SLIPKNOT

It was a Friday afternoon in the spring of 1999 when the office phone rang just around 5 pm. The lady on the other end introduced herself as Lynda from Roadrunner Records in New York. My first reaction was to ask why she was still at work, after all, it was 8 pm in NYC. Well, lucky for us that she was in fact still at work, making her last call of the day to us, t42! She filled me in on a band called Slipknot which they recently signed and that she is looking for a design team that could handle the album art. I recall that she didn’t know too much about this band yet, but that they are from Des Moines, Iowa, and that they wear coveralls and ‘weird’ masks. She was going to write up a ‘briefing’ for us and would send it by mail the following week. The handwritten letter read as follows in part: “What we are looking for: Fucked up, scratched up, blurred out, smeared, beaten, violent, frenetic, intense color, blown out, and really fucked up. But we don’t want anything too offensive.” How is that for a briefing? This sounded like a really exciting challenge and we were ready to jump into this project. Luckily the band was still in L.A. finishing the recording so we were able to meet with a few of the guys, one of them being ‘Clown,’ with whom we hit it off and struck a creative yet intense alliance for several years. As we were still early in our career, this presented itself as an amazing opportunity to work with a new band where nothing in terms of the graphic aspect was determined, except the band’s logo. We were pushed into uncharted territory but it felt really exciting and we knew we were onto something. Back in those days, it was common to also produce a lot of physical promo material, from flyers to posters, cassettes, promo CDs, etc. It was a true guerilla marketing style, all hands-on, take-it-to-the-people mentality. This of course also was due to the internet not being really developed as well as it is today.

Judging by the feedback we still get to this day, it does appear that these two first albums still stand the test of time. And needless to say, that Friday afternoon in the spring of 1999 was a pivotal point in our career. Slipknot put us on the map!

Our friendly relationship with several of the guys in the band lead us to work on Stone Sour’s debut album. The band is fronted by Corey Taylor, the singer of Slipknot. We spent a full day going around all kinds of odd and sometimes slightly creepy locations in the band’s hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. I insisted on a black and white photo theme, stark and eerie. Ken Schles out of New York was the perfect photographer for that job.