By John Pecorelli
Cover story for Guitar World magazine, January 2000
A small group of gang members huddles in the chilly Chicago afternoon a half-block from Trax Recording Studios, a modest old brick block that blends perfectly into the post-industrial decay comprising this end of Larrabee Street . Trax is best known as the haunt of Al Jourgensen—a.k.a. Ministry—it was here that he churned out some of last decade's roughest, heaviest sounds, and you can see the appeal of this neighborhood for him: Looks like an easy place to cop.
Inside the studio, where a slew of gold and platinum records adorn the foyer wall, a pair of attractive black women lounge comfortably on a lobby couch. Slowly filing by in front of them are members of one of this decade's roughest and heaviest bands, Korn. The women scrutinize.
“Who's that?” one asks.
“That would be Korn,” somebody answers.
“Oh, look out! Those boys are hard,” the other woman says gravely.
A few minutes later, David, Fieldy, Head, Jonathon and Munky are hooked up with individual mikes and headphones, and each is provided a print rundown of the day's work. Trash-talking and goofing around gives way to a serious sense of purpose as the engineers patch through a vocal coach from Los Angeles and prepare to roll tape. After a couple of initial performance run-throughs, Korn waits quietly for the coach's input. This is what he tells them:
“That's way too gay sounding. Think dorky gay, not buttfucking gay!”
Everyone bursts out laughing—and then Korn begin practicing their lines again. Not to fear, Korn isn't here to lay down tracks for the much-anticipated upcoming record Issues . They're merely doing voiceovers for “ South Park ,” the sick-o animated cable series everyone has been talking about since last Christmas. The vocal coach? “ South Park ” co-creator Matt Stone. He drew the band up, sent ‘em the pix, and asked if they'd appear as featured guests on the season's premiere episode—coincidentally the Halloween special. Even though they were on their own Family Values tour unexpectedly (filling in for DMX) and time was tight—when “ South Park ” calls, Korn jumps.
And they prove to be good students–their vocal inflections soon perfected for cartoonland. It's amazing—somehow Matt Stone has coaxed the band called by one moralist in the Michigan school system “indecent, vulgar and obscene” into sounding disarmingly, well, dorky-gay, transforming their typically blunt street lingo into the milquetoast lexicon of “The Brady Bunch”: “Golly!” “Oh, boy!” and “Gosh.” Reminding them one more time of the exact mood he wants, Stone counsels the band again, “Think cheesy and gay!”
“Thanks for having us on the ‘cheesy and gay' episode, by the way,” retorts David with a snicker.
Later that night at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Korn ceases entirely to be dorky. The live show is, as always, explosive. Showing no signs of a band that has spent the better part of a year writing and recording, Korn fire one massive salvo after another at the crowd: “Faget,” “Blind,” “A.D.I.D.A.S.”—all build and blow apart with the subtlety of a nail bomb. There's nothing fancy about the presentation, and precious little banter between band and audience; you've seen ‘em once, you've seen them a thousand times. But every time they'll blow you away.
Something is different tonight, however. A couple of tracks the fans are unfamiliar with make their appearance: “Beg for Me” and “Falling Away From Me.” It's Korn, to be sure, but there's a stylistic fluidity in evidence at which the band's earlier work only hinted. Both tunes will be on Issues , and both are indicative of the album as a whole—and of Korn, mach II. These are tunes, first and foremost. They are incendiary devices only secondarily. Korn's nearly schizophrenic musical dynamic spawned an entire genre of imitators and borrowers, now the forefathers look ready to shed their skin. A matter worth investigating.
The next afternoon, Munky and Head are hanging out backstage at the Keil Center in St. Louis . There they are, the twin towers of modern guitar, whose dark, heavier-than-Led sonic mayhem has inspired countless players in today's heavy rock scene. And they're such a soft-spoken, courteous pair that it makes you wonder how all that brutal onstage intensity can burst forth from these cats without it actually devouring them.
“Hey, I'm getting married,” Munky says matter-of-factly.
Say what?
“I'm getting married—finally. I'm the last one. January 22nd. Gonna do it quick and painless.”
