The number 7 is pretty versatile. It can be overlooked and taken for granted, as in the 7 days of the week. It can be a childhood memory, like the 7 Dwarfs. It could even be your drinking buddy, like Jack Daniel's Old No.7 Whiskey...OK, so that was a stretch. But when it comes to guitar playing, 7 is nothing short of brutal, and no I'm not talking about that extra string some people use, I'm talking about Mick Thompson of SLIPKNOT. Mick and I had a little chat that covered a bunch of topics which included Halloween costumes, fan sites, The Houdini Mansion, MUSHROOMHEAD, and most importantly, why you should never ever piss him off (no, he won't kill you, but it'll be damn close to death). Mick was cool and very straightforward, and his answers to some of our questions are full of lines that could become classic quotes instantly. Go ahead and read it, and then take a ride over to the mall and look around, I bet your perspective of the food court will change as well! 

Paragon Rob: First question is something I’ve always wondered: when you have to write a song with 4 or 5 people it could be difficult to agree and organize things, how much harder is it when there are 9 people with 9 ideas and opinions? 

Mick Thompson: Well you know, it really isn’t, because we still write like we’re a normal band. It’s basically all guitars, bass, drums. In the old days, Corey would sit upstairs because it was, well, too loud for him – singers, I guess ::laughs:: – so he’d sit upstairs with a legal pad. He still writes all his lyrics with a ballpoint pen in a legal pad, but while he’s listening to us play. Like he’ll be upstairs, and we’ll run through it or whatever, we’ll assemble the parts, and he’ll even end up changing lyrics based on the fact that we decided, nah, we don’t like the direction. Like, ‘that chorus was kind of like, whatever. It wasn’t quite hitting like the way we wanted it to. It didn’t flow to this next part like we wanted it to, and it’s all a bit tedious, whatever, it’s gone.’ And we would come up with something different. He would have already even a vocal melody. The way he writes his lyrics is really strange. If you ever read along and listen to his vocal patterns, it’s funny how he fuses those words into that pattern and still makes it come off in a nice, flowing manner, and it doesn’t sound convoluted. His approach is very unique, much to his credit. We did some of the record in the Houdini Mansion but the majority was written in our bass player’s basement (our other two records had been written in Clown’s basement) so Corey would just be sitting upstairs, at like the dinner table, with a pad of paper and a pen, and he would just hear what we were doing downstairs. And that’s what I’ve always said, is the first thing is the right thing. Whatever first comes to you musically when you’re hearing something, you’re inspired by something, usually is correct. If you go back and try to revise, a lot of times if we have a song that’s taken us any more than one practice to write it, it’s just not right, it’s just not happening. So, it’s really easy actually. Joey will have a riff, Paul will have a riff, he’ll have a starting point, or I’ll have something, and then we just kinda roll with it. Things tend to flow, and they find themselves then and there, really. And then we’ll add stuff later. Sometimes things will be started from a percussion thing that Shawn might have or whatever, and it’ll just inspire things to go from there. But yeah, we’ve never really butted heads, we’ve got Sid and Craig and Shawn and Chris that add extra stuff, but it doesn’t make it tough at all. 

PR: When you are with the same bunch of guys for months on end touring and writing and recording, people are bound to lock horns every now and then. Have there been any major fights that really stand out in your mind that you may have had with other members? 

MT: Major? No, never. Never been anything major. Little shit. I mean, obviously everyone’s idiosyncrasies start to grate on your nerves when you’re on a bus with someone or you’re in a dressing room with them every single day, but I dunno, I’m the oldest of four, I understand how that works. If you have little brothers and a little sister, and they piss me off, sometimes I wanna kill them. Sometimes I just wanna take them to the edge of death and let ‘em live, you know what I mean, ::laughs:: just suffer! But at the end of the day, that’s family, and you don’t fuck with family. There’s a love there that is just much greater than any sort of temporary annoyance you might have with someone. And at the core, we all fuckin' love and respect each other. Do we get pissed off? Of course, it’s only natural, especially when you’re forced to be in close quarters with people like that constantly. Yeah, I mean, there’s never any fights. Blood’s never been spilled. 

PR: It’s no secret that bands don’t eat very well when they’re on the road. The healthier stuff that your body needs to function isn’t always readily available. What do you find yourself stuffing your face with the most when you’re traveling between gigs? 

