The Masked Men of Mayhem

“No jumping into the audience, no setting the stage or anyone on fire.” It’s sound check at the Hollywood Palladium, and the members of Slipknot are being given a list of do’s and don’ts by the ballroom’s management. Apparently word has gotten out about Slipknot shows.

“The promoters have been talking to each other,” says drummer Joey Jordison, who, like his bandmates, has adopted a numerical name (he is #1). “Now every time we roll into town, we get a list of what we can and can’t do.”

With every frenzied performance, the list will undoubtedly grow. Slipknot’s onstage antics invariably include one or more of the following: defecation, masturbation, setting each other on fire and beating each other up. Trips to the hospital for stitches and treatment of burns and broken bones are not uncommon during their tours, and this surrender to the primitive and the violent is helping stoke this band’s growing notoriety.

But the nine-man army of metal, thrash and hip-hop warriors is out to achieve, in their words, “world domination.” In that quest, they are used to being told what they can’t do--but they do it anyway, and it’s becoming their ticket to success.

Founding member and percussionist Shawn Calvins (a.k.a. the Clown, a.k.a. #6) doesn’t have a problem with the powers-that-be’s efforts to limit the band’s act.

“It’s actually a huge compliment,” he says. “They’re waking up. I like that they up the stakes. I like it that they found out that we set ourselves on fire onstage. I like that they are paying attention.”

Slipknot is the latest act in a contemporary strain of extreme rockers that includes Insane Clown Posse, Coal Chamber and Static-X. Slipknot boasts that it’s the hardest-hitting of this modern-rock shock wave, and there’s no doubt it’s the most commercially potent. Its album “Slipknot” has sold nearly 850,000 copies since its release a year ago, and the band is co-headlining a multi-act tour called Tattoo the Earth, which comes to the National Orange Show Events Center in San Bernardino on Aug. 12.

“People either like hot or cold. If it’s in the middle, it’s boring,” says KROQ-FM (106.7) DJ Stryker, whose evening show is where Slipknot first received airplay on the influential L.A. station. “Slipknots say whatever they want, and they don’t care what anybody thinks. They’re every 15-year-old’s dream.”

Outside the Palladium hours before show time, portions of the sold-out crowd, mostly white males in their teens and early 20s decked in Slipknot T-shirts, are already lining up. When the doors open, they rush to take spots in front of the stage.

There they will wait through two bands, weather the crushing waves of fellow fans, dodge showers of debris and duck crowd surfers until Slipknot appears. They hang on the band’s every word from beginning to end.

Slipknot affectionately refers to the fans as “maggots,” because they “feed on the energy,” in Calvins’ words.

If Slipknot addresses alienated, angry misfits struggling to find their way, the band members speak from experience. In their Des Moines hometown, the musicians found nothing but frustration while trying to express themselves in a land of many cornfields and few creative outlets. They also discovered that the more oppressed they felt, the more determined they became to make a mark.

“When you laugh at a kid for 25 years and you let him out in the world, he’s gonna have some [expletive] to work out in his head,” says Jordison. “When everyone tells you, ‘No, no, no,’ your creative forces get a little twisted and turn into something more apocalyptic than ever.”

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Slipknot was formed in September 1995 by core members Calvins, Jordison and bassist Paul Gray (#2). The band eventually grew to nine members with the arrivals DJ Sid Wilson (#0), percussionist Chris Fehn (#3), guitarist James Root (#4), sampler Craig Jones (#5), guitarist Mic Thompson (#7) and singer Corey Taylor (#8).

“Everybody freaks out that there are nine guys in the band,” says Jordison. “I didn’t want nine guys in the band; that’s too many [expletive] people! But that’s what it took to get the sound we want.”

The band recorded and released its self-produced debut album, “Mate, Feed, Kill, Repeat,” in 1996. The release drew the attention of Korn’s producer, Ross Robinson, who signed the band to his own I AM/Roadrunner Records in 1997.

Robinson entered the studio with the band to record “Slipknot,” a pummeling array of sonic sensory overload But the confrontational, attack-and-conquer lyrics and hard-driving sound are just part of what Calvins refers to as the Slipknot “concept.”

Onstage and in photos, the band members attempt to “strip their identity” by wearing identical laborers’ coveralls topped with freakish masks--a leather-faced Medusa, a wicked pig’s head, et al.

“We started wearing them at our first show in Des Moines,” Jordison says. “We had all been playing in bands for 10 years, so everybody knew who we were. When we went to do our first live show, we didn’t want to give them the pleasure [of seeing us]. It’s not about the names or the faces, it’s about the music we are creating.”

With little mainstream radio or MTV play, Slipknot has reached its fans through relentless touring. They say they are a band that must be seen in their onstage chaos to be understood.

“I try to express to people that I want them to wake up and be whoever they want to be and do whatever they want to do. Don’t be shoved in a corner, and don’t take no for an answer,” Calvins says.

While the approach of this aggressive metal force may be easily underestimated or misjudged, Slipknot isn’t a band to be denied.

Calvins feels that there is now “a strong demand for change in determining what’s right and wrong.” And he believes Slipknot is just the band to do it.

“It’s almost like there are no more laws because I feel like I’m twisting them every day,” he says. “We are no longer just pushing the envelope--we are the envelope. Catch up!”

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Tattoo the Earth, with Slipknot, Slayer, Sevendust, (HED)pe, Sepultura, others, Aug. 12 at National Orange Show Events Center, 689 S. E St., San Bernardino, 11 a.m. $30. (800) 561-2361.