Clown Exposure: Tricky

One night in the late '90s, before Slipknot had a vocalist named Corey Taylor, we went with an ex-publicist friend to a Tricky concert in New York. At the time, the trip-hop artist was at his creative and commercial peak and conjured a heavy-lidded energy onstage that was nothing short of mesmerizing. Even though he was playing a large club, when I narrowed my eyes into slits, it felt like we were on an open field in the Amazon watching some sort of arcane occult ritual.

The experience might have had as much to do with the hydroponic weed we were smoking as it did with the tribal music, but with Tricky as witch doctor, and the smell of recently bleached skulls burning our nostrils, we were completely out of our heads -- compelled to flee like frightened rabbits, yet unable to move, consumed by the rapturous sound and desperate to see what kind of wicked mojo the artist would summon next.

Also, we were convinced that if we tried to leave and didn't exit unobtrusively, we would be singled out and recruited as sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl or some cryptic British deity like Brian Jones. Or worse, we'd be forced to go up on stage and dance. So we stood rigid and barely breathed, as if our pounding hearts would give us away over the flow of pulsing electronic beats and sedated vocals.

A decade later, I had almost forgotten the awesome, terrifying power I felt that night. Then, Slipknot percussionist Shawn Crahan emailed us this week's post for Clown Exposure, and the scenario jumped into perspective like a gargoyle-decorated castle in an 3-D View-Master. It seems Tricky still has the sinister juju, as Crahan recently discovered one night recently when his side project, Dirty Little Rabbits, landed a gig opening for the trip-hop pioneer. Since he'd had been a longtime Tricky fan, he brought his camera along and captured the magic.

"The moment I took the picture, he was just in it," Crahan tells Noisecreep. "He was reaching up in the sky and almost singing by acting. He was relentlessly moving his arm around and insinuating verse without singing. He had just come off a chorus and was just reaching while the band was jamming."

At first glance, the photo might appear to be a complete blur, but if you swirl your eyes around the image or even squint a little, the scene swims into focus. "The bass player is over on the left," Crahan explains. "Somebody who works for the band is in the back and the drums are over on the right. Then there's Tricky in the middle doing his thing."

Of course, the shot would have been a lot clearer had Crahan used a flash, but that's not Clown's style. He prefers to force viewers to use their imaginations and fill in the blanks when something's not obvious.

"It's a time exposure, so I'm moving a little bit and he's moving," Crahan says. "But I love stuff like this. And when I sit around with people that communicate like me, we can talk more about what we see in this than we can about something that's lucrative and linear."

Moreover, Clown's surreal photography reveals ideas and imagery to the viewer that might otherwise go unseen or unfelt. "Tricky's face is over there to the right in the middle. And if you go just a little bit to the left and up and use your imagination, there's this Nosferatu face in there -- his nose and mouth and pointed ear is there," Clown says. "And if you really use your imagination, even the blurry thing at the very top looks like a face. So, Tricky is throwing shapes.

"We say it all the time as musicians -- especially drummers. 'I'm gonna go out and throw some shapes.' And he's doing just that. He's summoning something and revealing his soul behind the music. And I just felt that because of our connection, I just had to put him down the wormhole and give him to the masses.