Vegas?
“Not that painless! We're doing it up in Carmel [ California ].”
Congrats are in order. Then it's on to business. I want to know about this brave new Korn I witnessed the night prior. But before we get to that, we need to take inventory on the old Korn and what, exactly, defines the genre they created. This band has been tagged everything in the book, from “new metal” to “thrash-metal” to “rap-metal” to “thrash-rap” to “pimp rock.” The first one makes sense in an extremely vague, non-creative sort of way, but the latter four—I mean, who's coming up with this nonsense?
“I don't know,” Munky says, “but I hate it. I don't think anyone ever came up with anything good to call us. I like hip hop, I'm a fan of it. But I don't want to be associated with it anymore—everyone's doing it. And Limp Bizkit has it cornered. They do it well. They can carry the hip-hop/metal torch—we don't want it. And how did they come up with ‘thrash-metal?' Thrash? Remember that stuff? So there was heavy metal, then it got heavier so it was thrash-metal—and we're that? I don't fuckin' know.”
“I don't care,” adds Head tiredly, picking at a plate of Cajun-spiced shrimp. “We're probably all of it. Probably. Metal, though? That was the ‘70s. Where did that term even come from?”
Maybe it wasn't just the Steppenwolf lyric “heavy metal thunder”—maybe it was because of all the heavy bands with metals in their names back in the day: Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, and so on.
“Yeah, that's it!” exclaims Munky, then pauses. “So then we're vegetable rock?”
Later, Jonathon puzzles over the same question in his dressing room—but he doesn't puzzle for long.
“All I know is I'm totally playing off this ‘new metal' bullshit,” he says, jumping off the sofa to grab a studded leather jacket with matching leather trousers from his wardrobe case. He holds it up proudly. “I don't think people have seen shit like this since Rob Halford! It's like, ‘Dude, if you're gonna fuckin' accuse me of being metal, I'm gonna be so fuckin' hell-bent-for-leather metal that it hurts!” he laughs, sitting back down.
“Halford—that was a leatherman, and that became what metal was,” he says. “They were pushing the limits, I guess, and I like that. I'm trying to do some of that myself, but not over the top. More just skating along. Look at this…” and he jumps back up to the wardrobe case and procures a most heinous, studded white-leather getup. “White!” he snickers. “Metal.”
If Korn was a metal band, it was a new species indeed, one whose origins still remain stubbornly mysterious. There's nothing in rock's fossil record to anticipate their sudden appearance in 1992—and the closest thing to a transitional species is Rage Against the Machine, which is somehow insufficient, given that Jonathon doesn't rap and Rage doesn't do 7-string heaviness. Each member of Korn acknowledges listening to the rap-metal pioneers, and each attests to their greatness, but as a straight-up influence, no. Nine Inch Nails has been mentioned too—the band sharply denies any musical influence even while praising Reznor's work and puzzling over his publicly espoused hatred of Limp Bizkit. (Incidentally, Reznor told me in late June that there was “no rock” anymore—save for Korn and “if you're feeling particularly bland, Rob Zombie”). One kid at the Allstate Arena said Limp Bizkit influenced Korn, though he either didn't check the release dates or didn't tell me about Fred Durst's time machine. (Durst by the way, has gone on record saying Korn's debut album “touched me hard.”) Perhaps the first Prong record, 1987's grindcore-defining Primitive Origins , hints at a few things Korn, as do bits of early Faith No More. But the sound of Korn, from the self-titled 1995 debut up through 1998's Follow the Leader , was fully its own beast. And people took notice.
So how on earth did five guys from Bakersfield come up with the sound that changed the world? Just how did they earn the tag “the Metallica of the ‘90s”? Once, after hearing me rephrase that question about 50 ways in an interview, Fieldy broke down and dropped the secret Korn formula, remarkable in its simplicity: “We listened to all these death metal bands, and some of it had that real heavy groove. It grooved and it was dark. So we had to figure out how to make that shit really hip, really bouncin' and hoppin'. Just slow that shit down, take out all the solos, and make it hop.”
