says he’d like Steel Panther to do more charitable work because “retarded kids get you laid”. He also has advice for any impressionable fans who might think about using needles.
“What’s wrong with sharing needles?” he says. “Just don’t be gay and share a needle and then you have nothing to worry about. If you don’t have AIDS then go for it. I mean, I don’t want some kid stepping on a needle on the beach that I had to use because my buddy won’t share his.”
If there’s one person Stix knows will always share his needles then it’s Steel Panther frontman Michael Starr, a star in every sense of the word, who crashed to earth in Chicago, Illinois in 1965. Starr was born to shine, quite literally getting conceived on stage while his mother and father worked in theater porn. His natural talent was spotted early by a school teacher named Miss Williams who took an interest is his singing career.
“I sang really good,” says Michael, “and she gave me a big hug, with my head in her bosoms, and at that point I made the connection like, when I sing good this is what I get. I was still disruptive at school but I got treated differently because I could sing really good. But it really led to an adverse effect because I needed to get people’s approval so that’s when I started doing drugs to fill that void. That’s a really hard balance because you don’t wanna fuck up your voice. A lot of singers make that mistake, especially doing coke, because if you’re high you don’t feel what you’re doing to your voice: you’ve got to wait until the guitar solo before you do any coke.”
The Starrs moved to California in 1979, Michael’s brother and mother buying him a guitar and a mirror so he could practice looking good. Thankfully a low sperm count keeps the paternity suits at bay, but it’s obvious that Michael is the sensitive guy in the band, the hand that penned ‘Community Property’. He crashed his first car, a Volkswagen Beetle, following a girl he had a crush on and, like Stix, wants to get involved in charity work.
“I wanna do a charity for strippers,” he says simply. “A lot of them can’t do it anymore or they don’t make as much money and they still need drugs like we do.”
Even Michael will admit, in his more reflective moments, that Steel Panther’s success had exceeded anything he could have possibly imagined: “I never thought I’d get chlamydia in Manchester.” The world is his oyster and yet something troubles this star.
“I’m definitely the reflective kind of guy,” he says. “It’s like trying to find the right combination, like putting cocaine and beer together. But I get too sensitive and I give them my real phone number sometimes. The only way to get rid of them is not to call them ever again. But, nine times out of ten, any chick who likes heavy metal is usually pretty bitching. And it’s surprising how many people love metal: that chick who works in an office all day totally loves metal. She’s totally straight during the day and at night she’s sucking dick!”
Do you think you’ll manage to stay grounded through superstardom?
“Probably not,” shrugs Starr. “My head will get really big and I’ll spend all the money that I don’t really have yet and then be broke, then we’ll get in a fight and break the band up and we’ll have to get back together for monetary reasons. But we feel like where we are now is already the top.”
Category: A-Z OF ROCK N ROLL, S, WRITING
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30 Jan 2010 - Morat
Kerrang! August 2nd 2003. Shot on film in Anehiem, California.
Category: A-Z OF ROCK N ROLL, PUBLISHED WORK, S, WRITING
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14 Jan 2010 - Morat
Slipknot Cover Story
SLIPKNOT
Down an endless corridor painted in the uniform colour of schools and hospitals worldwide that can probably only be achieved by mixing pigeon shit with dandruff. Security check. Turn left along another equally unattractive corridor… no wait. Turn right. Go back and ask the humourless security bloke who’s already forgotten your encounter of ten seconds ago and wants to see passes again. Left it is. Past a million uninviting little rooms marked ‘production’, ‘catering’, etc. Another security check. Another corridor. Repeat until mildly irritated. Try not to think about Spinal Tap.
Aside from being owned by the Faithful Central Bible Church, an irony that’s missed by no one, The Forum in Los Angeles is no different to any of the other faceless arenas that litter the country and backstage there is a pervasive air of routine, boredom even. Of course, it’s still a big deal to sell the place out: this is, after all, where the likes of Metallica and AC/DC play when they come to town. But ever since the Lakers basketball team relocated from here in 1999 the area has been in decline and now, like most arenas, it’s slap bang in the middle of somewhere you’d rather not be and too far away from anywhere you might want to go. It doesn’t help that the room set aside for interviews today looks like a police interrogation room with just a table and a couple of crappy chairs to offset the crumbling paint, the walls vibrating through other people’s soundchecks like someone’s getting a beating next door. Given that Slipknot started
touring for their latest album ‘All Hope Is Gone’ almost a year ago, the novelty is wearing thin.
