Korn, Kerrang! July 14, 2010

FOR MOST bands there comes a time in their career when, creatively, they more or less call it day. They’ve already racked up vast album sales, they have a loyal fan base in front whom they can tour when the coffers are low, they have hot wives, mansions and fast cars. Frankly, why the hell bother anymore?
A lot of people assumed that Korn had already reached that point. Their last two albums were nothing very special at all. There was sheen in spades, but there was precious little depth, heart or soul. Still, those albums allowed Korn to play some good festivals, put together a few solid tours, earn a few bucks. The nice car fund was intact.
Most of their fans, meanwhile, would put up with the new songs if it meant they heard the old hits once in a while. And so it was that Korn seemed content in their little backwater, gently fading from relevance, their time on the artistic register expired.
Theirs had been a career of some note too. Though they may not have invented it, they certainly pioneered nu-metal, becoming the genre’s first superstars in the mid-90s. Formed in Bakersfield in 1993 out of the ashes of funk-metal band L.A.P.D., they teamed up with the producer Ross Robinson – who would later mastermind Slipknot’s early, essential work – and he went about harnessing the darkness of singer Jonathan Davis, an ex-mortuary worker with more than a little turbulence of mind. Set to a relentlessly bleak, heavy and down-tuned backing, the then speed-addicted Davis poured out his heart on Korn’s debut about the abuse, bullying, child-rape and questions about sexual identity that had come to dominate his life.
Their second album, Life Is Peachy, was again produced by Robinson and maintained similarly intense themes, before third album Follow The Leader, in which they changed producers and left behind some of their darkness, made them global superstars. Issues, their fourth album, was equally massive and similarly less driven by catharsis.
But it was then, while at the top of nu-metal’s tree, that the panic attacks, drug and drink reliance and depression that, until then, Davis had kept in check span out of control. And as he went off the rails, so his band began to revel in their party lifestyle.
At the beginning of the millennium, Korn were touring in a private jet, driving fast cars and, in guitarist James ‘Munky’ Shaffer’s case buying $125,000 speedboats on whims. Bassist Reginald ‘Fieldy’ Arvizu, inspired by his hip-hop heroes, lead a lifestyle centred chiefly around strippers, lap-dancing clubs and bling (there was a time when he would ask girls to sign a disclaimer before they partied at his house, just in case they fell off the stripper’s pole he’d installed). His disastrous and subsequent solo hip-hop album, Rock ‘N’ Roll Gangster, was a lesson in the perils of believing your own hype.
So it doesn’t take a genius to work out quite where the band begun to fall off the creative radar. Surrounded by all the trappings of the millionaire rock star, their music drifted from the realities of their troubled Bakersfield childhoods into, well, nothing much. Inoculated against his memories that had driven his music – including conducting autopsies on abused children and being called “a faggot” by his peers when growing up – Davis began to leave the relentlessly personal material that had made the band’s name, meanwhile the rest of Korn celebrated the vacuum of the rarefied air which they breathed.
Their fifth album, Untouchables, cost a reported $4 million to make, and didn’t sell anything like as many copies as a budget like that might demand. Their guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch found God and ran screaming from the band as sixth album Take A Look In The Mirror suffered yet more creative problems. Seventh album See You On The Other Side and their untitled eighth record were hardly triumphs, with the latter being their least successful selling to date, while drummer David Silveria had already jumped ship. To say this was a band on the slide was to put it mildly.
So it was that Korn appeared to be shuffling off: shedding band members, losing direction and generally heading for the nu-metal retirement home. What, then, nobody expected to them to do was what they did next: head into a grubby 10 foot by 10 foot studio, work once again with their very first producer, Robinson, and then encourage him to rip them apart so as they might access the very feelings of loathing, terror, anger and horror that made them start the band in the first place.
They tore up their pampered lives, reconnected with their fury and fears and then emptied it all onto a record. It’s not the route most nearly 40-year-old multi-millionaires take.