MT: ::Laughs:: Anytime we’re out like on a real tour, we have catering. And catering tends to be, I mean, it’s like fine dining every day, especially if we’re carrying our own catering. You can have basically any real gourmet food. Obviously our first couple tours, it was all fuckin' cheeseburgers and whatever you bought at the truck stop when the driver stops to refuel. So yeah, we’ve seen that. Every day you get your dressing room rider, so you’ve got a deli tray and fruit tray and vegetables, bullshit like that, but a whole host of cheesy poofs and cookies and shit too. I really don’t hit that stuff on the road. I try to eat well. The show that we do is pretty crazy. It’s a workout for an hour and half a day, almost like Tae Bo or something, ::laughs:: so it’s good to keep the bad shit out. I just made an order here a couple days ago of various body building supplements and shit. You need a good multi-vitamin, yadda yadda, because you can’t necessarily always eat great, and sometimes you only get to eat once or twice a day, if it’s close to a show. If you’ve got four hours before a show, don’t dare put anything in your stomach. It’ll just come right back up once you start playing. 

PR: I read that one of your previous jobs was being at a fast food restaurant, but I heard that it didn’t last very long. What happened with that? 

MT: If it was on the Internet, it’s total bullshit. I worked at a Hardee’s frickin' restaurant. It was my first job when I was 14, I was there for 2 weeks, but I can’t recall ever having said that to anyone, ever. ::Laughs:: This is the first time I’ve ever actually admitted it. 

PR: Yeah, it was on www.black-goat.com 

MT: Oh, no, no. It’s unfortunate, all of that shit is just total bullshit. I look at all the fan sites, and I appreciate that people care enough to dedicate a website, but unfortunately, the stuff that you read on there is 99% incorrect. Like everything else you read on the Internet. ::laughs:: 

PR: The band’s sound on the new album is something slightly different than the past 2 albums, and dare I say, almost more mature. There are a lot of mellower sounds on the album along with the signature thrashing that people expect. What prompted this change? 

MT: Well, every day you change. Every day, you’ve seen more, you’ve done more, you’re moving somewhere else, and when you have a bunch of people in the band, I guess that hastens that a little bit. Plus we had like 2 ½ years off, so it’s a logical progression, I think. Nothing was planned, nothing was calculated. It wasn’t like, “Hey, let’s do this.” In fact, the acoustic stuff that we put on the record, we had no intent of even putting on the record. We recorded it and it was just kind of like, yeah whatever, we’re here; and we lived at the studio, so we had the ability to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted to. And it was recorded, but none of us thought it was actually going to be put on the record, and we started going, “Well maybe we should.” And I’m happy with it. And that’s like all our records have been. When we get together and write, it’s whatever comes out of us at that time. It’s what you get. Our second record was more mean. I’m all about playing fast, grinding stuff. Not everyone in the band is, but even those who weren’t so into that kind of stuff, still after touring and getting screwed around, you’re always screwed around by your label and by your management and by lawyers, everyone’s got their hands in your pockets, you’re getting pissed off living on a bus together at all times, stuff like that, a lot of bands’ second albums tend to be kind of dark. And I think that’s probably why. It’s just basically what comes out as a product of your life, which is funny because that’s what people have asked me, like, “How is it that you guys can manage to still have any sort of fuel for anger?” Dude, walk down the street. If something doesn’t piss you off, I don’t know where you live, ::laughs:: but I can’t pretty much go out and get in my car and look at the neighbors and just the fact that they exist pisses me off. Shit, you wanna get pissed off, go to the mall! ::laughs:: Sometimes I go and get really bad Chinese because I like to roll the dice with salmonella. ::laughs:: I’ll sit in the fuckin' food court and just laugh. The parade of idiots, fuckin' funny. So yea, I go to my local Wal-Mart. ::laughs:: The never-ending source of negative inspiration; you basically just gotta walk out your front door. Success doesn’t mellow you out. I don’t have a personal assistant and I don’t get massages every day. I go to mall to piss myself off, so the mean music ::laughs:: will continue. But there’s a beautiful side too. I don’t know anyone who plays the guitar that doesn’t also own an acoustic. There’s tons of stuff we’ve done like that that the world will never hear. It’s actually kind of a fluke that it even came out on this record, because like I said, it wasn’t our intent. We thought it was just too good to just leave for just us to hear. There’s even other stuff that we recorded that the world’s never heard, and probably won’t, but never say never, I guess. 

PR: During one of the Red Carpet Interviews that are done at The Grammys, Chris had told one of the reporters that you guys may be working on a new album after this tour. How much thought has already gone into the style of the songs or the overall sound of a new album? 

