‘Iowa’: the album sessions straight out of a horror movie
No album is necessarily a picnic to get through. Some of the greatest projects ever made are about capturing the magic in the studio, and while it’s sometimes easy to set up a few mics and let the musicians play to their heart’s content, there are also many moments where people wait for lightning to strike and have to go on for days until they finally have something to work with. Even though Slipknot isn’t the first band that lends themselves well to smooth sailing, the road to making Iowa is the kind of story that feels like it’s ripped straight out of anyone’s worst nightmare.
Before we even start, though, the band already had to deal with the dreaded problem of the second album. Anyone who has seen any rock and roll documentaries will know that the second album is where everything either begins taking off or becomes the moment where a great rock band can absolutely fumble everything, so when Slipknot’s debut erupted out of nowhere with ‘Wait and Bleed’, everyone was willing to see where the masked maniacs were going next.
The short answer: right into oblivion. Throughout the entire tour for their debut, everyone had become drug-fuelled freaks and had only begun to realise what was at stake when they went into the studio. While it was a good idea to make the record with longtime nu-metal producer Ross Robinson, things weren’t exactly high-fives and smiles when getting a good take.
The goal was to go even heavier on the album, and listening to singles like ‘Left Behind’, every piece of their sound seemed to be dialled up to ten. There were some disturbing moments across their debut, but it feels like they appear once on every track on this record, which is probably down to how genuinely angry everyone was.
Aside from taking shots at each other, Robinson was known to work them down to the bone on their debut. He didn’t care whether they got hurt in the process, either. As vocalist Corey Taylor recalled in the documentary Sound City, “Working with Ross was intense as shit. We did 12 songs the first night we were there, and the whole time, he is throwing potted plants at us.”
While the foliage wasn’t off the table, the fire marshall probably wouldn’t have approved, either, since Robinson threw a lit glass candle across the room, with some of the hot wax smearing all over Clown’s face before performing one of the takes that went on the album. If we’re talking intense pieces, though, nothing could have compared to the title track.
Compared to the intense work that went into getting a good drum take, Taylor put himself through the wildest torture sequence that Ari Aster never got the chance to film, saying, “[Ross] said, ‘I want you to take yourself to a place you’re scared to go’, so I tripped naked and went into the big room and Sound City, and I did that song in two takes. It was one of the craziest experiences I ever had. I cut myself up and threw up all over myself.”
For all of the pitch-black behaviour going on behind the scenes, it’s absolutely mind-blowing that this was recorded at Sound City Studios. The same legendary studio that somehow worked magic for Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hits and Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes brought the best out of the metalheads that anyone else would have been running scared from if they saw them on the street.
But that didn’t stop the album from being one of the heaviest albums ever made. Considering the amount of labour that it took to get there, all of it seemed to pay off, looking at how intense tunes like ‘People = Shit’ or ‘My Plague’ turned out. It’s not meant to be a fun listen all the way through, and while no member of Slipknot should be forced to go through that kind of pain again when making a record, it’s either a miracle or a curse that drove Iowa out of them, depending on how you listen to the music.
