Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (69 page)

STEPHEN CARPENTER (Deftones):
When I was in high school, I couldn’t get enough heavy metal. There were so many good bands in the eighties—Van Halen, Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Anthrax. I was fifteen when I first played a guitar chord. I used to watch videos, and most of the time everyone’s faking it. I was watching Ratt’s “Round and Round” where they were on a table soloing out. [Warren DeMartini] played a power chord, and I copied his finger positions, and went “Whoa, what the hell!” It was just a matter of playing it up and down the fretboard and learning to stay on time with my right hand. It was just fake-it-out city from then on. I learned to play to Anthrax, S.O.D., Metallica. I didn’t learn another chord besides a power chord until I had been playing for four years.

CHINO MORENO:
I didn’t grow up on heavy music at all. I grew up on new wave and bands like the Cure and Depeche Mode, that were really moody and had a lot of sorrow. My heart has always been really into sad music, and I incorporate it naturally into our songs. That’s what sets us apart.

JONATHAN DAVIS (Korn):
When I was a kid, I was into death rock, industrial, and Duran Duran. Bauhaus, Christian Death. I was called a fag because I wore eyeliner and had my hair up in the air. I was a nerd. I was picked on, and that shit’s never gonna change. I’m a rock star now, and people still call me a fag. There’s all these things on message boards about how I suck dick and fuck guys, and you know it’s never gonna change. So fuck it. I’m just who I am.

FRED DURST:
I’m definitely not a happy person, and I don’t sing happy songs because I fuckin’ don’t like them. I don’t have a positive fuckin’ message. My message is, “If you’ve ever been pissed off and felt like shit, it’s okay, because you’re not the only one.”

JONATHAN DAVIS:
My lyrics have always been dark because the things I get off on are all morbid, and my whole life I’ve collected and done dark things. When I was seventeen, I was a senior in high school and I got into this job placement program that hooked me up at the coroner’s office doing autopsies. I was like, “Oh, cool, I’ll be able to see dead bodies and cut them open.” I’ll admit I was white the first day and it freaked me out. But after the second and third time, I was totally into it. I liked trying to figure out how people died, and seeing the anatomy of the body was amazing. Just the fact that you’re cutting a fucking person open and you’re not going to jail, that’s awesome. So after high school I went to mortuary college. I was an apprentice embalmer at a funeral home, and that’s where I was in my first band, Sexart.

By the mid-nineties, bands were no longer flooding the Sunset Strip the way they had in the heyday of hair metal. The most exciting scenes were coalescing away from the city and manifesting suburban angst more than urban hardship. The first city to gain attention for its music community was Bakersfield, California, an area known for its country music scene in the fifties and, forty years later, home to Sexart, Korn, Videodrone, and Adema.

RYAN SHUCK (Sexart, Orgy):
The whole Bakersfield scene started with Sexart [which featured Shuck, Davis, and future Adema bassist Dave DeRoo]. Jon [Davis] came down to our studio and then I went down to his house and partied with him. Jon played with us for a few years. One of the first songs I ever wrote [for Sexart] was “Blind,” which ended up being a pretty popular Korn song. But there’s only one chord in that song. It’s all conceptual. It’s all about feeling.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
When I was in Sexart, [Korn guitarists Brian] “Head” [Welch] and [James] “Munky” [Shaffer] were in a bar in Bakersfield, California, watching us play, and they thought we sucked, so they were getting ready to leave. Then, suddenly, they heard my voice and flipped out. [Bassist Reginald] “Fieldy” [Arvizu] called me and asked me to try out. Me and Fieldy grew up together. His dad [Reginald Arvizu Sr.] and my dad [Rick Davis] had been in a band. From the first note, when I heard their sound, I was like, “Oh my god, this is insane!” I got my PA and I sang the first song all the way through, and everyone’s mouths dropped open and they were like “This is it! Let’s do it!” Two weeks later, we did a demo tape with [producer] Ross [Robinson] that started getting shopped around. But at first, no one wanted to have anything to do with us. We played clubs in San Diego up the coast of California for about a year before anyone noticed us.