And the results are Korn’s best album in years – deep, dark, raw and open. It was a brave step. But it was about the only thing that was going to keep their career alive.
IT’S A few weeks before Korn III – Remember Who You Are is due to be released and Korn are in Las Vegas. Last night was a day off from the band’s pre-album tour of the States; Davis went home to visit his family in Los Angeles, Fieldy and new drummer Ray Luzier kept things sensible though are not present today for interviews, but Munky went out and partied. He spent last night with an old friend, a member of the performance troupe the Blue Man Group.
“I went over to see them at the Venetian and hung out for a little while,” he says. “It was amazing, I was blown away by their performance. It’s nice to go somewhere and be entertained by music but for it not to have to be you playing it. I’m always entertaining everybody.”
He rounded off the evening in fine style, drinking into the night, partying in his room at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and generally having a swell old time. The problem is that it’s the next morning now and, well, Munky is still quite drunk. He knows there are photo shoots to be conducted, he knows there are interviews to be done but, really, he’d rather be sipping the potent Bloody Mary he’s clutching by the pool.
There are reasons for Munky’s drunkenness and they are not simply that he fancies a cocktail at 11am. His singer, Davis, will fret for him later in the evening – after a slightly shambolic live performance in which the guitarist misses most of the notes he’s trying to play – saying: “Oh, my poor boy. I worry about him. He’s going through a dark time right now and he doesn’t know how to cope.”
The precise nature of that dark time is private though, today, it’s taking one hell of an alcoholic battering.
But then Munky is not the only member of Korn to have recently been through a dark time. The recording of their ninth album was a singularly oppressive period for the band. First, they had to come to the difficult but necessary realisation that their last few records weren’t very good. Second, they had to delve into their souls.
“I think we had lost ourselves,” is Davis’ opinion of where the band were before the recording of Korn III. “On Untitled, I think we hit a wall creatively.”
“We had got away from things,” adds Munky. “I’m not going to lie: we got away from all of it. Our heads were in the clouds. So we felt we needed to peel everything back and bring it back to who we are. We’re some dudes from Bakersfield who were pissed off about our situation and decided to express ourselves through our instruments. We needed to get back to that.”
So they called up their old producer Robinson in the hope of finding that old band again. They went into a tiny studio nicknamed The Cat Box and there they set about reconnecting.
“We finally wrote as a band again there,” says Davis. “On the last two records we just wrote riffs and then pieced them together. On this one we were right in each other’s faces in a 10 foot by 10 foot room. We wrote the whole record there. Hearing everything so loud in that little room, with Ray beating the shit out of his drums, and me singing melody tracks live, was great.”
There was another important aspect of the recording process too. Rather than rely on ProTools gimmickry to bolt the music together as they had in the past, Robinson forced the band to record on tape, telling them that it was much more important to imbue the music with feel, rather than precision.
“We wanted to capture the vibe of the early Korn,” says Davis. “Ross came in and hit the reset button on us. We were recording on two inch tape and there were no click tracks, no crazy editing, none of that shit. The first time we heard it back on a tape, we went, ‘My God! This shit’s got soul.’ It was breathing, the tempos were fluctuating, it had a heartbeat. For us it was pretty incredible. We thought, ‘What the fuck have we been doing?’”
“Ross broke it all down,” says Munky. “He peeled back all the bullshit and just made us fucking go. He would stop us in the middle of takes and say, ‘You motherfuckers are wasting my time. Fuck you, I’m not feeling it.’ So we’d do it again and again and again until we got it. It meant that each track on the record made the hairs on the back of our necks stand up.”
WHEN ROBINSON first worked with Korn in the mid-‘90s he found a way to get inside Davis’s head. Once there, he would prod and push until the singer broke down – then he would set the tapes rolling. Fifteen years later, the producer can still force his way into Davis’s mind.
