Interesting Korn Facts (and quotes) To Remember:

 

 

  1. Bakersfield is lovingly known among the residents as B-Town
  2. Bakersfield is an agragian mining community, located at the nethermost point of California’s San Joaquin Valley. The outskirts of town are ripe with vineyards, almond blossoms, citrus groves, and dairy cows put out to pasture.
  3. Nearly a third of the city’s breadwinners make their living off the land.
  4. Munky, Brian, Fieldy, and David used to party in the city’s notorious "dirt fields".
  5. Jonathan’s mother took a liking to a local actor who was portraying Judas in a Bako production of "Jesus Christ Superstar", and so Jon’s parents divorced when he was three. When asked about it, Jon says, "He was such an asshole to me, but it still made me cry to watch him hang by his neck."
  6. (in reference to Jon’s dad) "He did fuck me over, but I can understand why. When he left to go on the road, he needed to put food on the table. He needed to pay hospital bills: I was asthmatic, I was in the hospital every month from the age of three to the age of ten."
  7. After his parents split, Jonathan took up the drums—a Christmas present from his grandmother.
  8. Jonathan has a strong belief in guardian angels—fostered by his own paranormal encounters with his deceased great-grandmother and great-uncle, and reinforced by the theories of his astrologer aunt. He grew up seeing ghosts ("They were like translucent white flashes of energy"), nearly becoming one himself when he was felled by a critical asthma attack at five.
  9. His father owned a music store, and so he became immersed in the workings of the instruments. If he spotted an instructor between classes, he would ask them how to play. Most of them would show him the basics, and then he’d learn the rest himself. In this manner he learned how to play the piano, upright bass, violin, and the clarinet…by the age of twelve.
  10. His stepmother used to torture him. "She’s the most evil, fucked-up person I have ever met in my whole life. She hated my guts. She did everything she could to make my life hell. Like, when I was sick she’d feed me tea with Tabasco, which is really hot pepper oil. She’d make me drink it by saying, ‘You have to burn that cold out, boy.’"
  11. In high school, when Jonathan had yet to meet David or Munky, the two were well aware of the former’s existence. They had both dated Jon’s sister.
  12. Bakersfield was a huge country music mecca.
  13. (Upon asked what Head listened to and played when he grew up) "I listened to AC/DC, Motley Crue, and shit like that, but I liked everything. I’d watch MTV and want to learn a Tom Petty solo or a Cars riff. All those videos my friends hated, I’d dig, ‘cause I wanted to do the solos. I never bought the record because I’d get laughed at, but I’d learn the solo."
  14. Brian had at first wanted to be a drummer like Tommy Lee until his father told him that a guitar would be easier to lug around.
  15. Queen’s "Another One Bites the Dust" was the song that made Brian realize that he liked the guitar better than the drums.
  16. Munky started playing to recuperate the pointer finger of his right hand after he severed it trying to silence his three-wheeled bicycle while sneaking out to an after-hours party.
  17. The first song Munky learned how to play was "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and took acoustic guitar lessons from a man named Mr. Haas. Until Brian showed him, Munky had no idea what disortion was.
  18. Head sold Munky Munky’s first electric guitar—a Peavey Mystic—for three hundred dollars…a total rip-off. Head says, "I played it for a few years and then I made my money back, and then some, on Munky."
  19. (Munky) "Brian pretty much inspired me to start playing. I used to go over to his house and eat his mom and dad’s food so I could save my lunch money and then by an amp."
  20. Fieldy was a weirdo with exotic musical tastes as a child: he was into Afrika-Bambaata and Parliament/Funkadelic.
  21. (Jonathan, on his adolescence) "I was into Bauhaus, Ministry, Depeche Mode, the Thompson Twins. Dude, I was a New Romantic! I was a sissy la-la. They even took me to the gay [student’s] counselor just because I wore makeup. All the cheerleaders would come and try and pick up on me just for laughs. That hurt."
  22. Jonathan went to Highland High School…the same high school as Beavis and Butthead.
  23. Jon hung out with the so-called freaks and misfits in school. He frequented gay clubs. He still does.
  24. When Jonathan was sixteen, his father "found" Jesus and saved himself. The priests made his dad burn Jon’s Motley Crue posters and tapes.
  25. At the time of his religious discovery was when his father began dissing Jon’s love for music, though he had been an avid supporter to that point.