FIELDY:
Most bands that get together are just a bunch of musicians. We weren’t a bunch of musicians. We were all friends always having fun together anyway. So we thought, “Why don’t we get in a band so we can all drink in a band together and get crazy?”

JONATHAN DAVIS:
When I write, there’s always that sense of sex there. I have a lot of fantasies I like to write about. It’s just the other side of human nature. But at the same time, I’m a vulnerable guy. I’m not trying to go up there and say, “Fuck this, I’m a bad motherfucker.” That’s not me.

JAMES “MUNKY” SHAFFER (Korn):
I started using a seven-string guitar to make the music really dark and different-sounding and lower. [A Korn guitar tone has] gotta be heavy, but with clarity. When we record, sometimes we layer three or four different tracks to get the right sound—a clean tone, a really dirty tone underneath, and then something between the two. Then we use lots of sound effects to make it sound even weirder. But I don’t know how to play a standard six-string guitar anymore. It feels like I’m missing a finger when I try.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
Alternative music was a depressing time in rock. I’d go to those shows and just fall asleep. I just wanted to wake people the fuck up. I didn’t even know what Black Sabbath was until I joined Korn. The thing that changed my life was when Pantera released
Vulgar Display of Power
[in 1992]. Then Fieldy turned me on to Sepultura. But we never wanted to do anything that was typically metal. If we ever write something that sounds like Judas Priest or Iron Maiden it’s out the door.

FIELDY:
If Jon even tried to sing the word “die” with lots of vibrato, we’d have to kill him. We’re heavier than heavy metal.

Around the same time Korn was honing their chops in Bakersfield, further north, in Sacramento, Deftones were writing in a similar style, combining jagged metal riffs influenced by Helmet, Prong, and Faith No More with hip-hop rhythms and subtle, haunting melodies. But like Korn, Deftones were innovators, not imitators.

STEPHEN CARPENTER:
A major thing happened to me when I was fifteen. I got hit by a drunk driver. I was skateboarding to a friend’s house, and
boom
! I should have died. The guy was doing, like, 60 miles per hour and I destroyed his car. I had an out-of-body experience. I never saw or heard or felt the car hit me. I just recalled not being here and floating above the treetops in Sacramento, and seeing the buildings popping up downtown and going, “Oh, this is really cool. What’s going on?” Meanwhile, there’s this voice repeating like a scratched record, “Man, you’re gonna be all right. You’re gonna make it, man.” I was like, “Who the hell is telling me this? And why the hell are you floating above the trees?” My final question was, “While you were skateboarding, did you fall asleep?” And I woke up instantly. I had fallen off my skateboard and there was reality. I wasn’t in pain, but I was right there in the moment and totally conscious of everything. There wasn’t a smell, a color, or an angle that I wasn’t aware of. I acknowledged everything at once at that moment, and I’ve been that way ever since. I felt totally normal—other than the fact that my leg was snapped in half. I had a compound fracture and I was in the hospital for two weeks. From that point on, I didn’t care about skateboarding anymore. I just wanted to have a good time and live and make music. I got a bunch of money as a settlement and I used it to buy equipment for the band. When we started Deftones, [drummer] Abe [Cunningham] and [vocalist] Chino [Moreno] were fifteen going on sixteen. We grew up together, and spent our teen years doing what we wanted to do, making music together. And we sucked for a long time.

CHINO MORENO:
I knew Abe because we used to skate together. Abe and I lived ten miles away from Stephen, and bus number 68 went right from Abe’s house to Stephen’s house. So we went over there one day after school. Stephen was sitting on his porch with his guitar on, and all his cabinets were in the garage plugged in and he was just rocking out.

ABE CUNNINGHAM (Deftones):
I had been playing since I was seven, and I knew what I was doing. But I was clean-cut and Stephen probably thought I was some wuss. There was a drum set in the garage, and he’s like, “The drums are in there.” He stayed out on the front porch with the garage door shut and started jamming. I’m like, “What a prick. He doesn’t want to jam with me, he’s out here sitting on the fucking porch.”