“Man, he fucking tortured Jonathan,” says Munky. “Poor Jonathan. He would have to pour out some of the most brutal shit and then he’d be in tears driving his truck home. Jonathan was going through turmoil all day long, he was freaking out. Then he’d call Ross, going, ‘What the fuck did you do to me?’”
Davis is someone who says he “feels things very deeply – it’s kind of a curse” and he has been seeing a psychiatrist for years. Since he quit drugs and alcohol 12 years ago he has been on anti-depressants. Robinson, however, ran roughshod over all those issues in order to force the singer to lay his emotions onto the album.
“Making the record was sheer fucking hell,” says Davis. “It was one of the most difficult things in my life. It was fucking torment. [Robinson] put me in a place I didn’t want to be. He put me in a horrible depression where I wanted to kill myself again. It was fucked up. He was just pushing my buttons, tormenting me and fucking me up. He’d find out everything that my lyrics were about then he’d use that shit as ammo while I was singing.”
Robinson would make Davis explain his lyrics in private one-on-one sessions, luring the singer into confiding in him. Then he would pick out any insecurities and rub them in Davis’ face.
“I got back into a position where I trusted him, but then he abused the shit out of [that trust] and that killed me,” says Davis. “I wrote one song as if I was talking to my wife, so he brought her in, sat her down and made me sing it to her. He put her right in front of me and I had to stare her in the eyes and sing it. It was killing me. I didn’t want to do that but that’s the kind of shit he did. He’d stand right in front of my microphone, right in my face, while I was singing because he wanted me to convince him that I meant what I was singing.
“He was sticking a knife deep into my heart. It was fucking brutal. He’s a motherfucker. I literally got to the point where I wanted to die. Fieldy and Munky were worried sick about me. I lost a whole lot of weight, I couldn’t eat, I was rotting away.”
Davis would find himself so caught up in the process that, when he returned home to his wife and children, he felt he couldn’t reveal what had happened in the sessions – “They wouldn’t have understood. I couldn’t let them see that,” he says – so he’d unload everything into either the music or onto his psychiatrist.
“My psychiatrist was saying, ‘Don’t listen to [Robinson], he’s not a psychiatrist, he’s making you go backwards and you’re doing so well’,” says Davis. “I didn’t know what to do. I had a big battle internally. My head was spinning in a zillion different directions.”
THE QUESTION is, why would a successful band put themselves through this if they didn’t need to? In part, the answer is that Korn needed to work out why they were still bothering anymore.
“I was asking myself that everyday,” says Davis. “I was asking why I was doing it. It was about rediscovery. I wanted to make a record that would make people feel again. I didn’t want people just thinking, ‘Oh that’s a cool song’, I wanted them to feel the emotion of what I was going through. You’re listening to me losing my fucking mind.”
And it wasn’t just Davis who bore the brunt of Robinson’s unusual recording techniques. The producer would wander into the studio when the band were playing and grab arms, smash cymbals or yell in the rest of the band’s faces too, all the while shouting his mantra of “I want to feel the violence” at them.
“I would only take it from him,” says Munky. “I wouldn’t take it from anyone else. Only him. Anyone else, I would spit in their face. Ross can take it as far as he wants. I don’t care if he’s burning me with a lighter while I’m trying to play guitar. He can set my head on fire, whatever it takes to get what he needs and feels.”
Because if the band resented Robinson at the time, they all respect him now. Both Munky and Davis talk about their admiration for him, thanking him for putting them through the process as they believe – rightly – that they’ve recorded an album of considerably more substance than anything else they’ve put out in years. The problem was that, for Davis, getting over the recording sessions after opening his psychological can of worms was fraught with difficulties.
“When the album was finished, there was relief because I was drained,” says Davis. “But I also thought, ‘Now what, motherfucker?’ Ross put me through so much and then I had to deal with the ramifications of it.”
