Cynics might have counted Slipknot as down and out, but Corey Taylor and crew are having the last laugh

In a testimony to the cathartic power of Slipknot, it’s almost impossible to believe that the voice on the line belongs to the masked lunatic known to die-hard maggots as #8.

Proving that you can’t always judge a guy by his on-stage persona, Corey Taylor is about as down to earth as they come when he picks up the phone in his Los Angeles home. If you’re looking for the nihilist who’s spent the past 10 years making the case that the world is a rotting, stinking hellhole, you’ve come to the wrong place. Taylor has an easy explanation for his decidedly positive outlook.

“I think Slipknot is the best therapy I could ever have wanted in my whole life,” he says with genuine humbleness. “It continues to allow me to really figure out things about myself. You know, get really macro and let a lot of stuff go. In a lot of ways, the insanity of Slipknot allows me to have the humanity of my real life.”

These days, that real life couldn’t be better, especially when you consider Taylor’s past. Homeless during his drugged-out early teens and a devoted alcoholic at the beginning of this decade, he makes work his main vice these days. Showing that Jack White isn’t the only above-and-beyond multitasker in rock ’n’ roll, Taylor currently has three projects on the go. On the day the Straight calls, he’s busy working on demos for the alt-rockish Stone Sour, which started out as a side project and has since evolved into a legitimate hit-making machine. He’s just as excited about the Junk Beer Kidnap Band, a roots-oriented outfit that, after making its debut a couple of weeks back, demonstrated that Taylor has something of a shit-kicker streak.

“We just wrapped up a couple of shows on the West Coast that were really fun,” he says of JBKB. “I’m just kind of getting out there and doing my thing. I write so many kinds of different music that if I don’t find a way to get it all out there, then I’m limiting myself. At the end of the day, it [writing] is just what I love to do. There are no ulterior motives other than just getting the music out. And as a songwriter and lyricist, I’m constantly trying to find a way to push the boundaries of what I know, instead of just falling back on what I’m comfortable with.”

That philosophy also extends to Slipknot. When Taylor and his fellow masked madmen first blasted out of Iowa with their eponymous—and newly reissued—debut, they sounded like an industrial-metal apocalypse, each song running on unrelenting and unrefined rage. Rather than make the same record over and over to diminishing returns, Slipknot diversified. Just when you thought the band was capable of nothing but ugliness at its most extreme, along came the meditative, black-skies dirge of “Vermillion”, off 2004’s Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses).

Taylor and company made their boldest artistic statement to date in 2008 with All Hope Is Gone, an album that cannonballed from shrapnel-spraying locomotives (“Sulfur”) to unapologetically accessible mid-tempo rockers (the hit single “Dead Memories”). In a feat that not even the most deluded record executive would have predicted in the wake of Slipknot, the album entered the charts at number one, something the singer was understandably thrilled about.

“Professionally, I couldn’t be happier at what we’ve achieved on this tour cycle,” Taylor says. “We had a number one album across the world and a number one single. How many bands get to say that? And how many bands get to earn that, especially after 10 years?”

Making it doubly gratifying was the fact that, before the release, the singer had lost count of how many times he’d read that Slipknot was done.

“The funniest thing for me was how quickly a lot of people were ready to dismiss us,” he says. “Prior to the record, we did this reveal of our new masks on AOL. There was this great quote by this one guy who said, ”˜It’s 2008, and nobody cares about Slipknot.’ And then the album drops. I now cherish that quote. ”˜Nobody cares about Slipknot.’ You’re absolutely right, idiot.”

What’s ultimately amazing about where Slipknot finds itself today is the way the group has managed to keep one foot cemented in the underground and the other in the mainstream.

The band’s legendary live shows are a testament to that. As much as “Vermillion” might get rock-radio fans hoisting their lighters from their seats, it’s on the floor where Slipknot’s hard-core fans—or “maggots”, if you prefer—make it clear that they love Slipknot just as much today as they did in the early years. Just as carnage doesn’t begin to describe the band’s hypertheatrical spectacles, it doesn’t do justice to what goes on in the pit. While Slipknot beats the living shit out of everything in sight—with members infamously using baseball bats for maximum impact—the maggots, all in the name of good fun, of course, lovingly do the same on the floor.

Taylor has a pretty good idea what’s kept those fans devoted to Slipknot over the years. And it’s not because he’s a nice guy.

“Too many bands are willing to sell their fan base out to get what they want, monetarily speaking,” he suggests. “Too many bands are willing to destroy the foundation of their career just to have a little scratch upfront. And that’s just fucking sad. To me, the great thing about having our feet in two worlds is that we never left our original fans behind. We never sold them out—we took them with us. And in doing that, we showed them respect. They were the ones that kept us here when things were dark, when nobody else gave us a chance.”

Slipknot plays the Pacific Coliseum tonight (October 15).