Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison sadly passed away last July of an unspecified cause. He was only 46 years old. Recently, Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor was asked how he dealt with the death of his longtime friend during a Q&A session at the Mad Monster Party in North Carolina. “That’s a tough one,” Taylor said. “It hit me hard, even though I hadn’t seen him or talked to him in a very long time. And I won’t get into certain things, but I will say that it hit us all really hard. The first person that I called was Clown [Slipknot percussionist M. Shawn Crahan] to make sure he was okay. Because those guys … I can remember going down and seeing them both at the gas station that Joey worked at — like, way back in the day. And he would work the overnights. When I wasn’t working at the porn shop, I would go down. And they were always scheming; they would always sit together scheming. It’s, like, ‘I’ve got this f*cking idea. All right? We’re gonna set our faces on fire.’ And I was, like, ‘No. You’re really not gonna do that.'”
Taylor said Jordison was one of the most gifted musicians he had ever seen. “All that history and all the memories came back then. And his health was obviously part of that. And it was sad because this man was probably one of the most gifted people I’ve ever seen in my life … It was far, far too soon. And it broke my heart. Regardless of what had gone down between us, it broke my heart. It was a hard … It’s still hard to think about. I think about it now and it doesn’t seem real. So it hit us just as hard. It’s one of the reasons why we pay homage to him and Paul [Gray, late Slipknot bassist] at the end of each show — to make sure that people realize that even though he was gone, he’s still part of the family, and he always will be.”
Slipknot split with Jordison in 2013 but never revealed why. Jordison said he did not quit. The drummer previously overcame a neurological condition that affected his spinal cord. He commented on the split in 2016 saying “All I got was a stupid f*cking e-mail saying I was out of the band that I busted my ass my whole life to f*cking create. That’s exactly what happened and it was hurtful. I didn’t deserve that sh*t after what I’d done and everything I’d been through. They got confused about my health issues and obviously even I didn’t know what it was at first. They thought I was f*cked up on drugs, which I wasn’t at all. I’ve been through so many things with those guys and I love them very much. What’s hurtful is the way it went down was not f*cking right. That’s all I want to say. The way they did it was f*cking cowardly. It was f*cked up.”
