Shawn Crahan was born on September 24, 1969. Known as Clown, the Slipknot co-founder and percussionist helped determine how the band looked as well as how it sounded. His work included designing percussion setups and directing music videos, including the 2014 clip for “The Devil In I” from .5: The Gray Chapter, which introduced a new set of masks through scenes of the members destroying their earlier personas.
Long before those images reached a worldwide audience, Crahan was a young drummer in Des Moines with interests that stretched beyond heavy metal. In a 2011 interview with Modern Drummer, he named Buddy Rich and John Bonham among his influences and singled out Van Halen’s Fair Warning as an important record. Drumming offered a physical outlet for his imagination. He described an approach involving his whole body: hitting hard, shouting and visualizing his stick passing through a cymbal. The custom percussion setups he designed for Slipknot gave that approach its own place onstage.
His friendship with bassist Paul Gray helped expand the musical possibilities. Speaking to The Independent in 2022, Crahan recalled meeting Gray through the local punk scene and discovering heavier bands through him. Their friendship grew through shared mischief and an appetite for music. With Joey Jordison joining on drums, Crahan found another collaborator willing to entertain his ideas. He remembered visiting Jordison during night shifts at a gas station, where they would trade increasingly outrageous plans for what they might do. Behind that imagination was a demanding rehearsal routine: Crahan recalled practicing six hours a day, six days a week.
The band’s visual identity developed alongside the music. In a 2001 KNAC interview, Jordison traced the masks back to Crahan arriving with his clown face, then adding one of his own. “We made the music first,” Jordison explained. Concealing their faces also changed how they presented themselves to a local scene that already knew them from other bands. The audience could hear the musicians without immediately seeing the familiar people underneath. Crahan’s mask became the starting point for an identity that the other members developed in their own directions.
Directing allowed him to work with those identities beyond the stage. For “The Devil In I,” Crahan placed the band’s transformation inside a horror narrative. In an official behind-the-scenes film released in 2014, he explained that the idea involved confronting past demons and then getting rid of them. The scenarios also drew on the members themselves: percussionist Chris Fehn chose a sequence involving birds because he feared them. The violence had a narrative purpose, making the change from one version of Slipknot to another visible.
With Day Of The Gusano, Crahan turned the camera toward the people watching. The 2017 documentary captured Slipknot’s first Mexican performance at Knotfest in December 2015, alongside stories from the audience. In an interview with Alternative Press, he recalled meeting a family who had sold their car to buy tickets for everyone. That sacrifice stayed with him as an example of what attending the show meant.
The finished film made room for those lives as well as the performance. Concert footage appeared alongside fans describing their connection to Slipknot and scenes of the musicians exploring Mexico, including a visit to Teotihuacan.