But, gradually, a curious thing happened to Davis. Faced with the realisation that Korn had, once again, made an album of raw emotion – rather than mere processed sounds – a sense of well-being and positivity slowly returned. All the rage and paranoia he had vented onto the album had gradually evaporated from his life. In fact, so positive does Davis feel now that, for the first time in 12 years, he is not on any mood-levelling medication at all.
“I feel better than I have in a long time and I think it’s because of this album,” he says. “I’ve been on Prozac for 12 years and I’m off it now. I know what it feels like to be excited and sad again. I haven’t felt like this in 12 years; I’m like a giddy little kid. But it comes at a price because I don’t have anything to level me out, so there are lows now too.”
So how does he deal with those lows? How does he cope with the problems that once drove him to addiction?
“By being a fucking man. You’ve got to put your fucking big boy pants on and face things straight on. You’ve got to have courage. It took everything I had to put what I put on this album for everyone to hear. But it’s the greatest form of art I’ve ever heard. I don’t listen that much to it but, when I do, I fucking feel it and I love it.”
SO 17 years after they first formed, Korn are still here and they’re still doing it. But, unlike many bands – some of whom are playing the nostalgia circuit here in Vegas tonight – there is still depth here. It’s a ballsy decision to take a risk, go against your psychiatrist’s advice and delve into your dark side – all just to entertain the public. It’s certainly a far braver decision than putting out another record of riffs strung together by computers and colour-by-number emotions.
There aren’t many bands of Korn’s stature who would even feel the need to bother, let alone allow themselves to be subjected to a form of torture in making it happen. And so, for that at least, this is band that deserve some respect. They wanted to know if they still felt it, they wanted to know if they still believed in their band, and they cut themselves open to find out.
“This record really made us remember who we are again,” says Davis, the hollow glitz of this city around him a reminder of the shallows they had previously plumbed.
“We realised we’re a band that is still growing,” adds Munky. “If you stare at a tree, it grows slowly and goes through different seasons. The leaves may fall but they always come back. But the roots get deeper all the time.
“And you know what?” he asks before he goes. “I think the leaves are going to be really green this year.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
A lot of people assumed that Korn had already reached that point. Their last two albums were nothing very special at all. There was sheen in spades, but there was precious little depth, heart or soul. Still, those albums allowed Korn to play some good festivals, put together a few solid tours, earn a few bucks. The nice car fund was intact.
Most of their fans, meanwhile, would put up with the new songs if it meant they heard the old hits once in a while. And so it was that Korn seemed content in their little backwater, gently fading from relevance, their time on the artistic register expired.
Theirs had been a career of some note too. Though they may not have invented it, they certainly pioneered nu-metal, becoming the genre’s first superstars in the mid-90s. Formed in Bakersfield in 1993 out of the ashes of funk-metal band L.A.P.D., they teamed up with the producer Ross Robinson – who would later mastermind Slipknot’s early, essential work – and he went about harnessing the darkness of singer Jonathan Davis, an ex-mortuary worker with more than a little turbulence of mind. Set to a relentlessly bleak, heavy and down-tuned backing, the then speed-addicted Davis poured out his heart on Korn’s debut about the abuse, bullying, child-rape and questions about sexual identity that had come to dominate his life.
Their second album, Life Is Peachy, was again produced by Robinson and maintained similarly intense themes, before third album Follow The Leader, in which they changed producers and left behind some of their darkness, made them global superstars. Issues, their fourth album, was equally massive and similarly less driven by catharsis.
But it was then, while at the top of nu-metal’s tree, that the panic attacks, drug and drink reliance and depression that, until then, Davis had kept in check span out of control. And as he went off the rails, so his band began to revel in their party lifestyle.
