Corey Taylor has opened up about his past drug and alcohol abuse, including the fact he was once left in a dumpster after an overdose.
During an appearance on Steve-O’s Wild Ride! podcast (via Ultimate Guitar), Taylor revealed that he has overdosed twice by the time he was in his mid-teens.
Taylor began: “When I was a kid, I was a speed freak. I did coke, I did meth, I did all that stuff. I quit all that when I was a teenager because I OD’d twice before I was 16.”
“But I quit all that, and I got more into booze – honestly because it was just easy. And my personality is such that I never drank to chill, I just drank to get fucked up. So it was easy to just stay medicated, especially doing what I do, and to just continue that.”
He continued: “I found myself becoming very unavailable in my own life. When you’re a father – at the time I was married, a long time ago – and I just decided to figure this out. ‘This is going to go in a direction that I don’t want it to go.’
“It took a long time to kind of figure out who I was and be comfortable with it again.”
Taylor continued on to explain the story of being abandoned by his friends after overdosing at a party.
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“The last thing I remember was I was at a party, this is when I was living in Waterloo, Iowa, I was at a party blacked out, we were all just kind of doing whatever was there,” he said.
“I think my heart stopped, something happened, and my ‘friends’ threw me away. I think that’s what happened, that’s the kind of city that that city is anyway. When you come to, I was covered in my own blood.
He continued: “I pulled myself out of the dumpster – I had no shoes on, and there’s that moment where you don’t really remember how you got there. And I had to walk, I was 12 miles away from my house.
“I walked all the way back, and as I was walking, it was starting to come to me. And within a week I moved out of Waterloo, I moved to live with my grandmother in Des Moines [Iowa].”
Taylor was then asked about the contents of Slipknot’s rider when he was still abusing alcohol, to which he replied: “I don’t even know if this was on the rider but we just had it at all times… we had at least nine bottles of Jack at every show, we had Crown Royal, we had Jäger, some people drank vodka, guys would have drugs brought in, which I never saw because by that time I was just an alcoholic.”
“There was a lot of crazy shit. I remember waking up on a pool table, just waking up in a bar. I was like, ‘How the fuck did I get here?’ I was miles away from the gig, I had no idea.”
Taylor went on to reveal that he become sober after former bandmate Paul Gray died from a suspected overdose back in 2010.
“I had quit drinking and I started again, and then when Paulie died, it was kind of weird. I was drinking to deaden the pain, but then physically it was hurting me, which made it really easy for me to quit. I quit about a month after he passed,” he said.
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Check out Corey Taylor discussing finding himself in a dumpster after an overdose on Steve-O’s Wild Ride!:
