- The songwriting for "Life Is Peachy" came so naturally to the band that Munky had to attribute the phenomenon to "a lot of creative buildup, like blue balls of creativity. In the studio, it just kinda spewed out."
- (David Silveria on touring) "It wasn’t so bad before, when I didn’t really have a home that was my home, with all my belongings in, and when I didn’t have a girl waiting for me, when I had nobody I cared about. I wasn’t missing anybody. I always miss my family, but I’m used to being away from them. So it wasn’t that big a deal. I’d be out on tour and I’d look forward to going home just to get off the road and be able to drive around in my car and hang out with friends. I’d miss that. But it’s different now that I have somebody that I love and I’m starting a family with. It’s a whole different story. That’s a different kind of missing."
- Head managed to sidestep cruel destiny by bringing his Rebekkah Ricketts (then his girlfriend) on tour. "It’s hard, you know, being gone on tour all the time and having a relationship. She has a hard time sometimes. This year I’ve seen her a lot. She came out to Europe for ten days, so that’s good. We go with it. It’s just gets hard sometimes."
- (Jonathan in response) "I miss Nathan and Renee a lot, but I wouldn’t do that to them—dragging them all over the world with me would be cruel. Touring is really crazy!! It’s such a weird feeling, last time I saw him (Nathan) he was a toddler, and now he’s already walking! I love music and I feel I have something to say but sometimes I wonder if it is worth it."
- (Jonathan about Nathan) "I’m going down the same road my dad did. It’s killing me, because I’m doing what my dad did to me, in that I’m always on the road, but I tell myself that I’m making his life better in the future. He’ll be pissed off with me, probably get in a band and write songs about me, and that would make me the happiest man in the world."
- At one stop on tour, the guys were walking around the festival grounds, taking in the scenery, when a group of fifteen cartgoers approached them. The laid-back musicians went with the flow, talking to the fans mano a mano, and shaking their hands. When their goings-on caught the attention of a nearby crowd, Korn suddenly found themselves besieged by hundreds of clamoring kids, and fearing for their lives. Peace was restored only when security arrived to throw the rockers a lifeline. In retrospect, David had to admit that "that was a pretty good feeling, just to see these crazy kids think that our dumb asses were cool enough to do that."
- At the Kerrang! Awards Ceremony in London in August 1997, the band received the award for Best Album for Life Is Peachy. Aside from wining his first award, Jonathan also managed to run into his first rock idol, Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon.
- Fieldy’s daughter Sarina Rae was born September 30, 1998.
- There were arguments about featuring "Got the Life" for the debut of Follow the Leader. The arguments were rooted in the hard rockers’ phobia of all things disco. (Head) "I don’t know, man. I don’t know if we should put this (Got the Life) on the record. People are gonna be like ‘You fucking pussies’."
- The words to "My Gift to You", Jonathan said, are "about me wanting to kill my chick while I’m fucking her. It’s about me choking her out while I’m banging her. It’s just a sick fantasy I’ve always had. Just to be able to see through her eyes, to see if I could feel myself. To see if I could feel what it feels like to get nailed by me—all kinds of stuff. That’s the weirdest song I ever wrote." However, Jonathan’s morbid fascination with death paled in comparison to Renee’s, who’d been known to leave love letters on his pillow, delineating the multifarious ways in which she’d have liked to see him die. She says about the song, "Thank you, that’s kinda fucked up. I was expecting a fucking ‘I love you, baby’ kinda song."
- No matter what the lyrics might someday spark in the mind of little Nathan, "My Gift to You" went over great in the Davis household.
- (Fred Durst) "Korn bet me five hundred dollars that I wouldn’t sing ‘Faith’ naked. So ‘Faith’ came up, and I ran to the side of the stage and stripped buck-naked, except for my Kangol hat and my Adidas shoes. I was not at my most proud naked moment. Next thing you know, I’m looking on the Internet and there’s a picture of it. But I got five hundred bucks!"
- Korn’s warped vision of a variety show (The After School Specials) would not have been complete without a regular who’s who of porn stars and smut peddlers. "Fuck it, I like porn," Jonathan admitted. "I don’t give a fuck. I have a huge-ass collection, ‘bout a hundred movies. I love fuckin’ sex. I love it, I love it, I love it. I like raunchy porn—the nastier, the better."
