Releasing inner demons

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

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

While Welch, Shaffer and Arvizu Jr. were dreaming of becoming heavy metal stars, Jonathan Davis wasn't so sure about his future.

Born January 1971, Davis had natural musical abilities.

"It was like an episode of 'I Love Lucy.' He was banging on everything," father Rick Davis said.

Rick bought his son a drum set by the time Jonathan had turned 3. The youngster would often bang the set along as his father, himself a renowned keyboardist who once played with bands like the Casinos, practiced with other groups at home. (At that early age, Jonathan's favorite song to listen and play along to was Ringo Starr's "Oh My My," Rick said.)

At Highland High, Jonathan Davis was known as a nice, quiet kid who wore black clothes and professed a love for '80s New Romantic bands like Duran Duran and Siouxsie and the Banshees. A long-suffering asthmatic (he was in the hospital 12 times before he was 3 years old, his father said), Jonathan started playing the bagpipes -- partly because of his grandparents' Scottish heritage and partly because Highland had a bagpipe group. He was told by a doctor that the bagpipes would improve his lung power.

"There have been better (bagpipe players), but he was good," said Douglas Burdick, who was the group's pipe major and now manages Stockdale Music in Bakersfield. "He was adventurous. The funniest thing, we wrote 'Tequila' and some other songs (for bagpipes), some screw-around, farty songs that we did at homecoming."

Davis is known for playing bagpipes on Korn records and in concert; he played the classic horn riff for Korn's cover of War's song "Low Rider" on the 1996 album "Life is Peachy."

During high school and after graduation, Davis worked for a local pro audio company as a sound technician and disc jockeyed some high school parties and dances. He wore braces on his teeth for part of his high school tenure.

A substitute teacher, Paul Anderson (who also runs the Andy Noise record shop, which was an epicenter of the local music scene in the '90s), remembered Arvizu Jr. as an upbeat kid, while the lone memory of Davis was of the student being late to class.

Davis' first semi-shot at celebrity came in September 1985, when he was picked up from Highland by Bakersfield police officers. They were acting on a tip that the boy might actually be 14-year-old Canadian teen Ryan John Veal, who had been abducted and whose photo ran in The Californian. The two boys bore a striking resemblance, but the matter was resolved with a trip to Rick Davis' store, where the father produced proof of his son's identity.

Korn's music -- and its image -- is largely grounded in Jonathan Davis' self-admitted awkwardness in fitting in with his peers. He's said in interviews that he was picked on, ridiculed and fought accusations of homosexuality by the school's preppy faction. That's largely because Davis was experimenting with his personal style -- wearing makeup to school, bleaching the front of his hair, wearing the kilt from his bagpipe group outfit as part of his school day wardrobe, trying to see what kind of reaction he'd get.

The teasing turned into songs like "Faget," whose title plays on the gay slur Davis was often called.

If not set to grinding, dense rock music, lines like those in "Faget" -- "Here I am, different in this normal world/Why do you tease me? Made me feel upset" -- would have just been the everykid poetry of teen-age diaries. Instead, Davis' words formed anthems for emotionally tortured youth.

While Rick Davis admitted there's a certain amount of artistic exaggeration in his son's lyrics, the pain from being teased was still enough to wound the sensitive schoolboy.

Adding fuel to Jonathan Davis' growing angst was the fact that his father was too busy trying to keep his instrument store open to pay much attention to his son. The store closed in the late 1980s. Rick went on to run the Fat Tracks recording studio and now also runs the Kern County government's television production system.

Jonathan Davis grew up living with his mother, Holly Chavez (a former ad services manager for The Californian and not related to Arvizu Jr.'s friend Jake Chavez). He only saw Rick on weekends. But Jonathan moved in with his father in time for junior high school.

By then, his father had married another woman. Jonathan's hatred for his stepmother later resulted in the song "Kill You": "You made my life not so good/All I wanna do ... is kill you."

Lyrics like those have prompted outrage in conservative circles. But Rick Davis is quick to defend his son's art, saying that the lyrics he sings aren't provoking violence, merely studying the darker side of life.

"And the band has never said its music was a documentary," Rick Davis said.