“I’m so not even on this tour anymore,” admits frontman Corey Taylor, chain smoking and flicking his ash into a spent paper coffee cup. “We’re at the tail end of six weeks right now. Six weeks of doing anything is a pain in the ass, but six weeks of doing this is like being stabbed in the eyes for six weeks. If the shows weren’t so fucking incredible I’d probably be worse, but leave it to this band to be bigger than they were ten years ago. I can’t figure it out! Almost all the shows are sold out and I’m like “really?”
Ten years ago Slipknot were arguably the most ferocious live band on the planet, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that they wouldn’t be able to maintain such an incredible pace forever. Turntablist Sid Wilson and percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan would flip a coin each night to determine who got a punch in the face on stage. Band members would set themselves on fire. Bones were broken and blood was shed. Indeed, on the first night of last years Mayhem tour, Sid back-flipped off stage and broke both his heels, completing the remainder of the tour in a wheelchair and, once again, proving that his lift doesn’t go to the top floor.
“Oh you nailed it there!” laughs Corey. “He definitely doesn’t have all the cheese on his cracker! Fucking idiot! He still walks with a cane! He’s the youngest guy in the band and he walks like he’s fifty! I’m like “what the fuck are you doing?” But that’s part of the charm of this band.”
Today however, Sid’s cheeseless crackers notwithstanding, Slipknot are a different band. They had to become a different band. The question is whether they like what they have become. Older readers may recall the friction in the Metallica camp when the ‘Black Album’ propelled them into the mainstream, some more willingly than others. Lars Ulrich was lapping it up, doing coke with Guns N Roses every night, while James Hetfield increasingly shunned the limelight, often appearing confused, even disgusted, by their own success. Kirk Hammett and then-bassist Jason Newstead may as well have been session musicians. Take that tension and multiply it by nine.
“It’s fucking weird, man,” ponders Corey. “It’s evolved into something that I never thought I would see. It’s still underground even though we had number one album. We’re still the black sheep of the musical family and yet we’re able to sell out places like this. The potency of it hasn’t gone anywhere, but it’s definitely a different band. And today, because I’m in a foul fucking mood, I’m trying to figure out if that’s good or bad. Seriously! You get to the point where it’s like “what are we doing?”
It should be pointed out that part of the reason for Taylor’s vitriol today is his ongoing love/hate relationship with Los Angeles. Engaged to be married in October, he has a house here for work purposes and because his fiancé is “kinda from here”, but otherwise hates the place, preferring to be back home in Iowa in the rare moments of downtime. He’s also none too keen on the Forum’s aforementioned owners, venting considerable spleen on the “hypocritical cunts who’ll let the heathens in when they bring you money!”
That aside, there are deeper underlying reasons for Taylor’s discontent, namely, it seems, that old chestnut ‘musical differences’.
“There are still some hangers in the band who are like “we can’t do this or that” and I’m like “why not?”’ sighs Taylor. “If we’re gonna cross over then let’s do it! But even though we’ve had incredible success there are still certain hardcore people in the band that feel like we can’t play certain songs live, like ‘Circle’ or ‘Vermillion Pt 2‘ or ‘Snuff’. Fucking grow up! If we’re not gonna play them live then we shouldn’t put them on the album. For me it’s a constant struggle of waiting for people to evolve, but then again it’s that tension that makes the band what it is. Some days it’s easier to live with than others. There are days when I’m incredibly grateful that we still get to do this and then there’s days like today when I’m a piss poor cynical bastard! And I hate being like this.”
Even beneath his current dark cloud, it must be said that Taylor is outgoing, funny and a lot smarter than he’s given credit for (he’s fluent enough in several languages that he can control pretty much any audience worldwide). He looks healthy too. Gone is the pudge from excess drinking a few years ago and along with going through an unpleasant divorce, he’s rid himself of the “douche bags and clingers” who pretended to be his friend, particularly the one who was staying at Corey’s house and was caught going through his private e-mails.
“It’s definitely made me more tentative,” he confesses. “There’s a thicker wall…which sucks because I’m an extroverted guy and I love hanging out with people.”
