Slipknot drummer Eloy Casagrande sat down with Modern Drummer and detailed how his stage costume and mask came about.
“When we did the lines, we felt like the design of the mask was not very balanced, because we had all the information from below but we didn’t have anything on the forehead. So, ‘What are we going to do?’ ‘Let’s put like a circle in the forehead.’ But we didn’t like it. So I came with the idea of the bullet hole in my forehead.”
The rocker then recalled one of the incidents that inspired the bullet hole on the mask — an actual gun threat. “The reason why is two years ago in Sao Paulo I was walking in my neighborhood, it was 9 AM in the morning. I was going to the gym and I had my backpack with me and my phone. Two guys, each one on a motorcycle, they stopped me, and they put a gun in my head and they asked me to give them my phone and my backpack. So that was something that somehow changed a lot of inside me.”
“I don’t want to say bad things about my country because every place has dangerous environments. They can be not good for you, but sometimes in Sao Paulo, it’s not a very safe place to be, but that was the only time it happened to me. Fortunately there was a guy with a gun and he decided to not shoot so I was lucky enough,” he added.
Casagrande left Sepultura just before rehearsals for their 40th-anniversary farewell tour started. Soon after, he replaced Jay Weinberg as the drummer for Slipknot’s 25th-anniversary tour. He had previously auditioned for Slipknot, playing a 10-day audition to join the band ahead of their 2024 Here Comes the Pain tour.
In other news, Casagrande got voted the best metal drummer in the Modern Drummer’s 2024 Readers’ Poll.
