Slipknot Goes Platinum

By archive-Rob-Mancini

May 15, 2000 / 2:15 PM

The infestation has reached a whole new level.

After months of relentless touring and virtually no help from mainstream radio or video outlets, the masked metal madmen of Slipknot have hit platinum. The Des Moines, Iowa band's 1999 self-titled debut album was recently certified platinum by the RIAA after selling more than 1 million copies in the U.S.

While MTV News, "Rolling Stone" magazine, "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," and other mainstream outlets have picked up on the band, Slipknot owes a good chunk of its swelling fan base to its road work, especially the coming-out party staged on last summer's Ozzfest. However, anyone who has caught the group live knows that the emotional give-and-take it experiences with its fans packs more of a punch than your average rock show.

The way I see it and the way all the guys in the band see it, when you go out and speak to a kid one-on-one and you speak in his language through songs about what that guy experiences

day in and day out, that's what I think makes it," drummer Joey (a.k.a. #1) told MTV News recently of the key to the band's success.

I think a lot of bands go out and even though they're kind of speaking one-on-one, they speak a little bit over a lot of these kid's heads," he continued. "I mean, this kid gets up at 6:30 and stubs his toe on the way to the shower and has his mom yelling at him and he has to go to school, and maybe he's not getting good grades, and his girlfriend's breaking up with him, and he has to come home, and then he has to do it all over again and he goes to bed. It's 'Groundhog Day' for him, and that's what it's like for us. And it's still like that for us every day when we're in Des Moines and we're writing music.

We're not going to go to some big, fancy recording studio and write the next record," Joey said, "because that's the poison that's infected us and made us write this great album that is speaking to kids in such a good language."

You got to keep it real, dude, or you're not going to keep anything," frontman Corey Taylor added.

The band is indeed already looking ahead to its second album, but before that Slipknot will continue its U.S. tour, which includes some radio-station sponsored shows (including the WHFStival gig in Washington, D.C. on Memorial Day weekend). After that, the band will head to Europe before returning to the States for the launch of the Tattoo The Earth tour in mid-July (see [article id="1432596"]"STP, Nashville Pussy, More To 'Tattoo'"[/article]). Here's where you can catch the band before that: