James Shaffer and Brian Welch, both were friends and went in the same highschool. Were born in June 1970, both spent much of their times jamming on guitars together. Then, Brian joined to Ragtyme , where he met the bassist, Reggie Arvizu.
Around that time, Brian was given the nickname that stick on him to this day, "Head", because of his too-big-for-hats head.
Reggie Arvizu, just started playing instrument after he was 16. Early on, he seemed to be a good lead guitar player. Then, he switched to bass guitar and fill in a short time on Pretty Boy Floyd.
Jonathan Davis, born in January 1971, was known as a nice and quite kid. Long suffering asthmatic, he started playing bagpipes in the highschool. There's several reasons, first because his grandparents' Scottish heritage and, because the doctor told him to.
During and after graduation, Jonathan worked as a sound technician in a local pro audio company and disk jockeyed some highschool parties.

KoRn's music -- and its image -- is largely grounded in Jonathan Davis' self-admitted awkwardness in fitting in with his peers. 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.
Then, his father married another woman. Jonathan' stepmother.

In highscool, Jonathan joined to Regional Occupation Program, where the only position open was in the Kern County Coroner Office. His experience on dead bodies on this stage, has forms a deep root on KoRn music, later.
After 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.
Much later, Jonathan Davis suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, for which he sought counseling.

Then he started jamming in a Bakersfield underground rock band, called Sexart.
In the late '80s, James, Brian and Reggie were graduated from highschool. James and Reggie joined in a band called L.A.P.D, while Welch act as a volunteer road crewman at shows and sometimes played second guitar.
Then, David Silveria joined the band as a drummer. Though only 14 years old, David had drum chops well beyond his age.
Thought they had a winning sound, they moved to Los Angeles.

It was a hard time for this young musicians. After a while, L.A.P.D. broke up. At some point, the remaining L.A.P.D. musicians also moved to Huntington Beach and re-established themselves as Creep. Welch was brought in to play guitar with Shaffer. All that was needed next was a singer.
In their return trip in Bakersfield, they hung out in a bar. Sexart was playing and Jonathan Davis, then 22, was at the microphone. The members of Creep were impressed by Jonathan wild stage presence. Then they asked him to join the band.
Jonathan helped the band pick a new name, KoRn, a week after joining. Jonathan even suggested flipping the "R" backward to emulate a child's scribbled handwriting. Jonathan offered bleak, nihilistic lyrics about personal anguish. He crawled inside each song and sung it with a rage that was visible from his flailing gyrations. He took the intensity of his bandmates' instrumental crush and made it even angrier. That's where it all started.
All members of Korn have nicknames, whether official or not. For Reggie, it's "F or not. For Reggie, it's "Fd," which he earned as a youngster with chipmunk-fat cheeks. Later, James would get the name "Munky" for his monkeylike feet.
Jonathan' nickname, of which he has a tattoo, is "HIV." It's a throwback to when high schoolers would tease that Jonathan was gay and probably had the AIDS virus.
And though David doesn't like it, his band mates have taken to calling him "Pretty Boy."
Later in 1993, tha band took up an offer by producer Ross Robinson to work on a debut album. He helped KoRn ink a deal with Immortal Records, a subsidiary of Epic Records (which itself is owned by Sony). The band recorded tracks at the Malibu's Indigo Ranch Studio.

