Shawn “Clown” Crahan co-founded Slipknot with Joey Jordison and the late Paul Gray, and was the one that suggested wearing masks. Before their first show, on Halloween 1995, when the question came up of what they were going to wear on stage, Crahan produced a mask he’d bought in the mall earlier, annoying his girlfriend in the process by spending the money he was meant to buy her lunch with.
“A few of them were like, ‘No fucking way. You can’t be the only guy wearing some stupid mask’,” he later recounted. “So I said, ‘I really don’t care what you think, this is who I am and this is what I’m going to do.’”
Crahan ended up enjoying the mask enough to name his label, Big Orange Clown Records, after it, and the mask idea turned out to really work well for Slipknot. Outside of the band, Crahan has directed videos for Hollywood Undead and Motionless In White, and in 2015 released his debut movie, Officer Downe.