Slipknot have, at long last, confirmed the identity of the percussionist referred to among fans as Tortilla Man, who has been with the band since 2019.
It’s long been speculated that behind the mask was Michael Pfaff, a bandmate of Slipknot’s Shawn Crahan (Clown) in his side project, Dirty Little Rabbits. The band even accidentally confirmed it in 2020. Well, now we know for sure. Earlier today, the band announced a Reddit AMA with a photo of Pfaff in costume, holding a sign that read “I am Michael Pfaff”.
In the AMA itself – which you can read here – Pfaff actually answers quite a few questions about keeping his identity relatively secret over the past couple of years. In one response, he talks about the challenge of keeping it under wraps early on, writing: “It was pretty hard. These days everybody is on the internet and has a phone….you could tell a person at the grocery store and the next thing you know it’s on the internet. I flew to LA twice before my wife even knew.”
Pfaff was also asked how he reacted to following the journey by fans and media to uncover the identity of Tortilla Man prior to it being formally revealed. “It was the best,” he replied. “Watching it all unfold was amazing. The theories, the detectives. Amazing.”
When asked what the moment was that Pfaff “no longer felt like the new guy in the band and felt like you were in and actually [part] of the band”, he replied, “today”.
In other Slipknot news, frontman Corey Taylor recently confirmed that the band’s new album is completely recorded and about halfway through the mixing process. With that in mind, Taylor added that he hoped the follow-up to 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind would be arriving in around two or three months’ time.
