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in-death-we-fall · 11 months

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Stone Sour

Hot And Bothered

Metal Edge 48-11, March 2003

By Joshua Sindell Photos by Annamaria Disanto

(google drive link) Murderdolls interview here - Slipknot interview here

Stone Sour’s debut album wasn’t what Slipknot fans were expecting. And that pleases Corey Taylor a great deal. Not nearly as outrageously angry as Iowa, the disc blends Taylor’s passionate singing, rock-solid riffing and indelible tunes, creating a record of downbeat songs that rewards comparisons to the sobering sound of the grunge bands a decade ago. With two other musicians of Slipknot getting involved—guitarist Jim Root’s a fully-fledged member of the band, DJ Sid Wilson adds sonic wallpaper to three songs—and now with a huge radio hit in the song, “Bother,” Stone Sour has begun to take on a greater importance than maybe even Taylor had intended. After all, this was a band that played in the Des moines area for years (‘92-’97) without gaining any attention from record labels. Members passed in and out of their ranks like ants through an anthill, and when Taylor finally gave his band notice, that he was joining their hometown rivals Slipknot, Stone Sour seemed to end with quiet finality.

“By ‘97, I’d been doing it for five years straight,” says Corey. Stripped of his Slipknot coveralls and mask, Taylor is a not unhandsome, stockily-built man, standing about 5’7” tall. His brown hair hangs down to his shoulders, and despite his frequent use of the “F” word, it’s clear that he has a large vocabulary and isn’t afraid to use it. “No one comes to Des Moines to see you play,” Corey continues. “Even Slipknot had to go to Chicago to get fucking noticed. I was sick of working my ass off in Stone Sour and seeing nothing on the back end. I knew that I wanted to make it, and I wanted to try something new. So, the guys in Slipknot came and asked me to join.”

His current bandmates—Root, guitarist Josh Rand, bass player Shawn Economaki and drummer Joel Ekman—have all played in Stone Sour at one time or another. Shawn recalls that Stone Sour were almost the “top dogs” in their small scene. “When we first came out, we had our own little reign in Des moines. Then Slipknot came out and just blew the scene to shit!” he laughs.

Were they furious with Taylor when he deserted them? Joel Ekman shrugs. “When he called me to tell me he was joining Slipknot, I told him good luck and wished him the best. Sure, I was mad. It’s hard to find a good singer, especially in Des Moines. Corey’s voice is just awesome and I wondered how we could replace him. When Slipknot needed a singer, of course he was the one to grab.” Corey sat down with Metal Edge to set the record straight…

METAL EDGE: So, you strike out on your own, after all this success with Slipknot, and then you name your new band after a drink? COREY TAYLOR: It just worked out that way. When me and Joel were trying to find a name, we had all kinds of fucking weird shit that we were thinking about calling this band. You have to remember that we were 19 when we started to put this together. You know, we tried names like Freak Show, but we were clearly not a “freak show.” We were just guys that wanted to play fucking music. So one night, Joel’s at a bar, and he’s reading a drink menu, and he starts writing down all this shit from the drink menu. There was a bunch of shit on there like “Hot Saki,” and “Ocean Green,” you know. Stone Sour was the second to last one, and he brought over the list. He asked me if I liked any of them for names. Stone Sour just stuck in my mind, and I decided that was it, it was perfect. It didn’t mean anything to us other than it was the name. It’s like Slipknot… Slipknot doesn’t mean anything either, it’s just a name for the band.

ME: I wanted to ask you about the spoken-word track on the album, “Omega.” Was that inspired by Henry Rollins’ spoken-word stuff? I know that you recently worked with him on his benefit album for the West Memphis three. CT: It was just something that I wrote. I’ve always wanted to get into stuff like that. Obviously, there wasn’t a platform for me to do that with Slipknot, so when we started working on this, I said, “You know what? I’m not holding myself down to anything. I want to explore, I want to do everything.” So, I just wrote this spoken-word piece, I was on an airplane, too, and it happened quickly, in only ten minutes. I knew that we were going in to do demos for what we were calling “Superego” at the time, which later became Stone Sour. It was more inspired by some of what Rolins had done, but also the “Beat” writers, like Kerouac and Burroughs and Ginsberg. That kind of thing. There’s a different rhythm to it. It’s not just somebody sitting down and just talking. There’s a flow to it, and that’s why I wanted to do it in the first place. I’ve always wanted to get into stuff like that, just from a writing point of view, because if you’re just singing all the time, you get bored. If you can branch out and do different things, why not?

ME: Have you ever done a kind of stand-up poetry reading in the past? CT: No, not yet. But I want to. I want to do it all, dude! I don’t give a fuck. I want to go out and do spoken-word shit, I don’t hold myself down to anything.

