When I got home and opened my bag, a steamy cloud of bugs and dust spewed out, and I chucked most everything inside. All I could think about on the flight back to Massachusetts, as I did the post mortem for the tour, was how we could have made so many wrong moves. I felt only dejection and failure. I could imagine producing more tours, but I could not see going on the road with one again, beyond a couple of nights. Though I’d enjoyed being on the road earlier in my career, being on Tattoo the Earth had sucked. I was kicking myself for having let Booth play me and was generally pissed off at everyone.

Trying to find the right spot for the tattoo artist’s tents at each show was like NASA trying to figure out where to safely land a space probe on Mars. Ronnie and Naomi walked the venues looking for the perfect spot that would keep the artists in the shade the longest (sunset could be unbearable). Unfortunately, it was over 100 degrees at our first Texas stop at the Far West Rodeo in San Antonio, and no amount of planning could make that okay. We added additional standing air conditioners and fans to the artist tents, but it was unbearably hot with the sun beating down, and dry and dusty; the ground was so baked it had giant cracks in it.

Of all the venues on the tour, the World Golf Dome in Bridgeview took the dubious prize as the most alternative. We put a summer festival in an indoor golf driving range, and everything about it just sucked. The venue was a pressurized dome, so load-in took forever because we needed to pause in a narrow hallway with each load of equipment, repressurize, and then head through the next door. We made triple sure that the pyro guys didn’t set up because I could see them blowing the dome right off the place. The venue was surreal once people were inside, and the bands started playing on both stages; it was a steaming hot, cacophonous mess. I had a thought to go up to the second level and hit golf balls into the crowd, but it seemed like too much effort.

Of all the stress-inducing events that made Portland so chaotic, the most traumatic experience was having to take a shower in the jockey locker room after the show. Like the unprepared kid at camp, I had forgotten shower shoes, soap dish, and just about everything I would need on the road. Horse racing wasn’t in season, and it looked like everyone had literally abandoned the place after the last race. Betsy kept lookout while I showered, the nozzle, at its highest angle, pointed directly at my chest. I used a dozen towels to lay on the ground, and hopscotched around like in an action movie trying not to make contact with the floor (Fran had to shower in one of the horse stalls, side-stepping manure, which put my own traumatic experience into perspective).

Sometimes when I would pitch the idea for Tattoo the Earth, I would tell people that my vision of it was so real that I could close my eyes, stand in it, and describe it in detail. I could see it clearly, right from the first moment I had the idea: all the sights, sounds, and smells of it all the way down to my bones. Now I was actually standing smack in the middle of our inaugural show, and while it looked, sounded, and smelled like I’d imagined, it felt nothing like I thought it would. However it went—and there were no guarantees we would get through it in one piece financially or physically—I did feel a sublime sense of accomplishment. I had gone from being one of a million bullshitters hustling some fantastical idea to someone who had seen it through and made it happen.

At the end of 1999, Steve Richards, Slipknot’s manager, and Sharon Osbourne, the wife of Ozzy Osbourne and producer of Ozzfest, had lunch in Los Angeles and agreed that Slipknot would headline the second stage on Ozzfest 2000. They shook on it. Sharon Osbourne had already become one of the biggest players in music by then and was known to be ruthless. She had resuscitated Ozzy’s career in the 1980s after he got fired from Black Sabbath, stealing him from her own father’s management company. Sharon’s father Don Arden was a legend in the music business in England (he managed Little Richard, Small Faces, and Black Sabbath) and was known to be a cutthroat character. But Sharon took him on, and Ozzy’s solo career and Ozzfest were proof of her skill in developing talent.

My gallbladder was the second non-essential organ I’d lost in the past few years—my appendix went first—and I felt more mortal knowing I was half a lung and a kidney from being in deep shit. The surgery was successful, I felt better immediately, and I started to put some weight back on. I wasn’t sure how much more I could do for Tattoo the Earth, or if it would even make a difference. Sean, Betsy, and I had dinner, and I asked them what they thought we should do next, and their response was a resounding “How should we know?” I had been driving the project since the start, with clear vision and purpose, and no one ever doubted my strategy. But I was starting to doubt it, and doubt myself and the idea, and I felt totally alone.

The end of my first attempt to launch Tattoo the Earth coincided with my annual February depression, and I had some dark nights of the soul. Rationally and intellectually, I knew my idea was good, and I knew I had a chance to pull it off. But in the depths of that depression I felt like the whole thing was folly, and that I was embarrassing myself running around the world on a losing proposition. Just as I sensed that much of the euphoria I was feeling wasn’t real, I knew from lugging my depression around my entire life that I just needed to ride the episode out and to try not make any major decisions or send an ill-advised email while it was happening. Doing a project with depression is like running a race with weights on your legs; it takes twice as much energy to get to the same place.