How Corey Taylor Handles Going to the Bar as a Sober Man
While many musicians have gotten sober over the years, there are still occasions for them to often be around bars, and during a recent appearance on The Moon Under Water podcast, Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor addressed how handles those situations having now been sober since 2010.
The podcast Taylor was guesting on has a specific focus, with host John Robins often inviting guests to create their dream pub, so the topic of Taylor's sobriety and being able to navigate a bar scene as a sober person came up.
He explained (as transcribed by Blabbermouth and heard below), "The first few years is weird, because you realize quickly how much a part of your personality booze has become, and you kind of have to sort out who you are, what you're comfortable with and largely just the habit of it."
He adds, "I was never a big beer drinker, so non-alcoholic brew, that wasn't the key. So I started with sodas and then just kind of went to water. And now that's just what I do."
Taylor then elaborated on the social aspect of going to the bar being a key thing for him. "To me, going out and hanging out in a pub or a bar or whatever is more about the company you keep. And you realize at some point the golden moment is going to go away," he explains. "So you try to time your departure right around that time where you're just, like, 'Okay, we've got about 10 minutes before he becomes a super mess. So I'm gonna split, and I'll talk to you guys later.'"
"I try not to 'Irish goodbye' everybody, where you just split. I only did that, really, when I was drinking," laughed Taylor. "But I make sure that everybody's good; I make sure that everybody's… Okay, if anybody needs a ride home, I'm the first one to do it. 'Cause it's usually just me and my wife. My wife still drinks, but she's very social. She's way better at it than I was. Usually right about the time she's starting to kind of… She's just, like, 'I'm tired. We need to split.' I'm, like, 'Ah. You had me at 'I'm ready to go.'' So we're out the door and heading for home."
In 2017, Taylor addressed his sobriety in an interview with the You Rock Foundation. "It's stronger to be that badass — to be the guy who sees it all, remembers it all, feels it all, and, at the end of the night, doesn't need that 'party,' you know. Because it's hard in this industry; people are made to feel like they don't belong, because they're not a part of that. And it's a shame," he said at the time. Two years earlier in 2015, Taylor revealed that a potential deathly experience led him to get sober.