Joey Jordison was one of those rock musicians who was always in the fast lane, trying to make everything a little faster, louder and harder. As in the legendary music film “Spinal Tap”, where the amplifier can be turned up to 11. It’s just one louder. This is what it’s all about.
Only, despite the masquerade and the urge to always go one better, there was nothing ridiculous about Jordison. With the metal band Slipknot At the end of the nineties he mixed up the American underground and then the mainstream with practically no intermediate step. The band came from New Metal, which was popular at the time, but rather took a step back into really hard metal, which was not least due to Jordison, who especially dominated the bludgeoned Death Metal. Where other drummers hit a beat, Jordison’s four often landed on the drum head, which gave his playing something incredibly nervous, but at the same time a machine-like precision. One of his drum solos is legendary, for which he was strapped to a rotating platform that was then tilted 90 degrees until Jordison was practically playing against a vertical wall. If he could have, he would have played the drums on a roller coaster.
Jordison in a Jesus costume at a concert in Berlin.
(Photo: BriganiArt / imago)
The fact that Slipknot made it into the mainstream almost immediately was also due to these appearances by the group. With their orange overalls and masks, one of the band’s shows looked as if escaped inmates of an American prison had looted the set of a Stephen King film and accidentally landed on a stage during their raid. Jordison always played in a black and white mask, which made him look like a horror movie Madonna. Later he also appeared as Jesus, with a crown of thorns. It didn’t go below that. For a long time it was not clear who was hiding behind the masks, and although the names of the band members are now known, the founding members in particular, including Jordison, have always kept something mysterious.
In 2013, Jordison left Slipknot, probably not entirely voluntarily. In recent years he has struggled with severe spinal problems, but that did not prevent him from participating in half a dozen bands, including as a guitarist. If there was one thing Jordison couldn’t do, it was keep calm.
On July 26th, Jordison died at the age of 46. The cause of death is unknown.