At the beginning of the millennium, Korn were touring in a private jet, driving fast cars and, in guitarist James ‘Munky’ Shaffer’s case buying $125,000 speedboats on whims. Bassist Reginald ‘Fieldy’ Arvizu, inspired by his hip-hop heroes, lead a lifestyle centred chiefly around strippers, lap-dancing clubs and bling (there was a time when he would ask girls to sign a disclaimer before they partied at his house, just in case they fell off the stripper’s pole he’d installed). His disastrous and subsequent solo hip-hop album, Rock ‘N’ Roll Gangster, was a lesson in the perils of believing your own hype.
So it doesn’t take a genius to work out quite where the band begun to fall off the creative radar. Surrounded by all the trappings of the millionaire rock star, their music drifted from the realities of their troubled Bakersfield childhoods into, well, nothing much. Inoculated against his memories that had driven his music – including conducting autopsies on abused children and being called “a faggot” by his peers when growing up – Davis began to leave the relentlessly personal material that had made the band’s name, meanwhile the rest of Korn celebrated the vacuum of the rarefied air which they breathed.
Their fifth album, Untouchables, cost a reported $4 million to make, and didn’t sell anything like as many copies as a budget like that might demand. Their guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch found God and ran screaming from the band as sixth album Take A Look In The Mirror suffered yet more creative problems. Seventh album See You On The Other Side and their untitled eighth record were hardly triumphs, with the latter being their least successful selling to date, while drummer David Silveria had already jumped ship. To say this was a band on the slide was to put it mildly.
So it was that Korn appeared to be shuffling off: shedding band members, losing direction and generally heading for the nu-metal retirement home. What, then, nobody expected to them to do was what they did next: head into a grubby 10 foot by 10 foot studio, work once again with their very first producer, Robinson, and then encourage him to rip them apart so as they might access the very feelings of loathing, terror, anger and horror that made them start the band in the first place.
They tore up their pampered lives, reconnected with their fury and fears and then emptied it all onto a record. It’s not the route most nearly 40-year-old multi-millionaires take.
And the results are Korn’s best album in years – deep, dark, raw and open. It was a brave step. But it was about the only thing that was going to keep their career alive.
IT’S A few weeks before Korn III – Remember Who You Are is due to be released and Korn are in Las Vegas. Last night was a day off from the band’s pre-album tour of the States; Davis went home to visit his family in Los Angeles, Fieldy and new drummer Ray Luzier kept things sensible though are not present today for interviews, but Munky went out and partied. He spent last night with an old friend, a member of the performance troupe the Blue Man Group.
“I went over to see them at the Venetian and hung out for a little while,” he says. “It was amazing, I was blown away by their performance. It’s nice to go somewhere and be entertained by music but for it not to have to be you playing it. I’m always entertaining everybody.”
He rounded off the evening in fine style, drinking into the night, partying in his room at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and generally having a swell old time. The problem is that it’s the next morning now and, well, Munky is still quite drunk. He knows there are photo shoots to be conducted, he knows there are interviews to be done but, really, he’d rather be sipping the potent Bloody Mary he’s clutching by the pool.
There are reasons for Munky’s drunkenness and they are not simply that he fancies a cocktail at 11am. His singer, Davis, will fret for him later in the evening – after a slightly shambolic live performance in which the guitarist misses most of the notes he’s trying to play – saying: “Oh, my poor boy. I worry about him. He’s going through a dark time right now and he doesn’t know how to cope.”
The precise nature of that dark time is private though, today, it’s taking one hell of an alcoholic battering.
But then Munky is not the only member of Korn to have recently been through a dark time. The recording of their ninth album was a singularly oppressive period for the band. First, they had to come to the difficult but necessary realisation that their last few records weren’t very good. Second, they had to delve into their souls.
“I think we had lost ourselves,” is Davis’ opinion of where the band were before the recording of Korn III. “On Untitled, I think we hit a wall creatively.”
“We had got away from things,” adds Munky. “I’m not going to lie: we got away from all of it. Our heads were in the clouds. So we felt we needed to peel everything back and bring it back to who we are. We’re some dudes from Bakersfield who were pissed off about our situation and decided to express ourselves through our instruments. We needed to get back to that.”
So they called up their old producer Robinson in the hope of finding that old band again. They went into a tiny studio nicknamed The Cat Box and there they set about reconnecting.
“We finally wrote as a band again there,” says Davis. “On the last two records we just wrote riffs and then pieced them together. On this one we were right in each other’s faces in a 10 foot by 10 foot room. We wrote the whole record there. Hearing everything so loud in that little room, with Ray beating the shit out of his drums, and me singing melody tracks live, was great.”
There was another important aspect of the recording process too. Rather than rely on ProTools gimmickry to bolt the music together as they had in the past, Robinson forced the band to record on tape, telling them that it was much more important to imbue the music with feel, rather than precision.
“We wanted to capture the vibe of the early Korn,” says Davis. “Ross came in and hit the reset button on us. We were recording on two inch tape and there were no click tracks, no crazy editing, none of that shit. The first time we heard it back on a tape, we went, ‘My God! This shit’s got soul.’ It was breathing, the tempos were fluctuating, it had a heartbeat. For us it was pretty incredible. We thought, ‘What the fuck have we been doing?’”
“Ross broke it all down,” says Munky. “He peeled back all the bullshit and just made us fucking go. He would stop us in the middle of takes and say, ‘You motherfuckers are wasting my time. Fuck you, I’m not feeling it.’ So we’d do it again and again and again until we got it. It meant that each track on the record made the hairs on the back of our necks stand up.”
WHEN ROBINSON first worked with Korn in the mid-‘90s he found a way to get inside Davis’s head. Once there, he would prod and push until the singer broke down – then he would set the tapes rolling. Fifteen years later, the producer can still force his way into Davis’s mind.
“Man, he fucking tortured Jonathan,” says Munky. “Poor Jonathan. He would have to pour out some of the most brutal shit and then he’d be in tears driving his truck home. Jonathan was going through turmoil all day long, he was freaking out. Then he’d call Ross, going, ‘What the fuck did you do to me?’”
Davis is someone who says he “feels things very deeply – it’s kind of a curse” and he has been seeing a psychiatrist for years. Since he quit drugs and alcohol 12 years ago he has been on anti-depressants. Robinson, however, ran roughshod over all those issues in order to force the singer to lay his emotions onto the album.
“Making the record was sheer fucking hell,” says Davis. “It was one of the most difficult things in my life. It was fucking torment. [Robinson] put me in a place I didn’t want to be. He put me in a horrible depression where I wanted to kill myself again. It was fucked up. He was just pushing my buttons, tormenting me and fucking me up. He’d find out everything that my lyrics were about then he’d use that shit as ammo while I was singing.”
Robinson would make Davis explain his lyrics in private one-on-one sessions, luring the singer into confiding in him. Then he would pick out any insecurities and rub them in Davis’ face.
“I got back into a position where I trusted him, but then he abused the shit out of [that trust] and that killed me,” says Davis. “I wrote one song as if I was talking to my wife, so he brought her in, sat her down and made me sing it to her. He put her right in front of me and I had to stare her in the eyes and sing it. It was killing me. I didn’t want to do that but that’s the kind of shit he did. He’d stand right in front of my microphone, right in my face, while I was singing because he wanted me to convince him that I meant what I was singing.
“He was sticking a knife deep into my heart. It was fucking brutal. He’s a motherfucker. I literally got to the point where I wanted to die. Fieldy and Munky were worried sick about me. I lost a whole lot of weight, I couldn’t eat, I was rotting away.”
Davis would find himself so caught up in the process that, when he returned home to his wife and children, he felt he couldn’t reveal what had happened in the sessions – “They wouldn’t have understood. I couldn’t let them see that,” he says – so he’d unload everything into either the music or onto his psychiatrist.
