A reluctant star

By CHRIS PAGE, Californian staff writer
e-mail: cpage@bakersfield.com

Sunday November 10, 2002, 12:00:00 AM

Ragtyme's bass player, Arvizu, was a considerable talent -- especially considering he hadn't played an instrument until he was 16 years old.

His father, who these days leads a musical Christian ministry out of his home, was a well-known guitarist in the '70s and '80s, gigging full-time in and around Bakersfield in the band Reggie & Alex when not recording and playing in Los Angeles. Reggie Arvizu Sr. was surprised he couldn't get his young son to play music.

"I couldn't shove it down him if it meant his life," Arvizu Sr. said. "He didn't want to play music, not even a ghetto blaster."

But that changed when young Reggie asked his father for a guitar, saying he wanted to be in a band with his friends. Dad bought a guitar at Rick Davis Music, where instrument shop owner Rick Davis, a longtime friend, cut him a deal.

According to his father, young Reggie was shaping up to be a pretty good lead guitar player when, out of the blue, he asked to switch to bass guitar.

"I told him, 'If you play bass, you'll always have a job,' " Arvizu Sr. said.

Later, Arvizu would also fill in for a short time in the band Pretty Boy Floyd (a local band, not to be confused with the Los Angeles act of the same name), whose original bass player had moved to L.A. for a band that eventually fizzled.

"He (Arvizu Jr.) was very good, extremely good," said singer Keith Galloway, who still sports rocker-long hair and sings for the local hard rock band Sick Trigger. "You could tell he had talent. But he went after something else. He went in another direction. And I guess I never did."

Galloway got a weird five seconds of fame when Korn made an appearance on MTV's "Total Request Live" program: Gazing down from the upper-floor window, Arvizu Jr. pointed into the crowd forming on the street below, focusing on a girl with long hair. He said, "Hey, guys, it's Keith Galloway!"

Galloway's still waiting for when he next runs into his former bassist, whom he'd like to remind of the early days in the hair metal scene: "You should have seen Reggie," he said, "all pretty in all that makeup."

"We laugh. It's funny. We had such good times back then," said Kip LaTouf, 33, a longtime friend of Arvizu Jr.'s who now acts as the Korn bass player's personal assistant and bass technician on tour. "Everybody goes through different stages and tries on different masks until they find out who they are."

All members of Korn have nicknames, whether official or not. For Arvizu Jr., it's "Fieldy," a truncation on "Garfield," which he earned as a youngster with chipmunk-fat cheeks. Later, Shaffer would get the name "Munky" for his monkeylike feet.

Davis' nickname, of which he has a tattoo, is "HIV." It's a throwback to when high schoolers would tease that Davis was gay and probably had the AIDS virus.

And though Silveria doesn't like it, his bandmates have taken to calling him "Pretty Boy."

Click here to continue to "Releasing inner demons"