Kat's KoRn Biography

Individual Biographies

Band History

The band KoRn was first formed in 1993 by the merging of two bands: LAPD and Sexart. Sexart was the band that Jonathon was the lead singer of during his days in the Kern County Coroner's office. Sexart was described as a "dull-assed Bakersfield band". He was only in this band for a short time, and it is believed that he only did one song that can be found on a Bakersfield compilation. "Sex Art spawned three bands to date. One being Korn, of course, with Jonathan. Another being Cradle of Thorns, and the third is called Juice. Juice is basically Sex Art without Jon and Ty. As far as anyone knows, there are a scarce amount of Sex Art tapes. All that are known are the ones that the band members have... and they won't even give their manager a copy because they don't want it to fall into the wrong hands. Another tidbit, Sex Art wrote "Blind." The original version is on the Sex Art demo tape, and I hear it's really cool... and it shows how much all the members of all the bands have grown. One member of Sex Art was Ryan, and he is now is Orgy LAPD was made up of Reggie (fieldy snuts) Arvizu (bass), James (munky) Shaffer (guitar), David Silveria (drums), and Brian (head) Welch (guitar). David says this about LAPD: "they weren't really very good. We were still trying to find our own band sound and develop our own individual sounds on our instruments. If you listen to those records now, you wouldn't think we were even the same guys playing on them. It was kinda a heavy, up-tempo punk, not at all what were doing now. But LAPD really was good for us, too, because we learned a lot about the industry and how things work. We played all the LA clubs - even some pay-to-play venues for about two years. Even when we didn't pay-to-play anymore we were playing for nothing, which is still paying to play. We definetly did not get a record deal after a few songs. We payed our dues" (Modern drummer).

It all started one day when Munky and Head went to a bar. Munky recalls: "We were getting ready to leave and just as we were walking out the door...Jon was the lead singer of that band, and we heard him sing, and me and Brian just turned to each other and our jaws just (dropped)...and so we turned around and went back in and watched the whole set" (from the video "Who Then Now?").

Shortly after, James and Brian asked Jon to join their band. According to Jon, he didn't want to, but a psychic told him to do it. Within a month, he was living with them and rehearsing under the name Korn. Within about a year of that, the band was signed to a record deal with Immortal/Epic. During the first week that the record "Korn" was out, it sold 1100 copies, and the rest is history. Jonathon says that from there, the group's popularity spread "like a virus" (Alternative Press, September 1997). The band toured for eighteen straight months, which led the album to Platinum record sales. When Life is Peachy first hit the record stores, it appeared at number three on Billboard's Top 200.

Origin of the name "KoRn". Apparently, the band got their name because they were trying to think of a name for the band, and Jonathon came up with KoRn because of a certain homosexual episode that he heard of. We won't get into too many details, but supposedly it consited of two homosexuals and one of them was licking the other dude's asshole, and the guy shot diahrrea all over his face. Apparently the guy had a Korn Kernel on his tongue afterwords. Jonathon heard about this and went around saying "corn" to everyone. They all thought it was pretty funny. So according to Jon, when they were thinking of a name for the band, Jonathon thought of "Corn", and they all just went "fuck yeah". Then he wrote it down like a little child would write it, and the rest is history. Look at all them details. There were many rumours that KoRn stood for Kiddie pORN, but this doesn't seem to be true.

The KoRn sound. According to Alternative Press, "KoRn plow an entirely new field, isolated from any established genre-and if you think they sound familiar, it is probably because someone copped the sound from them". Jonathon goes on to say: "I think it's kinda cool that no one knows how to classify us- you know you are doing something right. I like the fact that there are people out there saying that we are ruining alternative radio, keeping this metal shit alive. But a lot of them are just people who have a hard-on out to get us, anyway. We could put out the most incredible album, and they'd still write shit about it" (Alternative Press, September 1997).

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