“My psychiatrist was saying, ‘Don’t listen to [Robinson], he’s not a psychiatrist, he’s making you go backwards and you’re doing so well’,” says Davis. “I didn’t know what to do. I had a big battle internally. My head was spinning in a zillion different directions.”
THE QUESTION is, why would a successful band put themselves through this if they didn’t need to? In part, the answer is that Korn needed to work out why they were still bothering anymore.
“I was asking myself that everyday,” says Davis. “I was asking why I was doing it. It was about rediscovery. I wanted to make a record that would make people feel again. I didn’t want people just thinking, ‘Oh that’s a cool song’, I wanted them to feel the emotion of what I was going through. You’re listening to me losing my fucking mind.”
And it wasn’t just Davis who bore the brunt of Robinson’s unusual recording techniques. The producer would wander into the studio when the band were playing and grab arms, smash cymbals or yell in the rest of the band’s faces too, all the while shouting his mantra of “I want to feel the violence” at them.
“I would only take it from him,” says Munky. “I wouldn’t take it from anyone else. Only him. Anyone else, I would spit in their face. Ross can take it as far as he wants. I don’t care if he’s burning me with a lighter while I’m trying to play guitar. He can set my head on fire, whatever it takes to get what he needs and feels.”
Because if the band resented Robinson at the time, they all respect him now. Both Munky and Davis talk about their admiration for him, thanking him for putting them through the process as they believe – rightly – that they’ve recorded an album of considerably more substance than anything else they’ve put out in years. The problem was that, for Davis, getting over the recording sessions after opening his psychological can of worms was fraught with difficulties.
“When the album was finished, there was relief because I was drained,” says Davis. “But I also thought, ‘Now what, motherfucker?’ Ross put me through so much and then I had to deal with the ramifications of it.”
But, gradually, a curious thing happened to Davis. Faced with the realisation that Korn had, once again, made an album of raw emotion – rather than mere processed sounds – a sense of well-being and positivity slowly returned. All the rage and paranoia he had vented onto the album had gradually evaporated from his life. In fact, so positive does Davis feel now that, for the first time in 12 years, he is not on any mood-levelling medication at all.
“I feel better than I have in a long time and I think it’s because of this album,” he says. “I’ve been on Prozac for 12 years and I’m off it now. I know what it feels like to be excited and sad again. I haven’t felt like this in 12 years; I’m like a giddy little kid. But it comes at a price because I don’t have anything to level me out, so there are lows now too.”
So how does he deal with those lows? How does he cope with the problems that once drove him to addiction?
“By being a fucking man. You’ve got to put your fucking big boy pants on and face things straight on. You’ve got to have courage. It took everything I had to put what I put on this album for everyone to hear. But it’s the greatest form of art I’ve ever heard. I don’t listen that much to it but, when I do, I fucking feel it and I love it.”
SO 17 years after they first formed, Korn are still here and they’re still doing it. But, unlike many bands – some of whom are playing the nostalgia circuit here in Vegas tonight – there is still depth here. It’s a ballsy decision to take a risk, go against your psychiatrist’s advice and delve into your dark side – all just to entertain the public. It’s certainly a far braver decision than putting out another record of riffs strung together by computers and colour-by-number emotions.
There aren’t many bands of Korn’s stature who would even feel the need to bother, let alone allow themselves to be subjected to a form of torture in making it happen. And so, for that at least, this is band that deserve some respect. They wanted to know if they still felt it, they wanted to know if they still believed in their band, and they cut themselves open to find out.
“This record really made us remember who we are again,” says Davis, the hollow glitz of this city around him a reminder of the shallows they had previously plumbed.
“We realised we’re a band that is still growing,” adds Munky. “If you stare at a tree, it grows slowly and goes through different seasons. The leaves may fall but they always come back. But the roots get deeper all the time.
“And you know what?” he asks before he goes. “I think the leaves are going to be really green this year.”
© Tom Bryant 2010