ME: What have Slipknot fans thought about this departure for you? CT: Well, I just want to prove a point. I want to prove to everybody that, “a,” I’m not just a guy who screams all the time; “b,” I can do other stuff besides Slipknot, and “c,” I want to show everybody that if you put your fucking mind to it, you can do anything. You can accomplish anything in live, and that’s the whole fucking point. If you’re stuck in a band, no matter how popular it is and how unhappy you are, why not branch out and do as much fucking music as much as you can? I got into music to do music, not just to be a member of a band. I love Slipknot, and I love what I do, but at the same time, if I feel like I’m not getting to branch out creatively in other avenues, then I’m going to fucking do something else. Luckily, the response has been really good, the kids have really dug it. But at the same time, if nobody dug it I’d still be doing it. That’s just the way I am. That’s why I joined Slipknot in the first place, because in the original Stone Sour, I was kind of burned out on what we were doing in ‘97. We had been doing it for about five years, and it was time for me to do something new. The guys in Slipknot came to me and asked me to do it. Now, happily, I’ve been able to come back and do this again.

ME: Is it stifling to be in Slipknot? CT: Kind of, yeah.

ME: That’s going to be a hard thing for Slipknot fans to hear you say, won’t it? CT: Well, here’s the thing. You can listen to Slipknot and tell that we’re creative. We don’t really hold ourselves to one “form” of metal, but at the same time, it’s still metal, man. It’s still very brutal and there’s not much stuff that you can do with it. I couldn’t do a song like “Bother” in Slipknot. It just wouldn’t fit in and it wouldn’t be right. So it was important to me to be able to do that, because I write stuff like “Bother” all the time, and what am I supposed to do? Forget about ever singing those songs? Fuck that. It’s either i write and play and sing, or I die. That’s just the way it is.

ME: Your fiancee she says that she’s been listening to “Bother” for almost three years. And all of a sudden, it’s strange for her to have the rest of the world hearing it. CT: It used to be that I wrote stuff like that for myself. I write on an acoustic guitar, not on an electric. I wrote it in ‘95, and it was one of those songs that I’ve always, whenever I had a moment to play my guitar, I would always start to play it. It took a lot… I think I was actually kind of scared to do anything like it before. When we were doing the demos for the Superego stuff, I thought, “You know what? I’m just going to record it and if we don’t use it, then at least I’ve got it for myself. I can listen to it whenever I want.” And, luckily, when people started listening to it, they were like “Holy shit!” I flew out to L.A. to record it for the Spider-Man soundtrack, and people have been really digging it.

ME: Is it a relief to reveal the person you are beneath your Slipknot mask? CT: Yes. It really was starting to feel like I was a character that I was having to play. I wanted to get away from it, I wanted to get back and just do something so that I could come back to Slipknot and feel the same love that I had for the band on the first album.

ME: Were you nervous about going without your mask? CT: I was a little worried about it at first, but then I thought about it and decided, “This is who I am in Stone Sour.” I shouldn’t be worried or ashamed of that. I did Stone Sour for five years without a mask on. It was just “me.” And people liked it then, so why wouldn’t they like it now?

ME: What’s the reaction that you’re getting from Slipknot about the music that you and Jim are doing now? Have you talked to them? CT: I haven’t even talked to them in a whole. They’ve been doing their own thing, I’ve been so busy with this. I’ve talked to Joey [Jordison, Slipknot drummer] a couple of times. Joey’s doing the Murderdolls and he’s having a good time with that. I feel that if they can’t be happy with the fact that I’m happy right now, then why are we doing it in the first place, you know? If anybody wanted (sic) in the band wanted to branch out and do whatever they wanted, I’d be like, “Fuck yeah. Go for it!” I would never try to hold anybody back, and I don’t think that they’re trying to do that with me.

ME: Do you anticipate seven other solo projects from Slipknot? CT: [Laughing] Probably not! I mean, [DJ] Sid [Wilson]’s got his DJ stuff, and [percussionist Shawn] Clown [Crahan]’s got his hand in a bunch of cookie jars, obviously! [Guitarist] Mick [Thomson]’s involved in some shit… It’s just them basically doing what they can’t do in Slipknot, and that’s the whole reason that me and Jim are doing this.

ME: What did Clown say? CT: Clown said some shit about me and Joey and Jim, you know, that “they’d better realize that it’s all fun and good to do this side-project shit,” which pissed me off, because Stone Sour is not a side-project. It’s an actual band. But he said that if our fucking side-projects get in the way of Slipknot, that we’re going to have to answer to him. He’s just talking shit. You know the Clown! He loves to start shit.

ME: Can you still relate to some of the older songs on the album that date back a few years, as if you wrote them last week? CT: Yeah, it’s the same me. Half of the stuff on this album was written prior to us getting back together. It’s just a different perspective. You know, with Slipknot it’s very much about purging the bullshit and everything that I had to go through as a kid. With Stone Sour, it’s much more general, much more accessible and much more confident. These are issues that everybody thinks about. Stuff like relationships, religion, politics… All kinds of things. It goes back to the music question. I’m not going to limit myself just because common popular knowledge has me cast in one fucking role. Fuck that. I want to be the guy who’s known for doing it all and not giving a shit.

