Jonathan Davis

• 1. Introduction

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  Jonathan Davis was five years old when a severe asthma attack stopped his heart. Afterward he said, "My heart stopped, and I didn't see no damn light or hear any music." That flat, unflinching honesty would later define him as the frontman of Korn, a band credited with helping originate the nu metal sound. His voice could shift from a whisper to a scream inside a single verse, built from a childhood far stranger than most listeners would guess. What kind of adolescence produces a voice like that? What unlikely instrument became one of his onstage signatures? And what does three decades of turning personal pain into music actually cost a person?

• 2. Early Life And Trauma

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  Jonathan Howsmon Davis was born in Bakersfield, California, on the 18th of January 1971, to Holly Marie Chavez and Ricky Duane Davis, who had married less than a year earlier. His parents divorced when he was three. He lived with his mother at first, then moved into his father and stepmother's home after things went badly, and he later said the family made him feel like he had "ruined their perfect little family." Chronic asthma sent him to the hospital every month from ages three to ten.

  At Highland High School, classmates mocked him constantly for wearing eyeliner and baggy clothes and for listening to new wave music. They hurled homophobic slurs at him, an experience he later folded into the Korn song "Faget." He also got an HIV tattoo on his upper left arm as a direct response to that bullying.

  At sixteen, years before Korn existed, Davis took a job as a coroner's assistant. After graduating high school he enrolled in a one-year coroner program in San Francisco, spending his days over embalming textbooks and his nights living and working inside funeral homes. He dropped out after two semesters to apprentice closer to home, at the Kern County Coroner's Department, and also worked as a professional embalmer. He told Kerrang!, "I had post-traumatic stress from seeing dead babies, and young kids that had died after finding a parent's stash of drugs, shit that I shouldn't have been seeing at 16 or 17 years old. I had to have a lot of therapy to make the nightmares go away, but I got through it and it made me appreciate life a lot more."

  Davis has said his stepmother mixed his tea with Thai hot oil, jalapeño juice, and tabasco while he was sick, and he admitted he had once fantasized about "fucking her and killing her." The Korn song "Kill You" was written about her, even though his father later divorced her. In an interview with The Guardian, Davis said he left home at eighteen because he felt like "public enemy number one," calling her "twisted and sadistic" and saying his own father was too embarrassed to intervene. He left home at eighteen, before Sexart, before Korn, and before any of it had a name yet.

• 3. Forming Korn

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  Davis's first group was a short-lived project called Buck Naked, which recorded only two songs onto demo tapes he handed out to high school friends, titled "What I Have Done" and "Come With Me." He got free haircuts at a college where guitarist Ryan Shuck was a student, and Davis agreed to join Shuck's band, Sexart, formed in 1991. He later described those early days bluntly: "I had no clue what I was doing, I didn't know what the hell to do with my voice."

  In early 1993, former members of a band called L.A.P.D., who had just started a new group named Creep, spotted Davis performing with Sexart at The John Bryant club in Bakersfield. He was already friends with Reginald Arvizu and was reluctant to join Creep despite the group's persistence. He only agreed to audition after a psychic told him that leaving Bakersfield for Los Angeles would benefit him. "I was a little torn, because I was doing Sexart at the time, and that was my band," he said. "But I wanted to go and see what it was all about, and from the first note I was hooked. It just all clicked." He quit his job and moved to Los Angeles with his girlfriend, sharing a house in Huntington Beach with David Silveria and Brian Welch.

  Davis proposed naming the new band "Corn," a nod to the horror film Children of the Corn and a lewd story told to him by a gay friend; the spelling was changed almost immediately to "KoЯn." The band formed in 1993 out of the dissolution of Sexart and L.A.P.D. Word about Davis's ferocious, unpredictable stage presence spread quickly once Korn started playing shows.

• 4. A Voice Like No Other

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  Davis is a tenor with a vocal range spanning four octaves and four notes, from A1 to E6, though the vocal analysis website The Range Place lists his recorded register as peaking at the lower note F5. In 2014, Davis appeared on VVN Music's list of vocalists with the largest range.

  His style ranges from a gruff, distorted high to an odd, dissonant scat, with a softer, headier tone used less often. Around the time of See You on the Other Side he began showing off a cleaner voice that could reach down into his lower fifth octave, with lows as far down as F2 or E2 delivered in what is sometimes called an "attitude fry" style for a more intimidating effect.

  Describing a Portland performance, Robert Ham of Billboard wrote that Davis "growled, crooned and wailed with equal amounts of steady force." Essi Berelian, writing in The Rough Guide to Rock, described his singing as varying "between singing, half-rapping and breathless shrieking." Author Christopher Krovatin traced Davis's guttural scat breakdowns back to jazz vocalists like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Benjamin "Scatman" Crothers.

  That scat technique runs through songs including "Twist," the opening track on Life Is Peachy, along with "Freak on a Leash," "Got the Life," "Rotting in Vain," and "Worst Is on Its Way." That same instinct for turning strange sounds into signatures would soon pull an entirely different instrument into Korn's music.

• 5. Bagpipes And Ritual

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  Davis's great-grandmother was from Scotland and played pipe records for him when he was young, planting an early fascination with pipe band music. In the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the character Mr. Scott plays "Amazing Grace" on the Great Highland bagpipes at Mr. Spock's funeral, a scene that captivated Davis. He told Loudwire, "everybody tears up, and I'm like, I gotta play bagpipes."

