The site they chose was unconventional, to say the least. Tucked away at the end of a treacherous one-lane dirt road that wound for miles up into Solstice Canyon, the ranch had once belonged to the owners of the Stetson Hat Company, who used it as a hunting retreat. The main house, built in the early 1900s, “looked like a shack,” Davis says.“It was surrounded by trees,” remembers Shannon Larkin, the current drummer for metal band Godsmack, who played drums at Indigo with Amen and Vanilla Ice. “You felt like you were out in the middle of the woods.” The local wildlife visited frequently, which wasn’t always welcome; during the recording of Slipknot’s eponymous debut album, a skunk sprayed right outside the window of the studio’s lone working shower. “Slipknot’s whole recording session just stunk,” remembers co-founder and percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan.“We’d get done with the track all sweaty, and walk outside to this beautiful, flooded with light, perfect [place] where it’s hard to be all angry punk-rock,” says drummer Shannon Larkin. “It was a balance, a perfect balance.”
Robinson insists that his approach came from a place of love, and wanting his musicians to deliver their best work. “The purpose was to be beautiful and absolutely on fire,” he says. “And if I felt the fire was going down I would— rrrah!” He gives a little roar, punctuated by a nervous, self-deprecating laugh. “People have turned my thing into silly stories of violence, or something like that, to make it sound better, but my intention was more life, more fire.”Under Robinson’s guidance, the sessions for Korn’s debut album went to some pretty dark places. Davis, the band’s singer and primary lyricist, preferred to write songs that let him “yell about the horrible childhood he’d lived through,” guitarist Brian “Head” Welch wrote in his 2007 memoir, Save Me From Myself. And his bandmates encouraged him: “We all felt connected in some way because most of us shared the same sort of pain when we were kids,” Welch wrote. “The pain of being rejected, the pain of being picked on, the pain of not understanding our fathers’ love for us. Every one of us had similar issues with our dads when we were kids…It felt good to be angry and vent through our heavy music.”Davis’ exploration of childhood trauma reached a harrowing peak on “Daddy,” the album’s closing track. Over a rumbling, menacing groove, Davis describes the experience of being sexually abused by a family friend at a young age (not his own father, he later insisted, despite the title). He repeats the song’s chorus—“I scream / No one hears me / It hurt / I’m not a liar”—until he’s audibly sobbing, gasping for breath between verses. For the track’s final three minutes, Davis is a blubbering mess, cursing and crying uncontrollably. His bandmates, playing along live in the studio, weren’t sure how to respond to their singer’s breakdown. “They were all looking back to the window at us going, ‘What should we do?’” Agnello remembers. “And we all just said, ‘Keep playing, keep playing!’”“People have turned my thing into silly stories of violence, or something like that, to make it sound better, but my intention was more life, more fire.”
Though in later years Davis would sometimes, only half-jokingly, call Robinson a “sadist,” he credits the producer with helping him bring so much raw emotion to his vocals. “He just had a way of getting in your head and really getting you inspired and wanting to do something great,” he says. “It wasn’t fun. But that’s how Ross rolls.”“He just had a way of getting in your head and really getting you inspired and wanting to do something great,” Davis says. “It wasn’t fun. But that’s how Ross rolls.”
It didn’t help that nearly everyone at the ranch was getting high—with the notable exception of Robinson, a health fanatic whose substance of choice was wheatgrass shots. Bands had been following in John Barrymore’s shambling footsteps at Indigo since the beginning; booze and weed were omnipresent, and both Welch and Davis admitted to doing meth while recording Korn’s debut. During 1998’s marathon sessions, “we all did drugs and drank—no secret,” Amen drummer Shannon Larkin says.Even the staff at Indigo “did a lot of partying,” Agnello admits—including the boss, Kaplan, who would eventually join Alcoholics Anonymous. While the studio team prided itself on its work ethic, the long hours blurred the lines between business and pleasure. “We’d take a break and I would go run off to the bathroom and do a line,” Johnson says. “We always kept it together. But we weren’t angels.”Despite the drug use and the scheduling headaches, “everybody did what they should,” Slipknot’s Crahan says. “Everybody made great art. Everybody got out alive. We all did what we had to do. But I always hated the label for doing that to all of us.”From a sheer technical standpoint, Slipknot’s self-titled debut album may be Ross Robinson’s greatest achievement. The masked nine-piece band from Iowa had two guitarists, three percussionists, a turntablist, and a sampler/keyboardist. Wrangling all those parts into one frenetic whole was a huge challenge—especially the layers of drums, all recorded without click tracks, and manually spliced together on two-inch tape. “We had tape everywhere,” Agnello recalls. “On the floor. Draped over the machines.”“I was going insane,” Casey Chaos says. “Like Shining type shit … just covered the walls with blood and shit and scraps of paper.”
“It was separate from the rest of the world," Robinson says of the albums he recorded at Indigo Ranch. "And then there were bands that would take the formula, and it didn’t feel authentic.”
Many of the musicians and engineers who passed through Indigo Ranch cleaned up their acts, as well. Chuck Johnson left the ranch around the same time Robinson did and got sober in 2004. After a stint in rehab and joining AA, Larkin got on the wagon in early 2016. “We all went through shit,” says Korn’s Davis, whose entire band is now clean. “I got sober first. I’m coming up on my 20 [years] next month.” (After Davis was interviewed for this article, his estranged second wife, Deven Davis, died on Aug. 17 of unspecified causes. On Aug. 23, Jonathan released a statement about her death in which he said, “She had a very serious mental illness and her addiction was a side effect.”)One of Kaplan’s final acts, before he passed, was to bequeath the name Indigo Ranch to the Beach House Treatment Centers, a group of sober living facilities in Malibu. The new Indigo Ranch, located ten miles down the coast from the original, is a Tudor-style house set on seven acres with a swimming pool and tennis courts—and a recording studio, accessible only to the facility’s residents. “We feel we can connect with the clients through the music,” says co-founder Charlie Bentz, who became close with Kaplan though AA.Davis, who lost touch with Kaplan over the years, is pleased to learn about his legacy. “That’s cool. I’m glad he got sober. That’s good. He liked to party a little bit, but who didn’t? We were in rock ’n’ roll.”Andy Hermann is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter."He liked to party a little bit, but who didn’t?" Davis says. "We were in rock ’n’ roll.”