  26. The first show Jonathan had gone to was in L.A. to see Cradle of Thorns…years later they were signed to Jon’s record label Elementree under the name of Videodrone.

  27. Jon thought that Fieldy was an asshole throughout his childhood, because Fieldy used to make fun of him.
  28. Fieldy was born on tour.
  29. "They were poor, man. They had just enough money to get something to eat. They all had little side jobs that they could really care less about, that they were doing just to get enough money so they could pay their rent and eat." (Naleway, a promotional manager, when asked about LAPD before they were signed)
  30. Jonathan was cast out of his home in 1989.
  31. (Jonathan, on his time as a mortician) "I had a sick obsession with embalming and autopsies, but I didn’t want to fuck the corpses or nothing. I just got off on cutting people open. I could do things that serial killers did and get paid for it. I could hack up the bodies."
  32. (Dean Naleway, again, reminiscing about LAPD) "They didn’t have any money. We were, like, splitting McDonald’s hamburgers. We had to make sure we had enough money for the beer that we needed for that day and whatever was left over, we’d buy McDonald’s hamburgers."
  33. (Another quote) "We started getting them some live engagements and they were playing around town, which was kind of a nightmare. They were pissing a lot of people off, they were into a lot of different mischiefs like breaking shit backstage, peeing in the dip, throwing food…"
  34. Before settling on Creep the ex-LAPD outfit considered Crunchy Taters
  35. (Jonathan, about the morgue) "A motherfucker fucked dead bodies. This guy, he was a freak. Every time I’d go to the mortuary to drop off bodies, he was all [creepy voiced], ‘Hi, Jonathan, how are you? Come here…’ And he’d always be rubbing me."
  36. Jonathan wasn’t baptized as a Catholic until his mother’s remarriage.
  37. (Jonathan) "I don’t believe in organized religion—I dealt with them hand in hand, and a whole bunch of Catholic priests tried to molest me. Telling me I was gay and I should go home with them and stuff."
  38. (Jonathan) "I cut up people that I knew: drug overdoses, car accidents, a guy that died when a typewriter fell on his head. That kind of stuff shows you you could die at any minute. It helps you to live for the moment; appreciate your life."
  39. Jonathan doesn’t know how to drive and refuses to learn how after working on countless car accident victims during his time as a mortician. He never forgets to buckle his seatbelt.
  40. Fieldy is afraid of flying; in fact, the entire band is. So they all make sure they are very wasted before the flight.
  41. Creep had reservations about Jon at the beginning, despite his talent. He used to wear dresses in his old band (SexArt), and they were very weirded-out by it. He showed up to their apartment wearing a dress for his try-out.
  42. Fieldy cleaned carpets, David worked at Pizza Hut, and Brian and Munky worked at a furniture-moving company (no wonder they’re two lean sexy bitches!) while in Creep and LAPD
  43. Jon swapped his coroner’s job to a steady diet of Top Ramen and a garage at Long Beach when he made the try-out for Creep. His father cried when he helped him moved his stuff and has been quoted as saying later that he was happy that his son was at least "chasing his dreams."
  44. In Long Beach Jon befriended a speed dealer. "It’s just about being up," he explained. "If I didn’t have to sleep, I’d love it. If I could just stay awake and there was no such thing as sleeping…there’s not enough time."
  45. Within two weeks of Jon’s arrival, the band recorded versions of "Predictable", "Daddy", "Blind", and "Alive." They entitled this demo Neidermeyer’s Mind.
  46. Paul Pontius (the A&P rep for Immortal Records) waited through four KoRn shows as a silent observer before confronting the band.
  47. David dropped out of high school to pursue music.
  48. He doesn’t regret it.
  49. (Jon about Shoots and Ladders) "’Shoots and Ladders’, to set the record straight, calls out nursery rhymes for what they really are. I chose each rhyme for a different reason—‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ has racial overtones. ‘London Bridges’ talks of all the people dying [from the Black Plague], as does ‘Ring Around the Rosies’. Then there’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’—one story tells of the wolf raping Red Riding Hood and killing her. There is a lesson anyone for censorship should realize. The fact is you are covered from the world and once you are born into the world, your eyes are open and its all over."
