There are, I suppose, worse metaphors for the state of Florida this past week than a horde of evil clowns storming our shores and threatening bloody destruction.

“There wasn’t any f---ing way a goddamn hurricane was keeping us from f---ing coming down here," Slipknot singer Corey Taylor yelled Wednesday night at Tampa’s MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre.

Same for some 14,500 anxious fans who spent the last week fretting whether Hurricane Dorian would drench out the lone Florida date of Slipknot’s Knotfest Roadshow tour. One called me Monday from Vero Beach, looking for an update on whether the show was still on. Vero Beach was, at the time, under a hurricane warning.

“I know a lot of people f---ing chickened out because they weren’t sure if the storm was going to be there,” Taylor told the crowd. “You tell those motherf---ers what they missed tonight.”

What they missed was an intense yet inclusive Slipknot show, a high-octane, percussion-fueled hurricane party led by one of the biggest metal bands on earth.

Because that’s what Slipknot is: Big. Very big. There were nine of them spread across the industrial split-level stage, all wearing their trademark jumpsuits and horror masks, racing around and smashing percussion like some Cirque du Suleil of the Damned.

Slipknot performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

Slipknot performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

Slipknot performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

Taylor, the Iowa outfit’s mouthpiece, paced and glowered and roared to a crowd that roared most of his lyrics right back. He switched from a napalm-scorched growl to genuinely melodic choruses on songs like Psychosocial and Wait and Bleed, his powerful vocals barking over the din.

A lot of that din came from the band’s trio of percussionists, including drummer Jay (son of drummer Max) Weinberg and co-founder Shawn “Clown” Crahan. As Weinberg blasted out a booming double-bass backbone, Crahan smashed on giant drums and metal cans, hacking at one with a flaming baseball bat on Duality.

Slipknot went light on material from their new album We Are Not Your Kind, the punishing Solway Firth and throttling Unsainted. That just left more time to blast out crowd-pleasers from the past 20 years, including a few songs (the vaguely rap-rocky The Heretic Anthem, the hellbillyish Spit It Out) that still bore traces of the nu-metal era that spawned them.

Through the entire hour and 45-minute set, the band just kept coming, with members bursting out from anonymity here and there — turntablist Sid Wilson running wild all over the stage on Vermilion, guitarist Jim Root uncorking a shrewd, Van Haleny solo on Psychosocial. But mostly, they all worked as one, letting Taylor work the all-too-eager crowd.

“You motherf---ers are loud out there, Florida,” he said.

To bring Knotfest to festival-sized life on tour, Slipknot hired a trio of ringers from across the Atlantic, starting with Danish punkabillies Volbeat.

Volbeat performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

Volbeat performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

Volbeat performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

It’s not every band that could share a stage with Social Distortion as easily as Slipknot, but the powerful yet lighthearted Volbeat could probably pull it off, spinning slabs of volcanic metal muscle around a grinning boogie-rock skeleton.

After teasing Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, they cannonballed through Sad Man’s Tongue, a song inspired by him, with guitarist Rob Caggiano (formerly of Anthrax) firing off solo after sinewy solo. Then came a snippet of Slayer’s Raining Blood (“Yeah, you wish,” teased singer Michael Poulsen), right before the slobber-knocking, Slayer-inspired thrashfest Slaytan. And then they twisted the Metallica-like A Warrior’s Call into a cover of Dusty Springfield’s I Only Want to Be With You. If you can tip your hat to Cash, Springfield and Slayer all in the same set, you don’t need a mask.

Before Volbeat came French powerhouse Gojira, drowning the Amp in a maelstrom of riffs and distortion as singer Joe Duplantier, his face bunched into an intractable snarl, paid effusive tribute to Tampa and Florida’s many death metal pioneers.

“We would be nothing, and I mean f---ing nothing, without Morbid Angel, Death, f---ing Cannibal Corpse, and all these f---ing bands from Florida that inspired us so f---ing much," Duplantier said.

Gojira performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

Gojira performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

Gojira performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

But despite Duplantier’s bloodying bellowing behind the mic, it was his brother, drummer Mario Duplantier, who fueled Gojira’s withering technical onslaught, pummeling his kit with utter wrath, and flinging a blizzard of sticks into the crowd.

“I think we’re running out of f---ing drumsticks,” Joe Duplantier said at one point. “So in case you have two drumsticks, throw one back up here.”

Opening the evening with more flames, fog and face paint than lesser bands might fit into a headlining slot, Polish extreme metallers Behemoth thrashed through a set as throttling as it was theatrical, with monomynously stage-named singer Nergal waving fire wands and at one point donning a macabre black papal mitre. The music was tight, too, especially guitarist Seth’s (another nickname) surfy shredding on closer Chant for Eschaton 2000, but it was their gleeful embrace of devilish artifice that made them such a good fit alongside Slipknot.

Behemoth performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

Behemoth performs at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday. [ JAY CRIDLIN | Tampa Bay Times ]

There was a time when bands like Behemoth and Slipknot were held up as examples of What’s Wrong With The Children, their macabre appearance and hyper-stylized aggression blamed for all kinds of ills across society. Some powers that be are still doing exactly that, blaming violent video games and movies for acts of violence like mass shootings.

Slipknot’s danced that waltz before. And in 2019, they’re not having any of it. Slipknot calls its diehard fans its “family," and for a band borne of the heartland, that still actually means something.

“At the end of the day, sometimes this family is the only f---ing family you have,” Taylor said. “The beautiful thing is, you have family all over the f---ing world. And that means it doesn’t matter what color your skin is, what language you speak, who you love, where you’re from. We are all f---ing family. We may disagree on certain things, but we will never disagree that this is where we feel truly alive.”

And you wonder why they’d brave a hurricane to get here.