There's no stopping the nine-headed killing machine, Slipknot. The band recently landed its first number one album with All Hope is Gone, was the star attraction of the first annual Rockstar Energy Mayhem Tour, is about to release a psychological, rain-soaked video for “Dead Memories” (co-directed by percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan) and will return from overseas at the end of the year to launch a new U.S. headline run in early 2009.
At the moment, vocalist Corey Taylor and guitarist Jim Root aren’t even thinking about ramping up their highly successful side project, Stone Sour, again because they’re too tangled up in the Knot. Yet for percussionist and visual artist Shawn Crahan (a.k.a. Clown), all things Slipknot aren’t quite enough. Oh, he’s thoroughly enjoying the tremendous ride they’re on, and he’s got no plans to bail on The Nine. But at the same time, he’s got a few other irons in the fire, and one of them is his new band Dirty Little Rabbits, which released a three-song EP Breeding in 2007 and just signed to The End Records for their upcoming material. The day before Slipknot boarded a plane to head to Japan, HeadbangersBlog.com phoned up Crahan to talk about his new baby.
Tell us about Dirty Little Rabbits.
Shawn Crahan: Dirty Little Rabbits is my new Slipknot. I’m playin’ drums, and I’m a songwriter and this is the band I’ve been waiting to be in my whole life. And it’s more of an alternative band than a metal band. It’s everything I’ve ever been into. And it’s a thought process, it’s a mindset. And this will be the band I end my life with. A lot of people don’t know I’m more or less an alternative person in art and music. I didn’t grow up obsessed with metal. But that’s most of the beauty behind Skipknot. You’ve got guys that are completely dedicated to the metal, and then you’ve got guys who never even listen to it, like me. And you come together and make this thing called Slipknot that happens to be a metal band, and that’s awesome because I always believed when I got together with my brothers that they were writing music that I never heard or felt and that’s why I went with it. And I brought the art to this music, and throughout time I developed all my musical skills and – boom -- here I am with Dirty Little Rabbits and it’s finally everything I’ve ever wanted in a band.
How did the Rabbits come together?
Basically, I was kind of feeling sorry for myself because I wanted to play drums and [Slipknot DJ] Sid [Wilson] was reaching out to me to come over and play some tracks that he was gonna send Ross Robinson. So, I went over and threw down a track for him. It was a one-taker, and I really let my soul out. And it made me feel really good about myself and about the music, and it stirred up all the emotions. So, the next night Sid calls me and goes, “Hey, I got this guy, you should come over here. This guy’s amazing.” And I was like, “No, man. Just do your record.” And he said, “No, you need to come over here." So I went over, and I heard the guy was a drummer and I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll play the vibraphones that he brought." And he went, “Hey, man, you want to play drums?” He wanted to play the organ, so he sat down and started playing and I started jamming on the drums, and we went to some solar system that I had never been to with anybody. All these people were jamming there, too, and I couldn’t listen to any of them. I was just listening to him. I called the guy at 8:30 in the morning the next day, and the rest is history. And the guy’s name is Michael Pfaff.
What’s so magical about your chemistry with Pfaff?
It’s the way he was throwing his shapes into my shapes. And when he was doing that behind my beats, I was like, “That’s it!!” And, when we got together, he was the first person to ever jam with me that didn’t say, “What are you doing?” He was just like, “This is what you’re doing, so I’m gonna do this.” That was it. And that’s what our music is. We each bring it to our own level. Like, I don’t struggle in what I’m writing for Rabbits because it’s all me. It just comes out of me. I revise it after we’ve jammed it, but it’s all me and I play for the song. I don’t need to play fancy fills. It’s not me as a drummer. I like to hold it down. And sometimes I get into weird areas of where I want songs to go and most people fight it. Michael didn't.
Your singer, Stella Katsoudas, has worked with Sister Soleil and is a very dramatic presence onstage. Why was she right for band?
She’s an old friend and she’s my dream of a lead singer. I always wanted to be in a band with a female lead singer because I want to represent the whole world, male and female. And she’s the best. She’s like my sister so she brings it like I bring it. You’ve got this drummer and singer to bring it and the whole rest of the band brings it as well.
You’ve recently signed a record deal with The End.
Yeah, man. I’ve waited my whole life to meet a label like The End, and it seems like, artistically, the people involved in that are almost identical to my mind, and that’s why we’re able to do this pretty easily because it’s really been developed around the art. It’s not about the music business. When we started out, we didn’t have any expectations or care what people were gonna try and do or if they understood it. There was just no will to even be a part of this industry. Then next thing you know, two years later, here I am.
When have you had time to record with the Rabbits?
I got home off the Mayhem Tour with Slipknot and went right in to making the record. We’re gonna try to release an EP in January and a full-length in April. We’ve been up at Sound Farm Studios, which is the same place the Knot recorded [All Hope is Gone]. We actually did an EP before the Knot got in there. An old friend owns the place.
How will the recordings you do with the Rabbits stand out?
It’s gonna be phenomenal because I’m employing all the old ways. I’m tired of all the new bands in the world that just go with it for the deal. We did the whole record onto tape. Anything that we could record to two-inch, we did. And it’s amazing. So we’re gonna be employing old techniques to bring back rock n’ roll. And not only will we bring it back sonically, but then we’ll play live and I think that’s what most people are into with the Rabbits because it’s way out there. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted musically. So, it’s highly energetic and out there and I’ve very excited because I often wondered if I was ever gonna have it.
What do you mean?
I remember calling Rick Rubin up once and just bellyaching a little bit about how I can’t get it done. And he more or less laughed and gave me some of the best advice of my entire career. And I can’t tell you what it was, but it wasn’t months later, boom, I took all that advice and then some from other people that I love, and here I am now with the Dirty Little Rabbits. We’ve worked so hard for two years and now we have it. We have a full length of real music that we practiced for two years and toured. We toured with Stone Sour and we got really, really big in Omaha. We had the number one most requested song, “Hello.”
Before Dirty Little Rabbits you had another band, To My Surprise. What happened to that?
[To My Surprise singer and guitarist] Brandon and I always knew from the moment we were making the record, we should never be in a band together. I would say Brandon was more at an age where he was ready to start his career, and in fairness to him, I was way overloaded with too much stuff. I was just getting out of the Iowa cycle and thrown into the Volume 3: The Subliminal Verses cycle. And he demanded we get our stuff figured out and, unfortunately, I couldn’t do it. I had to get my Slipknot stuff done for my family. I wanted it. It’s my life, and he didn’t want to wait around, and that was awesome. He made the right choice. Making a band that was going to tour was very hard. But since then, we’ve talked, and we’ll probably make music to make music, but not to do that band thing. It’s too hard for us. It wasn’t realistic to try and beat ourselves over the head to get something that was gonna go tour in the timeframe we could do it and Slipknot made it impossible. That was one of my favorite records and one of my greatest achievements. We recorded that record with [producer] Rick [Rubin] before Volume 3, and it’s a great record. It’s my life. All that feeling coming off the Iowa cycle. All that pain and that pain and all that hope and that sadness and, boom, right into To My Surprise. So that’s there and it’s good that it didn’t tour. It needed to represent what it did. But that’s the past. Now it’s all about the Rabbits.
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