  50. "I’d wake up in the morning and do a line," Jonathan says of his speed addiction. "Speed in the morning, I’d have it all lined up for breakfast so when I’d lay down and go to sleep, I’d wake up and just snort and it’s like, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m up.’ It was bad. It’s like, you do one line and stay up all night, but then you have shit to do the next day so you have to do another line to be able to keep staying up to get that shit done. Eventually you start spinning out from sleep deprivation."
  51. To write lyrics for the first KoRn record, Jon returned to B-Town and wrote lyrics at an old recording studio called Fat Tracks.
  52. (Jon) "I like being miserable. I guess I’m punishing myself. I guess I punish myself everyday. I don’t know…I haven’t really analyzed myself lately. I just like the pain."
  53. The poverty, the dead-end jobs, the mac-and-cheese dinners…all were forgotten. (Munky) "We wrote these songs, got signed, and then the tour bus pulled up in front of the house. We haven’t looked back since."
  54. The first KoRn album arrived at stores around the country on October 4, 1994.
  55. According to Munky, some of the first gigs saw KoRn playing to "crowds" of only four or five people—"and we’re like, ‘And our next song, Mom, is…’"
  56. Stocked with an arsenal of alcohol that would put Liquor Mart to shame and enough porno mags to fill an adult bookstore, the tour bus has all the makings of home. Their CD collection for the tour bus features the likes of the Village People and Blondie.
  57. (Jonathan) "I thought touring would be one big-ass fucking party—chicks everywhere, the whole fantasy. It’s nothing like I thought. It’s better. If it was like what I thought it would be, I’d be dead now."
  58. (Fieldy about their performances) "It’s just intense the whole time, sometimes I’ll be walkin’ offstage and I’ll be like throwin’ up—I’m throwin’ up a couple of times onstage, too. It’s just because it’s so intense being up there. Sometimes I will be throwin’ up before we play, too."
  59. The only time they tried to play "Daddy" was at a New York club date
  60. (Munky, about their music) "It’s like we’re directing our own scary movie."
  61. (Jonathan) "We’ve got metal fans, alternative fans, Goth fans, punk fans, and hardcore kids. You go to one of our headlining shows, you see all kinds of people. I like that. It shows that kids don’t listen to us because it’s cool." (Fieldy, in response) "I remember calling my girlfriend a couple of times and saying like, ‘You should see the crowd.’ I don’t know, man, it was like they were out of the eighties." In time however, a uniform would emerge: logo-ed T-Shirts, Adidas track suits, and meticulously braided coifs a la Brian….
  62. According to Brian, Megadeth’s guitar-playing frontman was a consummate "dick". (Jonathan) "the other Mega-guys were cool; it was that Dave guy. There were all these rules. We almost got kicked off the tour for throwing some water at the crowd. It was ridiculous."
  63. As indicated by the artwork on the inside flap of the KoRn CD cover, this is a group that takes the adult-entertainment industry very seriously. The wares boasted by Amsterdam’s XXX-purveyors made even Korn’s favorite rags look well-night tasteful in comparison. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. Like kids at a Halloween-night candy store free-for-all, they stuffed their duffel bags full of publications such as Animal Orgy, and headed back to the States…five obscenely satisfied customers.

  64. Before the birth of Nathan, Jonathan kept a beeper on him at all times. "This tells me when my child’s coming. If I’m onstage, I say: ‘I’m having a baby now, bye!’"
  65. (Jonathan) "My astrologer told me it was going to be a girl. My little girl has been coming to me in my dreams, and it’s breaking my fucking heart." He was going to name the little girl Salaam Dementia.
  66. Nathan was born on October 18, 1995.
  67. Silverchair were great fans, so much so that they put KoRn stickers on their instruments. Whenever David and Jonathan would run into the underaged rockers, they would invariably attempt to ply them with drink. But since Silverchair never ventured far outside the watchful gaze of their parents, all such efforts were failures.
  68. Two of Korn’s favorite hard-rock outfits are Sepultra and Machine Head. These two bands supported KoRn’s sound from early on.
  69. (Jonathan about the infamous KoRn tattoo given to Head by Fred Durst) "He told us he’d been tattooing for years, but it turned out it was like his third tattoo! He did a KORN tattoo on Head’s back—and it looked like HORN."
