Always wanted to know more about the Iowa goat? Slipknot's Clown has answers

Slipknot's Clown has gone into detail on the album artwork of the band's second album Iowa.

“That goat’s name is Eeyore," Clown says. "My mentor who got me going into photography, Stefan Seskis, he shot the first album cover,  I came up with the concept and I so badly wanted to shoot the second album cover, and I just couldn’t get it done. One day  I handed him the goat.

“I came to the studio later that day and he had taken five or six photos. They were Polaroids.  I remember being so frustrated, I couldn’t believe he’d got the damn picture taken. I said,  ‘I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of this bastard and I couldn’t get it done.’”

Twenty years on from Iowa's release, Clown and Corey Taylor tell the definitive story of the album in the new issue of Metal Hammer magazine. It was the record that confirmed Slipknot as metal’s biggest band in a generation, but it also almost ended them for good.

“The cover [of Iowa] has a lot of symbolic, metaphoric solutions in it for everyone in our culture," Clown continues. "I haven’t really explained it. It’s for the end times to put the whole picture together, so I’m not going to  go into that.

"The cover is as important as the inside cover, which is the mirror I made. All these people think they know what Slipknot is, everyone wants to judge a book by its cover. But  if you’re a good parent, and you’re checking out what your child is listening to, you open it up and you realise you’re already part of it. There you are. Your twisted little fucking self. Right there in that mirror, you’re already part of this timeframe called Iowa.”

Read more about Slipknot and Iowa in the new issue of Metal Hammer, that's out now.

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