- After witnessing the wanton goings-on at Kamp Korn on the After-School Specials, Epic Records executives had a fit. Fornicators, pornographers, and Adam Carolla, oh my…This was no laughing matter. Thoughts of lawsuits and Mothers Against Korn unions had the label in panic. Unfortunately for Epic, their frantic pleas fell on deaf ears. All appeals to the musicians’ better judgment were greeted by the same response: "Don’t tell us what to do."
- On March 5, 1998, Eric VanHoven, an eighteen-year-old high school junior at Michigan’s Zeeland High School, was issued a suspension from Assistant Principal Gretchen Plewe. Why? He wore a Korn T-shirt to school. Hewes said, "The group called Korn is one of three groups that I’m familiar with that have extremely offensive lyrics. Korn is indecent, vulgar, obscene, and intends to be insulting. It is no different than a person wearing a middle finger on their shirt."
- The incident made Korn front-page news and all over America high-school students expressed disapproval for Michigan’s authoritarian regime.
- While Eric VanHoven might not have expected to come to his rescue, they did just that. When they found out about it, Korn tore themselves away from their album long enough to talk to their lawyers. "We just thought it was ridiculous, beyond ridiculous," Fieldy explained. "It’s like, ‘What the fuck—what’s this world coming to? You can’t wear a T-shirt that has a name on it?’ I can understand if it said ‘Fuck’ or something like that, but it was like saying ‘Korn’ is like saying ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’."
- In response to the assistant principal’s admonitions, the band demonstrated that hell hath no fury like Korn scorned. After teleconferencing with their lawyers and managers, the group issued a statement denouncing Assistant Principal’s moralizing. Going still further, they slapped the school district with a cease-and-desist order, instructing the assistant principal to either abstain from making any more defamatory comments about their band, or to prepare for a multi-million dollar lawsuit. And as if that was not bad enough, the group then commissioned the production of five hundred Korn T-shirts with the First Amendment and the words "Except in Michigan" printed on the back, and dispatched the lot to Zeeland High. "We contacted the local radio station and they took the T-shirts down to the school," recalled Jonathan, clearly relishing the memory. "They said that the cops were there because they thought there was going to be a riot. But it ended up that all the cops handed out all the Korn T-shirts to the kids. It was awesome."
- Korn got no love at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival. Jonathan said of the music of another band on the bill, "Goddamn Ben Folds Five sucks. It’s fucking Cheers music." Fieldy’s attempts to make friends with Garbage’s Shirley Manson (by repeatedly sticking a noise-emitting key chain in her face) didn’t go over too well. In a drunken plight one night, Jonathan proved that even naughty boys need love, too. "We go to these goddamn festivals, and no fucking goddamn band will love us. We get no fucking love at all. It’s like we’re in our own little world. We’re not that goddamned scary. What the goddamn fuck? For once in my life, please love me: I’m in Korn."
- (Critique of Follow the Leader by Spin Magazine…those goddamn buttfuckers) "Korn scare all the right people—critics and faculty—but resonance is only supposed to be a beginning, not an end in itself. They don’t have to grow up, they don’t have to achieve ‘closure’, but if they’re not going to make good records, what’s the point of going through all that therapy?"
- Dear Vice President Quayle,
It would be entirely inappropriate and remiss of us to not extend a personal invitation to you and your family to be on-hand at any one of the tour stops on "The Family Values" trek (September 22-November 1).
Since we believe it was you who brought the phrase "family values" to all of our attention, this tour is somewhat of a tribute to you.
We’d be honored if you could come out and enjoy the sounds of Korn, Rammstein, and Ice Cube, not to mention such artists as Limp Bizkit and Orgy.
Listen to what you have created and look what you have wrought.
Sincerely,
KoRn
- The name of the family values tour had been inspired by the very republican who would probably would have spelled corn with a k. As Jonathan explained of the tour’s name, "It’s just sarcasm, basically. It’s everything that we’re not about or all these bands are about…You know the politicians that always said, you know, ‘you keep our good family values’ and how, you know, ‘rock and roll and rap is just killing the youth’ and all that crap. We just named it that, it was just like a big you-know-what to all those people."