  70. By Christmas 1995, KoRn were a certified underground sensation.
  71. Fear Factory’s Dino Cazares charged KoRn with "ripping off" his band. Jonathan retorted, "I hate that jealous bitch. I heard he just got a seven-string guitar like us and he’s wearing Adidas suits like me. I don’t understand it." The ill will between the bands would continue, and was even rumored to have escalated into full-blown physical combat on at least one occasion.
  72. On January 17th, 1996, Jonathan was hanging out at Manhattan’s Whiskey Bar with a roadie and Ozzy’s drummer. He drank like a man possessed. The drinking binge ended with Jonathan toppling off his bar stool and stabbing his face with a burning cigarette (which, incidentally, he continued to smoke as he lay prostrate on the floor). "I woke up in the morning and I was so fucking hungover. I was getting out of the bus and I fainted. They had to get two people to carry me in. they dragged me in, like right in front of Ozzy and Sharon, his wife, everybody. Just looking like, fucked up! I go to the stage, I faint again. They slapped me, threw me onstage, and I pulled the show off. I don’t know how the hell I did it. I didn’t know what words were coming next, I didn’t know what song it was. I just fuckin’ closed my eyes. I’d been doing it for so long, I pulled it off."
  73. KoRn has opened for KISS.
  74. Munky attributed the phenomenon of song writing for Life is Peachy as "a lot of creativity buildup, like blue balls of creativity. In the studio it just kinda spewed out."
  75. KoRn writes songs in an odd manner; they all play around with their instruments, and the producer (or cheerleader, as they affectionately entitle him/her) will have to pick out something that sounds cool. "Somebody plays something and no one says nothin’—everybody’s too lazy," admits Fieldy. "[Munky] could play something cool and it’ll just go straight past ‘cause we’re too busy being arrogant with ourselves. I’ll be busy playing my stuff, I won’t even hear what he’s doing. We have to have somebody point it out like, ‘What are you playing over there?’…All kinds of riffs go past that might be good thast we just don’t hear ‘cause anything we play we don’t think is good…"
  76. The frontman has referred to his singing on Korn’s first two albums as "straight fuckin’ cathartic rage."
  77. Brian has joked that he hopes "that Jonathan doesn’t get help; we’re screwed if he gets cured."
  78. (Jonathan) "Best friends stab you in the front."
  79. The band wanted to have the first single off of Life is Peachy to be K@#%!. (Jonathan) "I’m so tired of [the radio people] cutting my cuss words out. That’s how I sing, and this is to make a stand. We’re throwing a big wrench into the fucker. We’ve got this far without radio stations and MTV. We really don’t give a fuck. Record companies just want to make a quick buck and then go, ‘Next band, please.’ If we let people get their meathooks into us, it’d spoil a good thing."
  80. (Fieldy about the A.D.I.D.A.S. video) "The only thing I didn’t like too much was being zipped up in that body bag—and I didn’t like putting the contacts in my eyes. I guess the worst part of the video was towards the end of the video when we were laying on those tables for about five hours. It fucking sucked, man! I don’t really think I would ever have the patience to act."
  81. KoRn was hailed as the long awaited antidote for the Hanson epidemic.
  82. (Chicago Tribune record review for Life Is Peachy) "If Korn wasn’t so sarcastic about it, they could have titled their second album Life Is Lunacy. Here we have an assembly of twisted souls—perverts, psychopaths, and paranoiacs—dramatized by the creepy multipersonal soliloquies of singer Jonathan Davis. What emerges is an overload of troubled emotion: thrashy hiphop, the vocal spasms of Davis and guitarist Head, and a sound that is both grooved and jagged."
  83. (Enertainment Weekly review) "KoRn’s sophomore release may be of interest to mental-heath professionals, but there is no reason for even the most twisted thrash-metal fans to expose themselves to this fifty-minute self-indulgent primal scream. Profanity-driven rants like the aptly titled "K@#!" and "Kill You" undermine the band’s compelling fusion of heavy riffs and tight hip-hop beats, leaving the impression that the frontman Jonathan Davis is turning his well-publicized childhood into a cheap marketing device." (Jonathan’s response) "Who’s this fucking bastard to say that? These are my feelings you’re talking about and I’m not putting my feelings out to make money at all. I’m putting my feelings out for myself and other people; if I get money, that just comes along with it, but I’m not one to be money-hungry. Fuck them, fuck those scared little bastards."