STEPHEN CARPENTER:
Abe started playing along with me and I was blown away. Everyone I knew my age or younger, nobody was as good as Abe. He was fifteen and he was like [Rush drummer] Neil Peart. The first Deftones show was hilarious. Our bass player at the time showed up late, and he was in cut-offs and a W.A.S.P. shirt that was mesh and sleeveless. He didn’t have enough sense to take the cord up through the strap and plug it in, so he’d step on the cord and it would unplug and he’d be playing and it wouldn’t be working. They built a stage for us to play on in the backyard, and it was, like, 4 inches high. Chino used to sound like Gomer Pyle singing. He was trying to sound like Danzig. That’s why he became our singer, because we could do “Twist of Cain” and sound just like Danzig.

CHINO MORENO:
We knew we needed a new bass player. Chi Cheng and his older brother Ming put up an ad, and it said, “Brother bass players. One plays metal, one plays funk.” Stephen called them up and talked to Ming first. Ming asked Stephen what kind of band he wanted to make. Stephen said, “Well, we sound kind of like Primus or Faith No More.” Ming said, “You want my brother, then. He’s a funk player.” So Chi came over to Stephen’s house. We saw his long hair and thought, “Yeah, this dude’s a straight rocker. We gotta get him.” We wrote a new song the day he came in.

Even though they cultivated a solid live set and were getting booked in and around Bakersfield, Korn were broke and scraping to get by. In Los Angeles, Coal Chamber were suffering a similar fate, and in Sacramento, Deftones were only slightly better off.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
Before I joined Korn I had a good career working as a mortician. Then I was in the band and had no money, so I worked for Pizza Hut and became a manager and got paid next to nothing. Before we got signed, I had that Top Ramen case kicking. I lived in a friend’s garage with a mattress on the floor because it was all I could afford. He built a carpet partition in the garage, and that was my room. I had to hang my clothes on pipes.

DEZ FAFARA (Coal Chamber, DevilDriver):
We were all living in my one-bedroom apartment on Melrose and Poinsettia in Los Angeles. [Bassist] Rayna [Foss] was sleeping on the floor in the kitchen. We were all eating Top Ramen. We would go into Trader Joe’s and steal food any time we could. LA was a musical dead zone. Before we came along, there were one or two other bands and us, otherwise there was no scene. Labels were not signing bands from LA anymore, whatsoever. Poison and all these hair bands came in and killed the Sunset Strip and killed LA. We fought like hell to bring the scene back to life.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
To spread the word, we’d scrounge up some money and go to Kinko’s and make flyers in Huntington Beach. We’d buy a bunch of 40s, get drunk, and flyer cars all night. Then, we got a printing press, bought all this sticker paper, and stickered every stop sign in town. People started hearing the name Korn. They knew the logo and wanted to know what the hell it was about.

CHINO MORENO:
We played a show in Bakersfield, and Korn’s producer [Ross Robinson] was at the show and he really dug our band, so we gave him a tape. A couple days later, the Korn guys called and said, “Dude, we want to play shows with you guys.” We had never heard them, but we went to LA and both played. They played first and we played last. I tripped out and said, “This is kind of like what we’re doing.” Except their shit is a little more dark.

FIELDY:
It was a trip. Jon and Chino were doing almost the same moves and wearing Adidas jumpsuits. But we didn’t give a fuck. We liked them ’cause they were good, and we all became friends.

ROB HALFORD:
The way I view a Korn/Deftones situation is much the same way I viewed Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Two very, very different bands, but they just happen to be from the same kind of mode, and they popped up in the same general time. It’s unfortunate that the media tries to pick up on the supposed conflict, because a lot of bad information gets put in people’s heads, and then you have to try to explain how it’s not true.

CHINO MORENO:
There were a lot of times when the press said we were talking shit about each other and we’d call each other up and straighten shit out. It was really stupid because we were all friends even before all this started, and it seemed like people were trying to make us enemies.