COREY TAYLOR has recalled attending an early SLIPKNOT performance roughly a year before he joined the band as vocalist, describing the show as unlike anything he'd witnessed before.
Speaking on Josh Scherer's YouTube channel, Mythical Kitchen, Taylor described watching SLIPKNOT play at the Safari Club in Des Moines on April 4, 1996, when the band's lineup still included original vocalist Anders Colsefni alongside percussionist Shawn Crahan, drummer Joey Jordison and bassist Paul Gray. "It was psychotic. I'd never seen anything like it," Taylor said of the performance.
According to Taylor's account, the band opened with an extended intro before entering the room from the back of the crowd, with members crawling and climbing their way toward the stage. Crahan performed a flip as part of the entrance, and Jordison kicked off a wall of feedback with the full band launching into the song simultaneously. Taylor said the chaotic, theatrical presentation immediately set SLIPKNOT apart from anything else happening in the Des Moines scene at the time, and he came away from the show with a clear reaction: "I'm going to be the singer in this band."
At the time, Taylor was fronting STONE SOUR, a separate project built around a more conventional hard rock sound, while SLIPKNOT was still finding its footing with Colsefni handling lead vocal duties alongside percussion. Taylor described the appeal of SLIPKNOT's approach as its willingness to fuse disparate elements into something new, saying the band was "taking all of these elements and kind of fusing them together" in a way that felt genuinely novel.
The mutual respect between the two Des Moines camps eventually proved decisive: within roughly a year of that Safari Club show, SLIPKNOT invited Taylor to join as vocalist, a move that reshaped both his career and the band's trajectory as it prepared to record its self-titled 1999 debut. Colsefni transitioned to a purely percussion role before eventually departing the band during the lineup changes of that period.
Nearly three decades later, Taylor's recollection offers a rare glimpse of SLIPKNOT in its rawest, pre-fame form — a band already fully committed to its chaotic identity well before major labels, masks-as-merchandise and arena tours turned that same energy into one of modern metal's defining live spectacles.