Slipknot Tease ‘Dangerous’ Summer Tour: ‘It’s Scary’

“I just like looking at the faces,” Slipknot percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan says. “After all these years, the most intense fan is still intense.”

For nearly two decades, the group’s nine masked headbangers have been challenging fans with performance-art experiments disguised as concerts, as they slither about the stage and literally set it ablaze. Last year, they put out .5: The Gray Chapter, their first record in six years and first without founding bassist and songwriter Paul Gray, who died in 2010.

Beginning in July, Slipknot will embark on their second North American tour in support of the album. Like-minded metal screamers Lamb of God will join them on the trek, which they’ve dubbed Summer’s Last Stand. “It’s always cool to jam with your friends and . . . it’s great to tour with bands that kids like,” Crahan says. “It just makes it more of a great day for a ‘maggot,'” he adds using the name the band has affectionately reserved for Slipknot faithful.

Before the group set off to thrill maggots in Europe, Rolling Stone caught up with Crahan to find out just what U.S. fans should expect from one of metal’s most unpredictable bands this summer.

How did it feel to get back on the road last year with a new album?
This business is pretty boring without us. You can look for something that’s equivalent to Slipknot and you’re going to fail miserably. It’s emotional for us because we are still something that people require and still something that people love. When you reconnect with your fans, it helps you recall the first mission, and that is to conquer the fucking world with our disease and our art and leave everything behind.

Slipknot singer Corey Taylor has said that you will be blowing stuff up on the tour. Is that literal or metaphoric?
We blow a lot of stuff up. I wouldn’t know where to begin. We’re reinventing ourselves a little bit. The world of rock & roll is real safe. You watch all these bands at these festivals and the decadence and the bullshit that goes on, the belief that you’re superhuman, and we’re just not that way. We’re just a force. We’re just bored with the way things have been and how safe the industry has gotten. We’ve been trying to get a little bit more dangerous lately and bring some of our stuff out from the past a little more.

What do you mean by getting “more dangerous”?
The danger stems from the everyday, monotonous fucking bullshit in this industry. You pull up to these sheds and it’s “left-brainer” business as usual. I want all the left-brainers to know that I exist and that my right brain will eat their left brain.

Everybody wants to make money off of Slipknot, including your magazine. So I think our danger is to remind you while you’re trying to get paid that there’s someone like me standing to your right or left who wants to systematically destroy you to the core and have you be a believer. I understand you can’t have left without right, up without down, so on and so forth. However, even the left-brainers – I call them “fancy shoes,” “smart shoes,” because you can always tell a corporate fucking tool by his shoes – you’re just a fucking target. So our danger arrives from being bigger, better, becoming huge. We like to keep everybody on their toes. A little fire, a little danger. That’s just what we are.