MT: We don’t ever think about what we’re going to do. We get together and then whatever comes out, comes out, and that’s the way we’ve done all three records. Our first one, obviously we had a few years together to amass a bunch of songs. After that, you’re kind of under pressure writing stuff. Still, the first few days it’s a little bit weird when you start writing stuff, but you eventually ease into it. Don’t try to force anything, and we don’t. We don’t have a plan either. We’re not like, “Let’s do this, we want to sound like this, we want to accomplish this.” It doesn’t even happen that way. We just start playing shit, throw stuff out there, whatever becomes of it, becomes of it. But yeah, when we’re done touring, which will probably be September--latest will probably be November, I dunno, I think we’re set up right now through September--we’ll take a month or two off, and then start getting together in the basement, writing songs again. 

PR: Will you guys continue the trend of having new masks for every album? 

MT: Well we haven’t really. There have been changes from album to album. I had my original one all the way through until this tour, this album. 

PR: You guys ever think of fucking with your fans and wearing happy smiley-faced masks at random times during your tours? Just to add a little element of surprise? 

MT: No, actually, I suggested on Halloween a few years ago that we needed like banana hammock underwear made black with our number on the crotch ::laughs:: and we just go out in that, no mask, no nothing. Because there are fan sites all trying to put up unmasked pictures. You know how many of those pictures aren’t actually even people in the band? A lot of them that are attributed to being Chris, a couple that are supposed to be Shawn, whatever, Sid, that’s just some dude. Kids believe that stuff. So anyway, I was talking about that, just going out wearing a banana hammock with your number on it, ::laughs:: and fuckin' no mask at all, fuckin' throw down like we normally do, and leave. I was like, these people would shit. And I think we were in the Meadowlands or something in NJ, and it was a big show right around Halloween, and people dress up for Halloween and we would dress down. No, I mean, we don’t ever really think about fucking with people. Basically, that again is creativity, you can’t do the same thing for very long without getting bored, you need to do something different. You kind of need to keep changing up to keep things interesting even for yourself. If we were still wearing the exact same stuff that we originally made ourselves here at home, way before we even had a record deal, I don’t know, I couldn’t see still using the exact same thing. I look back at that, and I see pictures, and I say, “Man, that was fuckin' old shit.” ::laughs:: Man, we’ve evolved and grown a bunch, I’m so glad. Things change in little steps but over the course of years, you look back and it really seems kind of foreign. Things are always going to advance and progress. 

PR: There was an incident not too long ago at a MUSHROOMHEAD concert where they came out imitating your masks and basically bashing you guys while their fans chanted some insults. I don’t wanna open any sealed wounds but would you care to comment on that? 

MT: Do they have a record deal anymore? I don’t think they do, and I suppose any way you can get your name out there in the press is probably a good thing. I just think it’s really funny. It doesn’t matter what you look like on stage. You’re a fuckin' musician, you write music, you record music, and people listen to the music that you recorded. Play their CD, play our CD, if you like them both, cool. If you like one over the other, cool. Their whole thing was they were pissed off because apparently they tried to get signed to Roadrunner and we’d already been signed to Roadrunner at the time because I remember we were doing our record. We had signed in early ’98, we recorded the record in late August to November of ’98 and it came out in summer of ’99. While we were making our record, Monte Conner said, “Yeah check this out. This band sent some shit to us. They wear masks too.” Didn’t think a thing of it; big fuckin' deal, we’re not the first, we’re not the last, so what? But he just thought it was interesting. But apparently from their standpoint, we stole their idea. Well actually, it wasn’t your idea, there are plenty of other bands that did the same kind of shit in the past. You bring something new to the table, if so, cool, if not, well, I think things tend to weed themselves out. I really couldn’t give a shit. There are lots of different people doing different things on this Earth and we all seem to coexist. I know that they did that. People tell me things, people email me pictures. If that’s what you’re trying to do to get your name out there, I don’t know why you would do it. Someone told me they didn’t have a record deal anymore. I can’t confirm that, I don’t pay attention, I don’t really care. I take care of my own shit and the rest of the world can kinda fuck off. 

PR: I was debating whether or not to ask you about it, because I didn’t want to go and give them the publicity. 

