Turning a Big Korner : Bright Year Seen for H.B.-Based Band as Album Sales Boom

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  The signs of burgeoning success were evident as the members of Korn gathered recently at their rehearsal studio in a suburban warehouse block.

Reggie Arvizu, the chunky, baggily clad bass player who goes by the stage name Fieldy, had just tuned in KROQ on the stereo of his new black Mercedes. The howling and tormented song he heard brought him only pleasure: It was “Blind,” one of Korn’s own.

The band members were reconvening from their first extended break after more than a year of touring, and there was backslapping bonhomie all around.

Guitarist James “Munkey” Shaffer was delighted with the $1,000 Christmas bonus check and Swiss army watch he’d gotten from Korn’s record company, Immortal/Epic.

Fieldy excitedly ticked off the latest weekly sales figures for the debut album, “Korn”--”27,000 this week, and we did 17,000 last week,” he enthused, quoting totals for late December.

The band, made up of five rockers from Bakersfield who gravitated to Huntington Beach in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, had been faring well even before those holiday-rush numbers started rolling in.

Sales were approaching 400,000 since the album’s October 1994 release. And now Korn was ready to get back to work--a two-month arena tour opening for Ozzy Osbourne to ring in what, for Korn, could be a leap year in more ways than one (the tour reaches the Forum in Inglewood on Feb. 29).

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For Jonathan Davis, Korn’s singer and lyricist, the chief rewards lately have been emotional rather than material. In October he became the father of a son, Nathan. And as Korn’s following grows, Davis senses, he is becoming a big-brother figure to many young fans who find something of themselves in his unrelenting, often-harrowing depictions of the dark side of growing up.

Davis and his band mates don’t pull any punches with their unrelievedly harsh, hammering metallic rock. In “Faget,” a protagonist deemed insufficiently macho by his peers is harassed and taunted to the point of explosion. “Daddy” is an unsparing primal scream of a song in which Davis makes uncomfortably palpable the rage and grief of a young incest victim confronting his parents.

As Davis sits talking with an interviewer in an office adjacent to Korn’s barn-like, high-ceilinged rehearsal room, it’s suggested that he has been playing with some lyrical and thematic dynamite.

He has turned an anti-gay epithet into the scream-along refrain of “Faget” (clearly not with abusive or bigoted intent, but for the sake of realism, although he admits not all listeners get the distinction), and has delved into the horror and anguish of child abuse.

He nods, and smiles for a moment before he responds to that question about pushing buttons that could give offense: “Somebody had to have the balls to do it.”

Offstage at least, Davis hardly looks or acts the role of a roaring, rage-venting punk-metal firebrand. His features are soft and boyish, the mouth almost rabbit-like. His voice is mild, its tone polite. His shuffling, nervous body language betrays a fellow who doesn’t seem entirely at home in his tall, skinny, slightly stooped frame.

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Korn’s music has stylistic links to Rage Against the Machine, the Rollins Band and Nine Inch Nails, but Davis seems a breed apart from the revolutionary agitator, the muscled titan and the dark lord of depression who respectively front those bands.

He does sport extremist tattoos on either shoulder. “HIV,” on the left, is the nickname his band mates gave him because of his scrawny, unhealthy appearance when he first joined Korn. The sinister design on his right shoulder depicts, as Davis describes it, “a clown pope, laughing at Christ on the cross.” But the tattoos almost seem an anomaly in a fellow who, out of the spotlight, is anything but confrontational.

Perhaps it’s more useful and honest to have a gawky-looking young Everyman, rather than a titan of rage, deliver the kinds of tales Davis has to tell.

“I can’t tell you how many kids come up to me [after concerts], bawling” from the cathartic impact of Korn’s songs. Ultimately, Davis said, enacting some of the worst agonies of growing up is not an exercise in darkness: “It brings happiness. They feel a bit better that somebody else went through that. People always bag on angst-ridden singers, but it does a lot of good. It lets kids vent those feelings and feel better about it. So it’s positive. I think about it at night, [how] all these kids look up to me that way.”

What they’re getting is no put-on, Davis said. “I sing about what’s in my heart. It’s got to be true.”

“Clown” and “Faget,” both about the torments one can suffer in youth for being perceived as different, are portraits of his younger self.

“I was in the New Romantic scene, with Duran Duran [as a role model], wearing makeup. I got called a ‘fag’ by the jocks. I couldn’t walk through the halls without hearing that or being picked on.”

Davis said he took some imaginative license with “Daddy,” but he doesn’t consider the song fictitious. He said he was molested as a boy, but by somebody outside his family.

“That was my vent. I’d never gotten it out,” he said of the studio performance, which proved to be the last of the handful of times Davis ever sang the song.