Maybe that's all there is to it. In any case, for Korn's eventual place in rock's social strata, to “take out all the solos” was akin to committing blasphemy. That's what punk rock bands did, not what supposed metal bands did. No matter to them.
“Actually,” Munky admits, “we grew up playing guitar solos and practicing them. It was the thing. It was like the whole build-up of the song was about that! The high point of the song wasn't the chorus—it was the guitar solo after the chorus. We just thought that was kind of egotistical.”
“It's boring, too,” agrees Head. “It just got dull.”
“Yeah. How come there's no bass solo in every song?” asks Munky. “So we kinda, as a band, create something together , where we all can step up to the podium and shine and do our thing.”
“Just get more intense with the song, more melodic or whatever,” adds Head.
“Or let the vocal do something,” continues Munky. “Not a vocal solo, though. Because the solo thing has been done and done, over and over. How many times have you gone to sleep in a guitar passage? We just thought it was old hat.”
“And you don't hear it so much anymore,” chuckles Head. “There's no one doing solos nowadays! The really great players must be mad at us bands now!”
Where are the really great players these days, anyway?
“VH1,” says Munky flatly. “'Where Are They Now?'”
Musically, Issues represents a departure from the traditional Korn sound. Added to the mix are dark waves of didgeradoo and Mellotron, giving it an eerie, psychedelic feel, which is accentuated by Jonathon's latest vocal technique: soaring harmonizations. Coloring much of the record, from the bagpipe-based opener “Dead” and the first single, “Falling Away From Me” (set to air on Korn's episode of “South Park” Oct. 27) to the 8-minute closing track, “Dirty,” these haunting and beautiful harmonizations recall the vocal work of groups like the Byrds. Seriously. An intentional nod to the experimental spirit of the lysergically altered ‘60s? No, says Jonathon flatly.
“Vocally, it was ELO and the Carpenters and shit like that,” he explains. “I was just trying to think fuckin' sick. And like ‘Dead'–it's so happy and all, just like the Carpenters. But I was all about sick-ass shit. The contrast is fuckin' awesome…But [ Issues ] is like heavy psychedelia,” he finally concedes. “It just takes you somewhere. Everybody's been comparing it to Pink Floyd, Genesis, that kind of vibe. I always joke that people are gonna be taking mushrooms to it and getting fucked on acid. I listen to it at night on the headphones and I think, ‘Fuck, this is some trippy, weird shit.'
“And no one's doing it!” he continues. “We've always had to be innovators just to keep our heads up and not get lost in all the shit. I wouldn't say it's hard for us, but it's frustrating…. It's hard when you do something like we did and everybody just sort of bites off you. It's cool for a while, but then it makes even us seem kind of played out. Even though we started the whole thing.”
Munky seconds the thought. “Someone in a band, I can't remember who—it doesn't matter—was telling me the other day, ‘Man, you faggots. We wanna be heavy, but everything we play sounds like you guys. Every song we write ends up sounding like Korn.' Well, they're really gonna be thrown by this record! The single [‘Falling Away from Me'] is the only song on it that even sounds like that classic Korn sound.”
“Yeah,” agrees Head. “We just experimented a lot more.”
“We did,” Munky affirms. “And we knew when we wrote this one that we were going to have to do something really great. Because our last record was commercially successful, we knew we had to dig deep this time. I think we just went inside of ourselves and tried to bring it all out personally.”
For Jonathon, it was more personal than ever. Months back, after casually glancing through the singer's lyric book, Fieldy proclaimed, “Man, you got issues,” and thus was born the album's moniker. While track titles such as “Am I Going Crazy,” “Trash,” and “Make Me Bad” make it look like business-as-usual for the raucous SoCal quintet, looks can be deceiving. Issues is, in fact, a concept record as harrowing as The Wall in many ways, tracing with pointed acumen Jonathon's maladjustment to fame and his problems with substance abuse.