But still, if rock music needs an ambassador, someone who can stir things up without alienating the genre, then it could do (and has done) a lot worse than Corey Taylor, and you get the feeling that he’s okay with that and getting used to it.
“I’m definitely more recognized now than I was, but I’m not locking my door or pulling a J-Lo and renting limos to go half a block,” he shrugs. “It’s a double edged sword because you want people to recognize you, but then you act like a twat when they ask for your autograph. I’m just as human as everybody else so I have my moments when I’m a total fucking asshole, but even then I’ll take time. The thing that you have to realize is if you wanna be in this industry then you’ve gotta work and if I can get more work by being more visible then, fuck it, why not? And at the same time, if you do it right you can still be yourself and have the kind of success that I’ve always hoped for.”
If the exact opposite can be said of anyone, then it can be said of the next person to enter the room: Shawn Crahan, husband of 16 years with four kids, whose hobbies include painting and fishing. Better known simply as The Clown, a dangerous mental case who prowls the fringes of the rock industry like a shark circling it’s prey.
“You were supposed to go first douche bag!” hoots Corey when he arrives. Clown retorts with something the tape doesn’t catch.
“You know what?” responds Corey. “I am a rock star, but I turned up on time!”
It’s difficult to tell whether it’s said in jest, but before there’s time to find out Clown takes a seat and makes his feelings crystal clear.
“People always challenge me a lot with what I say,” he snarls, “so I’m getting my words a little more direct and to the point. It’s simple: I hate touring! I hate everything to do with it! I hate this fucking room that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in 20 years, I hate the catering, I hate all the jackasses hanging around and all the kiss ass, suck dick, bullshit that goes with getting to do one thing, which is the only reason I do it…to play live! I play live because I have pain that is unidentifiable to anybody else but myself and the release comes through live performances.”
Yeah, presumably going nuts on stage in front of 16,000 people gives you quite the adrenaline rush!
“It’s more that,” says Clown, having calmed a little (only a little, mind) from his initial tirade. “I go to a spiritual place. I find myself babbling under my mask and I’ll sing the words as loud as I can even though people can’t even see my lips move, but I’m not singing for all of them, I’m singing for me. I’m up here playing for me and currently that still feels great! But I don’t like anything about touring. Nothing! I never knew any of this was going to exist, but the payoff with my spirituality every night is still what I require.”
As therapy goes, letting loose with Slipknot every night must be pretty good stress relief, not least because, as the Clown, Crahan has carte blanche to do whatever the fuck he wants up there.
“Yeah and a lot of people don’t know that,” says Clown, with a hint of a smile like it’s got lost and turned up on the wrong face. “I mean no disrespect here, but I’m not even a metalhead and I can take credit for starting one of the biggest metal bands ever! I like that. That goes hand in hand with designing my own position in the band: I am the Clown and I do what ever the fuck I want! These guys can play their blast beats and heavy ass guitar and I’ll take a piss. I ‘ll go outside and enjoy the moon for a minute for parallel experience and that’s the way I designed it for myself. I’m the fucking Clown and I’ve been the Clown since I was born, it just took my whole life to put this together that way I need to to deal with this sentence known as life. I don’t have any problems that are more important or any different from anybody else, it’s just how I handle it for myself with this concept known as Slipknot. And on top of that,
accidentally, I made a career out of it. And it’s the career that I fucking hate! I’m blessed, but it was never part of the thinking. The thinking was, “I’m outside this door and if you don’t let me in I’m gonna fucking kick it in with eight other guys and there’s nothing you can do about it!” And he we are still. And I fucking hate it! Come and see the monotony of making my art!”
Crahan is not here to make friends. Of the 16,000 people here tonight he says he’ll connect with “less than a dozen” and if he could he’d just turn up for the show without speaking to anyone.
“It’s not personal,” he adds. “It’s just that in some ways I didn’t ask for all this.”
Can the Clown really afford to be numb?
“Oh I’m so fucking numb, man,” he sighs. “I’m so over this, but I love Slipknot. Did I wanna be the biggest thing in the world? Of course! I don’t know any other way of thinking. But people are like ‘what do you think about having a number one album?” Fuck you! I left my kids ten years ago and I left my wife with Crohns disease and I was number one then and I was number one every day after that, kicking the world’s ass to achieve something for myself and my family. I was number one ten years ago and our shows were better ten years ago. Now it’s five dressing rooms and five busses and first class tickets and fucking blah blah. It’s so much bigger than me and that’s why so many people think I’m full of shit because I still try to adhere to some kind of realism behind what this all is. And it ain’t the cover of fucking magazine or a fucking record and it certainly isn’t fucking Roadrunner or MTV or any of that shit.”
