Rocker lives good life, keeps attitude

Remember when Vegas tried that whole ‘Let’s appeal to families’ thing in the early ’90s?

It didn’t work.

Booze and boobies prevailed, as they tend to do.

And yet, two decades later, family life is what Corey Taylor, frontman for platinum rockers Slipknot and Stone Sour, associates with Vegas — albeit for reasons other than a failed marketing campaign.

Turns out Taylor’s wife’s family is from here, and so about three years ago, they bought a house in the Henderson area and have been dividing their time between Vegas and Taylor’s native Des Moines, Iowa, ever since.

“It’s become like my second home,” he says from a Stone Sour tour stop in Corpus Christi, Texas. “I look at Vegas as a safe haven. I’m surrounded by people who make me feel better than 99 percent of the people on this planet. It’s good to have, trust me.”

Aside from catching the occasional Blue Man Group or Penn & Teller show, though, Taylor doesn’t spend too much time on the Strip.

“If you want to see how the crazy half lives, all you gotta do is go down there and watch how ignorant people get,” he says.

But there was a time when Taylor lived a version of that kind of life himself.

“In the early days, I was very malleable, so I kind of fell into the same cliches that a lot of people do with the drinking and the excess,” he says. “But in the back of my mind, I knew that it wasn’t what I wanted. I’ve been able to take the steps to go in that positive direction and find myself. This quest, for lack of a better word, has been the last seven, eight years of my life.”

The personal transformation that Taylor speaks of is at the heart of Stone Sour’s most recent record, “House of Gold & Bones — Part 1,” the first half of a two-disc concept album that revolves around a man at a crossroads in life, trying to figure out in which direction he wants to go next.

“One of the main reasons that I wanted to write this story is because I know that a lot of people struggle with it,” Taylor says of the narrative behind the latest effort from his band, who perform Friday at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel.

Uplift isn’t something that’s always been associated with Taylor — this is a dude who gives growling voice to Slipknot’s “People = Sh!@” — nor is it something that he’s always associated with himself. If that’s changed, it’s because so has Taylor — to a point.

“When you talk about being positive and trying to do something good, there’s almost a stigma that’s attached to it now, where people look at you as a goody-goody, kind of a pushover,” he says. “The thing I’m trying to represent is the other end of that. You can be a good person and still have an attitude about it.”

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com
or 702-383-0476.