“From the time we started Family Values until I got better,” he says somberly, “it was just anxiety and me going straight crazy. I did, I went completely, fucked-up kookoo. I had to go to the doctor—I got on the medicine and I'm all good now. But the whole album's about what I was feeling, thoughts I had. I was ready to kill myself… Kids don't know what the fuck I went through. As for the fans—well, you all fuckin' drove me fuckin' insane. But if it wasn't for you, I'd be dead anyway. Kind of a catch-22. We've always dealt with shit, we're about that. But more, this album is just going out, playing the music and showing them what the fuck's up, what I went through.”
Truth be told, Jonathon's difficulties coping with the pressure of life in the public eye date back some years. In mid-1997, nearing the end of more than two years of touring Life is Peachy , he confided, “I honestly don't know why I'm stressing. I'm in an awesome band, I'm traveling the world, writing songs…I'm changing peoples' lives. Why am I hating it so bad?” He admitted to a tranquilizer addiction and a proclivity for Jack and Cokes that was to become near-legendary in the following years. He also spoke of cleaning up. He had a little boy, Nathan, and the last kind of father Jonathon wanted to be was one like his own: a musician in Buck Owens' band who often left home to tour, and was often drunk when when he wasn't touring.
So Jonathon took the plunge, got sober. One benefit was immediate. The writing and recording of Issues was downright speedy relative to the production time of Follow the Leader. Partial credit must go to Brendan O'Brien, whose production style—employed previous by Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and Stone Temple Pilots—was to keep moving at all costs. If the band hit a creative snag, they'd back the tape up to a previously recorded but unfinished idea and try to flesh it out instead. In the Leader sessions, they'd merely call it day and go home. O'Brien is credited by everyone in the band, but that's only part of the story.
“When we went into the studio, Jon had no lyrics, nothing,” says Head. “Sometimes he wrote the songs like an hour before he sang them—lyrics and melodies.” Davis was even more ambituous about his role on "The rest of us had gone to an awards show,” says Head, “and by the time we got back, he'd written it, sang backups and everything. We got back and were like, ‘Oh my god! '”
“And wait till you hear it,” adds Munky. “That song is amazing.”
What was his trick?
“I think he's just, uhhh…” Munky pauses, “…sober.”
“He's been that way for a year. No cigarettes, no alcohol, nothing,” nods Head.
“His mind is clear. There's nothing in the way now. Melody just flows out of him.”
Jonathon agrees.
“A lot of it was Brendan,” he says of the production pace. “And a lot of it was that I didn't have to sing songs 50 times over because I was so fucked up.”
Whatever benefits Korn is experiencing as a result of Davis's sobriety, there is an ironic downside. Life for recovering addicts is no cakewalk; they often wake up to see the old monsters that drugs or alcohol put on hold staring them right in face. Sometimes they trade the spoon for the fork, as Mudhoney once put it, or they get bloated on religion instead. Sometimes they drop back into substance abuse. And sometimes they triumph and grow from the whole experience.
As for Davis, he seems to be having a difficult time these days. However focused he was in the studio, he does not come across that way in the interview. He fidgets, looks away frequently, trails off into non sequitur now and then. It's a state of compulsive agitation that, considering Davis's sobriety, brings to mind one of the group's recent hits: "Freak on a Leash."
Davis says something about the recording of Issues being like “downfall,” and that all there is to do now is “crawl back up.” He characterizes the past year as “really fucked,” then dismisses a query about the difficulty of sobering up with a simple, “I've had to be really strong,” adding cryptically, “I know I'm gonna die.” It's dangerous to infer too much from an hour-long interview, but it seems as though the troubled singer is dealing with more “issues” than ever.
Certainly none of this has softened his lyrics. They remain as bluntly autobiographical as ever. Likewise, Davis's temperance hasn't dulled his band's attack. True, Issues isn't stunning for the severity of its rage, as Korn's monumental debut album was. Nor does it shock with the kind of towering, studio-sculpted sonic constructs that typified Follow the Leader. Instead, Issues astounds with the weight of its songwriting. In place of the band's signature terse, choppy dynamic is unexpected fluidity; in place of jolting explosiveness are thoughtful arrangements, mature pacing, and really good songs. But make no mistake, this album is not without moments of sheer brutality.