It’s difficult not to empathize. As good as Slipknot are, their intensity has been unavoidably diluted by their success and although Corey insists that Slipknot shows are “like the World Series of Poker…they’re always be the nuts!”, there are no ‘maggots’ lurking in the parking lot before the show, scaring the crap out of passes by, just regular rock fans come to see the big show. Asked if there are any real ‘maggots’ left, Clown looks genuinely hurt.
“Barely,” he says. “It’s bigger than them now too and that’s sad.”
In case you were in any doubt, Clown is one of the band members who refuses to play the ‘ballads’ live. That said, in the last few weeks he’s declined two kids who wanted to “flip for punches”.
“I’m not the guy I was ten years ago and if I was I’d be dead,” he says simply. “Am I scared? Fuck no. I’ve taken so many punches to the face that it’s like being in a war…no I retract that, it’s not even close, but it’s my own personal hell that I’ve created for myself. This kid hands me a quarter and called me right out, like “let’s go fuckface!” I had to decline because if I lost and he smacked me up, I would vomit on myself, I might shatter because I’m not that guy any more. I would probably just cry for hours. I’m out and I can’t explain it. All night long he just kept looking at me like I need to stand up and let him smack me. But what if I win? What am I gonna do? Give him a hug?”
So…ten years after exploding onto the music business like a well placed nailbomb, the nine-headed insane asylum that is Slipknot is very different thing to what it once was. The ‘all for one’ gang mentality remains, the feeling that if you fuck with one of them then you fuck with all of them, but nowadays you’d have to round them all up first. And while Clown’s puffy knuckles and scarred face attest to the fact that he’d probably be first in, the air of menace when dealing with the band has gone. It’s not threatening backstage anymore like it was.
“Yeah it was, but everyone wants different things,” says Clown almost apologetically. “If I could be king I’d start locking the motherfuckers up again like baboons in dark cages, but what are you gonna do? Either way I don’t give a fuck. Stay out of the Clown’s way! I speak the truth, I’m not scared of anybody and I don’t give a shit what anybody thinks about me. I’m not in this for the money or the fame and I don’t give a shit if we’re headlining or going on first, never did, never will. What scares me is I’m getting the furthest away from it, every day further and further away. And, quite frankly, I like it. I don’t care. I’m not scared of any of these fuckers. They can all have their rock star parties, but I’m the guy that says “oh you wanna come to the show? Fuck off! I don’t like your band. Never did and never will.” If it was up to me they’d sit with all the kids whose parents are divorced and who go through
life with no money, scrounging up 30 bucks to go to an overpriced metal show.”
Does Clown have a clear idea what he’s going to do with the second half of his life?
“Oh yeah, definitely,” he says. “I’m gonna disappear. I’m going to escape with my wife and kids and when I leave there will be no reunion with the Clown and no one going “rock’s great legends, let’s put some fucked up thing on VH1”. When I’m out, I’m out and I’ll take that to my fucking grave. I don’t know how much of a place I have in this any more. The pieces are only as good as the whole, I know that, and I might be the Clown, but what the fuck’s that really? I don’t know my place and I don’t care. I’m just doing as much as I can and trying to give back as much as I can before it’s done, because it will be done; it could be ten years or tomorrow, but it will end and I know that better than anyone.”
We can’t expect to see Slipknot’s 30th anniversary show then?
“No,” says Clown, plain and simple. “I’m doing the ten year anniversary thing right now and I’m like ‘fuck it all!’ You wanna make money off ten years? Fuck you! Did you walk in my piss soaked shoes every night? No, so why should you even make a dollar? This is still real, but how real? I don’t know.”
And with that the Clown stomps off down those endless corridors to do another ‘meet and greet’ with people he neither wants to meet or greet. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll connect with someone today. Probably not. Either way he’ll still take a piss on stage.
MORAT
Category: A-Z OF ROCK N ROLL, COVERS, METAL HAMMER MAGAZINE, PUBLISHED WORK, S, WRITING
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