MT: Well, exactly. And that says another thing. The only reason they would do that, because I know they don’t want a fist fight because I almost went to jail a few years ago after some shit went down first time we ever played in Cleveland and I’m like, “Well, I don’t think they wanna go there.” And I can only imagine. Sour grapes, really, I don’t know. Personally, if there was some other band doing the same kinda thing we were doing, and they were a lot more successful, fuck it. That’s even what I said before about them, I mean, shit, if you think we stole your idea, well, first of all, we didn’t, we’ve been doing this since 1995, they’ve been doing it since 1994, well big deal. Never heard of ‘em, never seen ‘em, whatever, big fuckin' deal. In fact their entire deal may have even been because of our success. Right after a band starts to get big, every fuckin' agent, every person working at a label, is out looking for the next whatever it happens to be. There were A&R people scouring our city thinking, “Okay, well if these guys sound like this, and they’re from here, then what else is there?” And, well, nothing. ::laughs:: But there were a bunch of A&R people coming to check out bands from Des Moines, which has never happened before, because we were successful. So I’m like, hey, if anything it probably helped them out. I’m sure that there are a lot of our fans that probably bought their record just to see what it was like. Big deal. More power to them, but sorry if I’ve never given a shit. They said a lot of shit in the past--then again, no one’s ever come up and said a word to my face, I don’t anticipate that happening anytime soon--but to me, it was fuckin' over and done with, big deal. But yeah, and then I saw pictures recently of that, and that’s really grasping at straws, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do to get your name out there. 

PR: The mansion that the band stayed in while recording Vol. 3, is said to be haunted. What were some of the weirder things that happened while you guys were there? 

MT: Oh, fuck. ::laughs:: Well for me, there were like these doors that opened to a crawl space on the side of my room, and they would never stay shut, even if you put something in front of it. 

PR: Oh, that’s a little creepy. 

MT: A little bit, yeah. ::laughs:: So I finally gaff taped it shut and it stayed. Different weird shit: If you stood in a room, and you know that someone just walked in, you turn like you’re going to say something to them, and then no one there kinda deal; also, a lot of times, in my peripheral vision, I would see something like move, and then when you look at it, you don’t see anything there, you know, nothing extremely distinct. 

PR: Just stuff enough to get on nerves. 

MT: That’s not enough to say, “Hey, this was going on,” but I never experienced that before I was there and I never experienced it since I left. It just seemed to be a little bit odd. Well, the first night I was there, I had a practice amp in my room, I got my shit all set up, I turn the practice amp on and I’m sitting there playing, and it must’ve been like 4:30 in the morning, in my room, by myself, and my amp went dead. It was just quiet, so the first thing I do is check the cable and whatnot, just makes sense. Then, that wasn’t it. Looked over and the volume on my practice amp, while it had been low, was now all the way down. I had to physically turn it back up. And as soon as I realized that that was the case, I’m like, “Okay…” ::laughs:: I shut it off, put my guitar down, and I’m like, “I’m gonna fuckin' go to bed now.” And that was basically it for me. I’ve heard different things from different people, but I was not there so I cannot corroborate their story, and I’m certainly not one to make a ghost story into something more if it can be explained. I wouldn’t want to blow something up that wasn’t real. You’re gonna have to hear that out of that person’s mouth. That was my two things, really. You definitely got a weird vibe going in there. 

PR: Is there any truth to the rumor that you once had a solo album out? 

MT: No. I played on a friend’s band’s record, like a blues/rock thing. I played two tracks on that, on the Tyler Thompson Band. I had a record deal years ago, actually, like 2000, 2001, to do my own solo shit and it was through London Fire and then they went under. Also, if you look on all the fan sites, it says what gear I use, that’s all bogus. I don’t own half the shit that’s on there, never owned it in my life. They’ve got it listed that I use an Ibanez 4-something. I never owned a 400 series Ibanez in my life. I’ve owned a bunch of 5 series, and some 7’s, and now I own an assload of them. But it’s various bits of gear, like a 290 power amp Boogie, I never owned a 290, I have a 295 from ’86, never had a 290, totally different amp. I haven’t played a Marshall JMP1 tube preamp since 2000, I think, during the Tattoo the Earth Tour. I’m going to do my own signature amp. It gets a little frustrating. It’s cool that people fuckin' care, and even obsess, about what you do, enough to spend the time to make a website. I taught guitar for 3 ½ years, so it’s like, I’m a stickler for accuracy when it comes to anything music, especially with gear. And then when people are like, “Yeah, I went out and bought this because I saw that you had that,” I’m like, “No, never had that. And I definitely would’ve steered you away from that in the first place. I wish you would’ve emailed me first, I would’ve set you straight to begin with.” So I mean, it’s a little disheartening sometimes. 

PR:Any last words or plugs for our readers? 

MT: Uh, no. ::laughs:: 

PR: ::Laughs:: I get that every so often. 

MT: Yeah, I get that, but I don’t think of what I’m going to say. I know I’m getting an interview, but I don’t think to make sure I bring out whatever points. I just fuckin' take it as it comes, but whenever they hit me with that at the end, I’m like, “Wow, I’m in responding mode.” Typically, if someone has to have a quote for something, I just let them know a great piece of advice, “Don’t shit where you eat.”