“Yeah, we changed it up a lot. But it's still Korn,” Davis says. "It's like Follow the Leader was the last chapter in that kind of music. You can only go so far, and everyone's taken a bite out of it and diluted it and did everything that we've done, so much that it's just ridiculous. We had to change up a little bit and remember what we are.”
But Davis also had personal reasons for making the change. “I could only scream so much. And [on] this one I wasn't so much pissed; I was hurt and scared and didn't know what was gonna happen—if I was gonna die or what. I do scream, but it's different. If you wanna hear screaming listen to the other ones. I just gotta do some new shit.”
Fortunately for Davis, his bandmates feel the same way. To that end, Korn recently showcased the album by performing it live, top to bottom, with full orchestra and choir the evening before its release date. And the venue? New York City 's famed Apollo Theatre—the legendary 85-year-old structure that's played host to some of America 's most storied black performers: Bessie Smith, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, on and on.
A concept album performed in its entirety with full orchestra smacks distinctly of ‘70s prog rock excessiveness (anyone remember Emerson, Lake & Palmer's doomed 1977 tour with full orchestra?). But Korn has never balked at daunting prospects. Starting their own label, Elementree, two years ago garnered them a few smirks within the industry. But when the first signed act (Orgy) went platinum, cynics were hushed. Similarly, the Family Values tour, Korn's ambitious version of Lollapalooza, has seen a 30-percent increase in ticket sales from its first year to this, according to Pollstar. And the task of getting their first two albums to go Platinum with virtually no help from radio or MTV may have seemed daunting too. But they did it–with relentless touring and consistently good live shows. All things considered, these five guys from Bakersfield have accomplished a hell of a lot. You gotta wonder what's left to prove. Munky's quick to answer.
“Just appreciation from other musicians,” he says. “Yesterday in Chicago I had a friend of Jonathon's tell me, ‘I never really liked any of your music. But Jonathon played your new album and I really like it.'”
“No way! That skinny guy?” asks Head.
“Yeah–and we're not a type of band that he likes, you know. He said, ‘And I'd tell you too. I heard it from beginning to end and it really blew me away.' He's honest, so it's cool.”
“Either that or he wants a job,” Head chuckles.
Munky continues, undeterred. “One thing that I really like about this album: no guest appearances, no hip hop. It's just a good rock record. It's just Korn.”
So what, exactly, is Korn these days?
“Well, we kinda just go for a really dark–I don't know. What would you say, Head?”
“Ass-kickin' metal,” he laughs.
“Yes, dude,” says Munky, looking back at me with a big grin. “Ass-kickin' metal.”
SIDEBAR
Boogie Nights: The Simple Truth Beind Korn's Deceptively Complex Sound
Korn's widely imitated guitar sound has been called “the tapping of the ‘90s” by the editor of this magazine. From arena stages to practice pads and basements, guitarists the globe over are trying to approximate the low, gnarly tones Munky and Head coax from their setups.
What, exactly, is the secret recipe for heavy? The members of Korn, as well as their guitar tech Michael “Caco” Villalovos, contend that there is none.
“It's all based around your rig and your guitar,” says Villalovos. “Using the 7-string guitar and the Mesa Boogie amps—there's nothing but deep right there.”
Korn's use of the Ibanez RG7 with the low B tuned down to A is no big mystery. In addition, Korn utilize a variety of effects—everything from the Steve Vai-popularized Digitech XP-100 Whammy Wah to basic Boss chorus and reverb boxes, plus an array of funky Electro-Harmonix products. Munky has 17 pedals at his foot's disposal, by the way. But none of these helps them get any lower on the heaviness scale. The real deal there, says Munky, is what they play, not what they play through.
“You know the dissonant chords we play? That out-of-key sound? Well, if you put the right bass note behind it, it sounds like Korn. If you play some of the chords that we do just by themselves, it sounds wrong. But by putting the right bass note behind it—and the right groove—that's how we do it.”
Villalovos concurs.
“That's actually it, man,” he says. “Just a straight, direct tone. There's nothing hiding behind the sound. It's all in the riffs that they do.”