ME: There’s a lot of emotions that seem to come out of depression on this record. “Bother” definitely comes out of that dark frame of mind. CT: Yeah. A lot of the stuff, like “Monolith” and “Take A Number”... “Monolith” is a case study of about (sic) what our potential is. All of us are fucking animals, and the people who think that they’re above being animals are the ones who are more susceptible to snapping in a fit of stress and taking a gun and shooting people. And a song like “Take A Number,” back in the scene as popular as we were, there was always the hot new thing that was going on, where people were buying all the bullshit that somebody was saying. That song’s kind of about personality cults and finding out too late that someone’s full of shit. It’s about being burned by somebody that you really believed in. “Bother” is just about people who take and take and take, until you feel like you can’t give anymore, but they still take and keep on taking.

ME: I wanted to talk to you about “Blotter,” as well. Is that about taking acid? CT: No, no… It’s about a chemical imbalance, about obsession. It’s about being that guy that chases a chick all over town and sits outside her house for six hours a night, calls her time after time when he knows she’s not home. About being that guy who scares the fuck out of you, the template for all women who worry about strangers in dark corners.

ME: And that was never you? CT: No. I came really close with my jealousy. I used to be a very jealous person. But I realized how fucking ugly I was with my jealousy, and a lot of my truth wasn’t reality. Every man has been burned by at least one woman in their life, and for a long time after that you really base your opinion of women off of that experience, unfortunately. It’s just about really wanting to be with someone after being in a situation like that. Meeting someone who has the potential of being that “chemical,” very perfect, very forever, and having your own psychosis get in the way of having that, and losing it. It’s kind of about that.

ME: In addition to Jim, Sid plays on this album. CT: Yeah. Sid does some spinning on three songs, yeah. Sid does what he wants. He doesn’t give a fuck. He never has. The only thing he really worries about is whether his coveralls are all intact, and if he’s got a burn on his leg! I asked him to come down, and he was like, “Fuck yeah, man.” He came down and did all his songs in one night. I didn’t want to make what he did integral parts of the songs, I just wanted something for “ear candy,” and that’s what he’s perfect at. A lot of DJs want to remix everything, they want to start everything over again at ground zero. But Sid comes in, asks what you want him to do, and I told him what I was thinking about. He goes into his albums, his bag of tricks, and fucking pulled it off. It was awesome.

ME: This album was done inexpensively? CT: Very inexpensively. We recorded in Catamount studios in Cedar Falls, Iowa with a guy who Shawn and Jim had worked with before on one of their other bands. And we just got along, he knew that we wanted to make something and we knew that we wanted to do it the way we wanted to do it, and not fuck around with a lot of production and a lot of producers. We wanted to produce it ourselves, and it just worked out fucking great. We ended up going in and spending less than $10,000 to record the album. And then we had Toby Wright set up to mix it. I’d wanted Toby Wright to mix it since day one, and it worked out. A lot of things were really smiling on us, you know?

ME: Did Toby Wright’s name come up from your admiration for his work with Alice In Chains? CT: Yeah. Chains, plus I’d also worked with Toby when I did a song with Max Cavalera for the second Soulfly album. We had hit it off really fucking well. He knows what he likes and he loves great vocal performances, and I really wanted to play with that.

ME: How much time have you set aside for Stone Sour? CT: This is something that, depending on how big it gets, I’m going to tour with this up until we get together to do Slipknot. Maybe even past that, because the rest of the guys can work on the music, and me and Jim can come out and we can still be doing this while they’re working.

ME: Things are comfortable? CT: Me and Shawn and Josh have all known each other since we were kids, and I’ve been with Joel since ‘92. Jim we’ve known forever, just because he’s the most popular guitarist in town with all the bands that he was doing. I don’t know what it is, man, we just work really well together. We play off of each other’s ideas, we have carte blanche to do whatever we want musically, and vocally. It’s a good feeling when you’re working towards a goal instead of working for your own means.

ME: So let’s play word association for a second. If Slipknot equals metal, and People equal Shit, Stone Sour equals…? CT: Melody and freedom. It’s everything to me. It’s the first real band I was ever in, it’s the first band I’ve played live with. It’s the first band I ever recorded anything substantial with. It’s the first band I’ve ever felt proud of, where it wasn’t just me and a couple of guys playing what I wrote. It was all of us really working to do something very cool.

ME: This album seemed to come out of nowhere. No one knew you were off the road long enough to make this record. CT: Fuck yeah. This thing was recorded in thirty days, man. I think Stone Sour is different from what’s out there. It’s melodic and catchy, and it’s got soul and life. I think that it’s going to make people re-evaluate how they look at music. I think that this is the needle that gets shoved in the eye of all the corporate bulshit! Everything is cookie-cutter nu-metal crap! Everybody thinks that they have to have the big rap breakdown, and it’s fucking pathetic! What happened to songwriting, what happened to storytelling? Show me something before you ship a million-plus copies! It’s bullshit, man!

#if you want anything else from this scanned just lemme know #corey taylor #stone sour #metal edge 48-11 mar 2003 #jim root #shawn economaki #joel ekman #josh rand #interview

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