"Then we spot the mask. Caked in garish make-up and framed by filthy orange tresses, it lies face up and concave on an armchair, its already sinister clown features grotesquely twisted. Shawn Crahan scoops it up in his shovel-sized mitt, kisses his wife and daughter goodbye, and heads to the door. It's time for Clown to go to work."
It's October 17, 1999, and I'm standing in Shawn Crahan's house in suburban Des Moines. I've seen Slipknot play before, earlier that year, on May 27, at the opening date of Ozzfest '99, at Coral Sky Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, Florida, but this is my first up-close-and-personal meeting with Clown. The paragraph above was written in the introduction to Slipknot's first ever magazine cover story. You never forget your first time.
Shawn Crahan remembers exactly where and when he first encountered the only face that he would show to the world on his band's first album cycle.
Article continues below"I was 14 years old," he recalled in a Hallowen 2024 interview with Vulture. "I was in a mall with my girlfriend at the time. We always went to Spencer’s because they had little adult novelty toys. Then I saw this mask in the clearance bin. I remember it exactly. I put it on and I immediately understood what it was like to disappear. I was gone and the real me had just shown up. It was so natural.
"From that day on, I molded my face to make my own masks," he continued. "I have always been the Clown no matter how the mask has changed. The essences are always there. But it's always ironic to me that the most identifiable clown mask is the one I didn't make for myself. It seems like that’s sort of how brainwashed the world is, that this familiar entity that a corporation made has become part of my own merchandising."
In another interview, Crahan revealed exactly how much the mask cost.
"It was $49 and I had $50 in my pocket," he recalled. "I was supposed to be buying my girlfriend lunch and she got all pissed off because I spent all my money on this mask. Well… she’s gone but I still have him downstairs."
"I was just drawn to it," Crahan stated in a 2016 interview with the BBC's Artsnight programme. "It was awesome. And I just never knew why it was in my world but it was always around me. Then one day, it just so happened, it was that moment of clarity to decide what I want to project. I'm like being taught something more and more and more, and I hadn't even figured it out yet. This thing has no fucking limits."
Just about every body fluid has gone onto it. It's rolled around on every floor in every city.
Shawn 'Clown' Crahan
When Slipknot returned with their second record, Iowa, Crahan had a brand new mask, featuring an upside down pentagram, horns and a bloody brain. But mask one never truly went away.
"I still have that baby," he told Vulture. "I kept it in a safe in Iowa before I moved to Palm Springs, and now it stays hidden away in a bag in the studio. It's shrunken a bit from all the stage lights. I know this is going to sound a bit weird, but I always though I was going to sell it for a lot of money. If I were to donate it, there’s no guarantee that it’d be taken seriously or protected. You know, if the Smithsonian would take it, I would give it to them, but I don’t know if they’re interested.
"Just about every body fluid has gone onto it," he added. "It’s rolled around on every floor in every city. It's rubbed up against human beings in the middle of a pit. It’s a disease on its own. All the masks are.
"When we did Ozzfest in ‘98 [actually 1999] we were on a bus with 16 people. We didn't have any money. No one knew who Slipknot was. We weren't even getting a hotel room. I had to steal showers, waiting for the fucking Deftones to play so I could sneak in and use their filthy ass stuff. There was this lounge on the bus, with, like, six drawers. We put our masks in there. I can remember other bands getting two steps into our bus and being like, Jesus, what is that smell? That smell's money, man."
Watch Crahan, Corey Taylor and Slipknot fans discuss masks on the BBC ten years ago.
In October 2024, 25 years after we first met, I spoke with Shawn Crahan again, and revisited out first encounter in his home in Des Moines.
That day, he had told me that he had slept badly the previous night because he was so excited about his band’s trajectory, and had ended up watching James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic on TV.
"Joey [Jordison] told me the last half hour is so rad, so I watched it, and I'm not embarrassed to say, I got all fucked up, dude,” he told me then. “When the girl says goodbye to the guy and tells him she won't forget him, it got to me. I got back into bed beside my wife, and I started thinking about my life. This is the craziest fucking dream I’d ever want."
When I read this quote back to Clown, one week before his band went on the road to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album, there was a brief pause as he absorbed his own words from a quarter of a century earlier.
"I got goosebumps listening to that," he admitted. "My whole body has got goosebumps. Man… what a journey. I’ve lost a child [Gabrielle, who passed away on May 18, 2019], I’ve lost my partners in crime - the two most important people who had most to do with that record [Joey Jordison and Paul Gray] are gone - but we're still relevant, still making art, still believing, still hoping, still dreaming, still imagining. These 25 years have been insane. And I can't tell you right now if it's everything I wanted, because it's not done yet, it just keeps morphing into more madness."
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