The end result was 1994's "KoRn", an album that offered a foundation on which the band would base itself from then on: distorted, effects-laden guitar riffs played on low-tuned seven-string guitars; five-string bass slapped with funky abandon a la Les Claypool against David's Primus-esque backbeats. Floating on top and swooping into the thick of it was the wild braying of Jonathan' vocals.
The album wasn't an immediate success. The band couldn't get played on rock radio due to the inflammatory, expletive-filled content of its songs. So instead of waiting around for airplay and a shot on MTV, KoRn hit the road supporting acts like House of Pain, 311, Ozzy Osbourne, Marilyn Manson and Megadeth.
By the time the band had finished touring -- two years after releasing "KoRn" -- it had sold 700,000 copies of the album, an unheard of amount for a band with little radio support and no video on MTV. Immortal/Epic, which hadn't expected that kind of popularity for the band, pushed KoRn and Robinson back into the studio for a follow-up album.
"Life is Peachy" was released in 1996 and debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart. According to almost everyone associated with the project, the recording process was much too rushed. But the album razor-sharpened the KoRn formula: There was more experimentation on the guitars, more use of dynamics (softer moments explode into monster-size choruses) and a greater emphasis on Jonathan' vocal ticks and tricks.
Touring continued to be a major aspect of KoRn's work, one of the most popular acts at the '96 Lollapalooza tour. In 1998, the band got into the concert-promotion business and started its own rock package tour, called "Family Values."
The success of "Life is Peachy" established KoRn as a major force on the rock scene. It was also a good sign for the band itself, which knew that sophomore albums are usually where most acts fail. Those that have successful sophomore albums are typically then able to renegotiate their recording contracts, meaning higher royalty rates on later albums.
"Follow The Leader" released in 1998, turned out to be a multi platinum success.
Around the time of that album's release, the band hit a publicity coup d'etat when a high school student in Zeeland, Mich., was suspended for wearing a KoRn T-shirt. The school's assistant principal said the shirt was offensive simply because the band's music was offensive. KoRn offered to send a lawyer to defend the student, then handed out free KoRn T-shirts outside of the school.
In April 1999, the band turned once again to its fans -- which they lovingly, if not condescendingly, refer to as "KoRn Kids" -- in hopes of drumming up support for a new album. It asked the more artistic of music fans to illustrate the cover of the next album, "Issues." The winner was Alfredo Carlos, who won $10,000 for an illustration of a worn-out rag doll with its stuffing billowing out of a rip in its torso.
The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, selling 575,000 copies in its first week.
Trouble surfaced in the middle of a 2000 tour when drummer David suffered a wrist injury that forced the band to hire another drummer, Mike Bordin of Faith No More, for the remaining dates.
David irritated the rest of the band when he took a gig modeling for a skateboard clothing company.
Reggie was about to kick David out and replace him with Mike. In the end, Reggie conceded and David stayed with the group.
Superstardom hasn't been entirely peachy for the members of KoRn.

Jonathan Davis and Renee Perez had a son in 1995 and the two were married in 1998. But they only stayed together for six months. Now, Jonathan -- who has boasted a love for pornography -- is dating a former porn actress, Deven Davis (her surname before meeting him), and the two are engaged.

Brian, formerly wedded to a woman named Rebekkah, ended his relationship and has custody of their daughter, who is 4 years old.

Reggie. divorced his wife, Sheila, last year. The couple had two daughters together. 
And then there's Mandi Arvizu. The 25-year-old sister of Reggie moved to Los Angeles after him with a desire to get into professional modeling. She got work as an exotic dancer, and later did a topless photo shoot -- at Reggie's home. Those images ended up on an adult Web site, billed as "KoRn's baby sister." That strained relations between the two, as Reggie thought his sister was capitalizing on the band. The siblings have since patched up their relationship.
In the wake of so much drama, KoRn began working on its latest album, "Untouchables," in late 2001. The band brought in a new producer, Michael Beinhorn, after firing an earlier one (the band likes to work at a tireless pace and frowns on working with those who can't keep up), but dealing with personal problems was too much for the band. It couldn't shake its creative block.
Ultimately, the band's record company sent the group to Arizona to work on songwriting in relative quiet. When it returned to Los Angeles, the band and Beinhorn crafted a gem that mixes polished studio glamour with a sound that's bigger than anything the band has done before -- taking KoRn's crunchy sound and transforming it into a bone shaking, danceable dirge.
"Untouchables" is the closest KoRn has ever come to a party record. Released in June of this year, the album went platinum by the end of that month, although sales are down sharply from previous albums.
Kevin Boyce said...