But, as Korn fans know, there's one real-life thing that forms a deep root in Korn's music -- teen-age Jonathan Davis' experiences working with dead bodies.

In high school, Davis entered the Regional Occupation Program, which places high schoolers in job areas in which they might be interested. Because of his asthma, Jonathan wanted to try working in respiratory therapy, his father said. But the only position open was with the Kern County Coroner's Office.

"He came home that first day green," Rick Davis said.

Coroner's Division Chief Jim Malouf still gets phone calls from journalists and Korn fans asking about Davis' stint there. Korn-curious tourists in town have even snapped photos of the front of the building. Malouf remembered Davis as a distant contrast from his Korn persona. He was just a nice, nice kid.

"He didn't know if this was going to be his cup of tea or not," Malouf said. "It ended up ... he got very interested in it. It wasn't that he was into death. It's a science."

Davis worked at the office, assisting in autopsies, for 1-1/2 years. In interviews, Davis has said that the experience taught him a lot about living life to its fullest.

"It just opened my eyes to what life's all about," he said in a recent telephone interview with The Californian. "(Expletive) can happen at any moment, bam, you're dead."

A few years ago, Davis returned to the office and said hello to Malouf.

"He looked like his dad had had an affair with a parrot, his hair the way it was," Malouf said, laughing. "I said, 'What happened to you, boy?' "

After high school graduation, Davis moved to San Francisco to attend mortuary sciences school. At 19 years old, he returned home and worked in an apprenticeship at the Peters Funeral Home in Shafter.

"He was just a sweetheart of a guy," owner Cheryl Woody said.

"He just had some different things he liked to do," she said, laughing. "He liked to collect old bottles, antique bottles of embalming fluids. It's probably illegal now. He also collected antique torcheres ... My kids were young when he worked here. He teased them, always telling them he was going to give them a swirlee. He never did it, but he always teased them."

A fascination with death extended to Korn's dark spirit -- as well as other areas of Davis' life.

He is working on opening a museum of items collected from famous murderers. He owns the Volkswagen Ted Bundy used to stalk his victims, as well as two of serial killer John Wayne Gacy's clown suits. Some of those old bottles from the funeral home are still at Rick Davis' house.

But working around death had a detrimental effect on Jonathan Davis. While at the Kern County Coroner's Office, he had to work on the body of a fellow Highland High student. And Rick Davis remembered his son asking to borrow a black trenchcoat once -- he needed it to swathe dead babies as he carried them from the coroner's office to Kern Medical Center across the street, where they had to be X-rayed for obstructions in the throat. The coat would keep each infant warm and concealed.

"He told me, 'They deserve at least that much,' " Rick Davis said.

Much later, Jonathan Davis suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, for which he sought counseling.

"It wasn't the work that bothered him," Rick Davis said. "It was all the grieving people."

After Jonathan Davis went through the R.O.P. program at the coroner's office, the program decided it was too gruesome to let high schoolers work there.

But it was during Davis' time at the Peters Funeral Home that he began jamming in a Bakersfield underground rock band called SexArt.

These days, the band would be considered a supergroup -- with membership including Elam, who juggled time between popular Bakersfield band Cradle of Thorns and SexArt, though would later front major-label act Videodrone; Ryan Shuck, who would later go on to play guitar for major-label rock act Orgy; and David DeRoo, who later went on to play bass in major-label band Adema with Jonathan Davis' half-brother, Mark "Marky" Chavez.

SexArt practiced often and spent some time in Rick Davis' recording studio. The only recorded song the band ever released was "Inside," which came out on the "Cultivation '92" local band compilation album.

It's a ragged, unpolished tune that features Elam singing while Davis screams at the ends of phrases. But fans have coveted the rare pre-Korn memento, either snatching up copies on Internet auction site eBay (Anderson found a copy and sold it for around $30 to $40, he said) or posting the song online.

Davis has said in interviews that he learned how to sing from Elam.

"We kind of connected pretty easily," Elam said. "He was eager to learn and have fun, and so was I."

The group played shows regularly at downtown Bakersfield's then-relatively new club Bam Bam's, which functioned as an all-ages punk hangout and off-hours gay dance club for much of the early '90s.

Click here to continue to "The chance meeting"