“Daddy” ends with the singer collapsed in a paroxysm of sobbing while the tape rolls. Given the subject matter, Davis says, he had a “hellifying” time explaining “Daddy” to his family after Korn’s album came out. “I had a long talk with my dad about it. Good things came of it. Now we’re best of friends.”

If Davis goes to unusual extremes in Korn, he already had plenty of extreme experience in a day job perhaps unprecedented in music history. Starting in his senior year of high school, and continuing until he joined Korn at 22, Davis worked as a part-time autopsy assistant for the Kern County coroner’s office--a job he got through a school-based career placement program.

“It’s a fix, a rush. There’s some kind of power involved when you’re cutting up a human body,” Davis said. “It’s not a sick thing, but it’s really a fix.”

“He was reluctant at first,” recalled Jim Malouf, the chief deputy coroner who was Davis’ supervisor. “When Jonathan came in, he didn’t know if he’d be able to handle it. But he got so interested in it, and he became very knowledgeable. We lost a good autopsy assistant there when he left Bakersfield.”

Davis can tell some horrific firsthand tales about the physiology of sudden death, its myriad shocking and ghastly causes and its technical implications for those charged with handling and examining the victims. But he said that what he drew from coroner’s work was more than a morbid fascination, and he has no desire to write macabre songs based on that chapter of his life.

“That’s for a death-rock band, singing about death and destruction,” he said. “The only thing it did was make me appreciate life more, and my feelings more.”

While Davis was spending his teens “cutting up bodies and listening to Duran Duran,” as he puts it, the other members of Korn were getting their act together in Bakersfield as a heavy-metal band.

Fieldy, Munkey (as Shaffer likes to be called) and drummer David Silveria started out as 16-year-olds, modeling themselves after glam-rockers such as Poison. But they soon came under the influence of bands with tougher sounds and visions, including Faith No More and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

By 1992 they were in Huntington Beach, sharing a house near the shore and trying to catch a break in the record business. Another old Bakersfield buddy, Brian “Head” Welch, had been added as a second guitarist to beef up the sound.

On a trip back to Bakersfield, Munkey and Welch discovered Davis by chance: They were walking out a club when he began wailing as front man for a band called Sex Art. They were smitten, and within weeks Davis had said farewell to his ambition to one day be a deputy coroner.

“The vibe felt perfect,” he said, recalling his audition session in Huntington Beach. “I knew we could go somewhere with it.”

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Nearly four years later, Korn has played an estimated 250 or more “somewheres” in the 15 months since its album came out, building a large grass-roots following, largely by word of mouth.

Davis has gained enough stature among Korn’s fans to be the subject of rumors on the Internet, which he takes with a mixture of fascination and disdain.

“There’s a lot of people talking about me having AIDS and being gay, and being a heroin user. People need something to talk about. I know what I am.”

At this point, Davis said, one thing he and his band mates are not is rich: “We’re not even middle class. We all live in apartments, and you struggle.”

While most of the others in Korn bought fancy cars, hoping the money will continue to pour in, Davis, the newly minted family man with baby bills to pay, said he got his girlfriend a sensible Honda Civic. He doesn’t drive much himself, owing to his days with the coroner’s office: “I’ve seen too many people annihilated, and it scares me.”

Aside from an occasional raw throat, near-constant touring hasn’t brought any strain, Davis said: “This is a big team thing. We’re the tightest, the bestest friends. We’ve been on the road for a year, and none of us fight.”

Helping to keep the Korn tour bus smiling are the surprisingly un-metallic musical selections they like to listen to for fun: Davis is still keen on Duran Duran, Flock of Seagulls, Missing Persons and other lightweight ‘80s techno-popsters; Welch likes Boyz II Men and Phil Collins, Silveria goes for the Bee Gees and ABBA, while Fieldy is a hip-hop lover and Munkey favors avant-gardists such as Mr. Bungle and John Zorn.

With all that success, accord and fluffy ear-candy in the air, what’s a wrath-rock band to do when show time approaches and it’s important to get into the proper mood?

“I picture what the songs are about, what I went through,” Davis said. “Or I’ll make up stuff just to get me going. One time I imagined one of the other band members with my chick. I’ve pictured all of them with my chick.

“[They’re] my best friends in the whole wide world, and thinking about that, it gives you a weird feeling in the stomach,” he said. “It just works. Then the music starts, and you instantly go into that vibe. The first power chord hits, and we’re transformed. Everything’s serious, and we’re doing what we do.”

* Korn opens for Ozzy Osbourne on Feb. 29 at the Forum, 3900 W. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood. 8 p.m. $25, $35. (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).