  His grandmother gave him his first set of bagpipes, and he joined the Highland High School pipe band, taking lessons from its Scottish conductor before training under a teacher who had studied in Scotland. He went on to compete at established gigs across the United States.

  When Korn recorded their first album, something felt missing from the song "Shoots and Ladders" until bagpipes filled the gap, an addition that began as "a joke." Kelsey Chapstick wrote in Revolver Magazine that Davis recorded the intro while walking away from a stationary microphone outside the studio, creating the impression of "a faraway player fading into the distance."

  Bagpipes later turned up on songs including "Low Rider," a cover of the funk rock band War, along with "Dead," "Liar," and "The End Begins." On the 15th of November 1999, the NYPD Pipes and Drums corps opened a Korn show at the Apollo Theater with "Dead." On the 23rd of July 1999, Davis performed his bagpipe routine for more than 250,000 people at the Woodstock festival in New York. That same appetite for the theatrical would soon extend to a piece of stage equipment unlike anything else in metal.

• 6. The Giger Microphone

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  In March 2002, three months before the release of Untouchables, Davis unveiled a microphone stand art piece called "The Bitch" during a South America tour. The idea came from his personal assistant, Jonathan Pavesi, who suggested a custom stand, and Davis then contacted Swiss artist H. R. Giger directly, asking for a design that was "biomechanical and very erotic" and giving him total creative freedom.

  In 2000, during the European Issues tour, Davis visited the H. R. Giger Museum in Switzerland to discuss the piece further. Giger and his assistant Roni emailed him photos as the figure grew more streamlined, and Giger said Davis's only real request was that it be "totally functional and as movable as possible" so he could grip it easily on stage.

  Only five of the biomechanical stands, cast in the shape of a woman, were made at a foundry in Zurich before the molds were destroyed. Davis kept three, and Giger kept two, one for permanent display at his museum and one for gallery exhibitions. Giger later said of the piece, "he was just a genius."

  Davis has been sponsored by Shure microphones since the mid-1990s, using wireless KSM9 and KSM8 models on stage, and recording in the studio with a Telefunken U47 and an ELA M 251. That same devotion to Giger's dark aesthetic would resurface in a very different collection Davis kept at home.

• 7. Collector Of The Macabre

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  In the early 2000s, Davis began collecting serial killer art and memorabilia, displaying pieces publicly while on the Ozzfest 2003 tour. His collection included the Volkswagen that Ted Bundy drove during his murder spree, the "Pogo" and "Patches" clown outfits worn by John Wayne Gacy, a 1928 confession letter from cannibal Albert Fish, and original drawings by Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker.

  In June 2001, Davis approached collector Arthur Rosenblatt, who was planning a museum of criminal justice artifacts to be called the Museum of Justice and Odditorium, or MOJO Museum. In March 2003, Davis suggested funding it through a film or television production, then pulled out of the deal, and Rosenblatt sued him twice, accusing him of misnaming the project in the media and of threatening his life. Attorney Ed McPherson resolved the litigation in 2006.

  In December 2005, Davis began selling off his serial killer memorabilia, saying, "I don't want that around my kids." He later denounced the items entirely.

  His home still holds a private art collection built over decades of touring, including an Ibanez guitar designed by Giger, a human shrunken head from South America, and a fetus he calls "Luther." Alongside it sits religious art from many traditions, including 600-year-old Buddhist sculptures and numerous crucifixes, especially depictions of a Mexican Jesus. He has also gathered taxidermy from a hunting trip in South Africa, telling Metal Hammer in 2015 that he waited a year for the mounted heads to be shipped back. "I wouldn't say I like religion, but I like the art," he said.

• 8. Marriage, Loss, And Sobriety

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  In 1996, Davis married his high school sweetheart, Renee Perez. The couple had a son, Nathan, in 1995, who now makes music under the alias Hi I'm Ghost, and they divorced in 2000. In 2004, Davis married Deven Davis, and the couple had two sons, Pirate and Zeppelin. He filed for divorce in October 2016, and in 2018 a domestic violence restraining order blocked Deven from custody or visitation, with Davis alleging she was deep into drugs. Deven Davis died on the 17th of August 2018, at age 39, from combined drug intoxication involving heroin and prescription medication.

  Davis abused methamphetamine and alcohol heavily during the recording of Korn and Life Is Peachy. He recorded Follow the Leader under the combined influence of methamphetamine, cocaine, and Jack Daniel's, later telling The Ringer the album was "fueled by cocaine, speed, and just constant gallons of Jack Daniel's." He got off methamphetamine at 28, during that fall's first Family Values Tour, though sobriety brought worse anxiety and depression, compounded by his grandfather's death, and doctors placed him on suicide watch from the late 1990s into the early 2000s.

  In 2013, Davis was treated for Xanax addiction, and he smoked marijuana openly until 2015. In 2018, he told Forbes he still struggles with chronic anxiety, depression, and insomnia, now managed with medications including Prozac, Halcion, Benadryl, ZzzQuil, NyQuil, and melatonin.

  On the 14th of August 2021, Davis tested positive for coronavirus, forcing Korn to postpone six United States tour dates and cancel two shows in New York. When the band resumed touring on the 27th of August 2021 at Tinley Park, Illinois, the stage included a custom throne so Davis could sit while performing. Bandmate Brian Welch wrote that Davis was "still struggling with the COVID after-effects" and needed "love, light and energy" from fans.