- Quayle did not show up at any of the tour dates. He would have received "All Access" passes if he had. Lucky bastard.
- For Jonathan’s bachelor party, he hired Matt Zane, the creative force behind such triple-X classics as "House of Flesh" I and II and "Backstage Sluts" I and II. Zane had been a long time friend of Jonathan by that time. "He does fresh, new shit," raved Jonathan. "Reverse gang bangs where this guy gets fucked by eighteen chicks. He adds action shit into his movies, stunts and shit." With such an adept organizer, the fiesta was certain to be nothing if not festive. Besides essentials such as a dominatrix and a she-male, the bachelor bash included "a little skinny girl and a big fat girl who put a double dong in between each other," Jonathan reminisced. "Then there was, like, an eight-girl orgy, and I was right in the middle." (Note from me: Ooookay.)
- The only thing proved at the Big Day Out festival was that if Korn wanted to enjoy themselves while in transit, they had better pick the bands themselves. Not only did Courtney Love turn out to be less than amiable, but Marilyn Manson did a complete about face, going so far as to actually bash Korn during his performance and baiting Jonathan to—among other things—suck his member. Courtney Love went in for more of the same, saying "I really like picking on Korn. I sort of turned it into an art form, and it made me really happy to pick on them, but then I realized that Jonathan is just kind of this loser, weak, sweet little guy."
- (Jonathan, in response) "I thought it was funny, because both those bands are so bitter and jealous towards us that all they did was talk about us and I just keep hearing all this talk. It was just getting ridiculous. Courtney said that she made an art out of picking on us, and Manson said a whole bunch of stuff. I actually knocked him out onstage. He called me out, he said some pretty band things about me in front of fifty thousand people, and I took him out right there on stage. I felt pretty good about myself when he was whimpering at my feet."
- (cont.) In fact, on several occasions, Courtney Love actually had to lose her shirt to get a rise out of the Korn- and Manson-enamored audiences. Love’s cognizance of her own strictly limited appeal was evidenced by the question she kept putting out to the audience: "I can bring Korn back, you know—do you want Korn?"
- (Jonathan) "The mainstream didn’t want anything to do with us until this record. Even now, they give us the least attention possible. They have to play us and write about us because it’s gotten to the point of where it hurts them to ignore us. See, nobody on the inside really likes Korn. I think we’ll always be on the outside, and from that point we’re always looking in."
- With David nursing his fatigued wrist through most of May 1999, the guys were able to relax with the baby Korns, hit the strip clubs, think about their imminent studio venture, and reflect upon the events of the past twelve months. Considering all that had come to pass, there was no shortage of food for thought. After all, it hadn’t been a year since they’d first broken through to mainstream audiences. In the months that had followed, they had launched their own annual package tour. Orgy’s "Candyass", the first album to be released by their record label, had at last turned gold. The biggest names in hip-hop, such as Ice Cube, Outkast, Naughty by Nature, and Wu-Tang Clan, had embraced their genre-splicing efforts. They’d inked a deal, reportedly in the high six figures, with Adidas archnemeses at Puma, Inc. and changed their style accordingly. They’d guested on several of their friends’ albums, not the least of which was Limp Bizkit’s triple-platinum-within-two-months-of-release "Significant Other", and appeared on a host of compilation CDs. To cap it all off, there was the invitation to take their rightful place among the recording industry’s best and brightest at Woodstock ’99. All in all, a smashing year for a band that had been overlooked by the Grammys. Indeed the general consensus seemed to be that Korn had single-handedly rescued hard guitar rock from the clutches of irrelevance.
- Like an asteroid, they came out of nowhere, traversing tremendous distances at the speed of light to show up as a blip on the periphery of the cultural radar. Even then, no one save a few so-called madmen believed that a day would come when Korn would leave a dent the size of the Grand Canyon on the very face of the rock ‘n’ roll landscape, wiping out any signs of the Mesozoic era (read, Grunge Age), and give rise to a brand-new species of rock band. In these eyes, if not always in their own, they’ve earned the right to wear the laurel wreath for life. To quote Jonathan, "There’s tons [of imitators]…But we’ll always have that we fuckin’ created it."