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.
JACOBY SHADDIX (Papa Roach): When we were coming up, the Deftones was the band we looked up to. I’d go to their shows and I’d leave going, “Man, I want to start a band.”
DEZ FAFARA: When things started happening again in LA, you had Coal Chamber playing the Whisky one night, and Korn would play the Roxy the same night. Both were unsigned. But Korn brought buses of people from Huntington Beach up to LA to make sure their shows were packed. And they weren’t the only ones. I remember Lynn Strait kept bringing Snot from Santa Barbara to fucking LA, which pissed a lot of people off. So I walked up to Lynn in front of the Roxy one night and said, “Fuck you, go back to Santa Barbara.” And he said, “You know what? I like you and I’m a huge fan of Coal Chamber. Let’s go get high.” We ended up in a car smoking a joint. Then we went into the Roxy and did shots of whisky. We became friends from that point on.
RAYNA FOSS (Coal Chamber): Korn got signed and blew the doors wide open for us. Snot got signed, System of a Down got signed. Fear Factory and Machine Head were already signed. Everything was happening.
DEZ FAFARA: Everybody would go into clubs every single night and you’d run into every single person from every band. Most of the time people would have backpacks on and be handing out demo tapes and stickers. Promotion was key at that point. And the shows were really intense.
JONATHAN DAVIS: Most of the time, I had no clue what I was doing up there. I blackened my eye so bad from smacking my microphone against it one night. I stuck my teeth through my lip, bloodied my nose, I looked like
Blackie Lawless from W.A.S.P. for a whole set ’cause I was bleeding all over myself. I fucked myself up left and right all the time just trying to do the best show we could.
DEZ FAFARA: There was a lot of nepotism, which I was a little wary of. We got a deal after Korn and Deftones and Ross Robinson was supposed to produce our first record, but after hearing people compare us to Korn I ran away from Ross and straight to Jay Baumgartner and Jay Gordon [of the band Orgy] to do our first record. But Ross is the one who brought us to the attention of Roadrunner, and Fieldy lent all of his bass equipment to Rayna for our first record.
MONTE CONNER (ex-VP A&R, Roadrunner): Coal Chamber got some grief because they had a similar sound [to Korn]. Hundreds of bands came after that, but Coal Chamber was the first to follow Korn—I would say Coal Chamber’s first record was the second nu metal record ever to come out.
FIELDY: When we started out there was nobody to tour with, and now we have all these bands out there that we can put tours together with. Back in the day we were like, “Fuck, we want to go on tour. Who can we do this with? Megadeth? I don’t want to go on tour with fucking Megadeth.” But we did.
While Los Angeles was developing into a musical hotbed again, a band in Jacksonville, Florida, was bubbling under. Limp Bizkit would eventually eclipse the popularity of all the West Coast bands by combining the volcanic guitar eruptions of Korn with straightforward rapping, courtesy of part-time tattoo artist, former break-dancer, and future entrepreneur Fred Durst.
FRED DURST: I started break-dancing in 1982, and I got real good around 1984. I started rapping, doing talent shows and break-dancing contests at the mall against crews, battling and rapping with a beatbox. Then I got turntables and a mixer and learned how to DJ in 1985. Most nights I went skating or went into a break-dance contest at some little club.
WES BORLAND: I grew up in Nashville and bought my first guitar with lawn-mowing money when I was twelve. I started taking blues lessons because I had to take what was offered, which was fingerpicking, blues, and country. But I wanted to play electric and was listening to Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Metallica, and Testament. I would bring in something, and my teacher would go, “I’ve never heard of the Damned. Don’t you want to play Merle Haggard?” When I was thirteen I really got into Metallica’s Kill ’Em All. At the same time I liked a lot of New Wave. I was always the weird kid. I got beat up a lot by jocks in high school. It was a really racist school, and my locker was in the “black” hallway. So I got hit a lot out of nowhere ’cause I was a little white skateboarder kid. Then we moved to Florida and I started going to a school of the arts, which was much safer. Fights there were like little gothic girls saying they were gonna cast spells on each other. That’s where I met [drummer] John Otto. He was going there for music.
FRED DURST: Before Limp Bizkit, I was in an alternative band called Malachi Sage, and Sam [Rivers] was the bass player. They wouldn’t listen to me so I said, “Fuck them,” and I started 10 Foot Shindig, which was more of a rap/rock thing. Sam was still in Malachi Sage, and one night after they opened up for us, I said to Sam, “You need to quit this band and start a band with me.” He said, “I wanna call my cousin John. He’s a jazz major in school.” The first day we jammed with John I was playing guitar and rapping. It happened right there. We wrote three songs.
WES BORLAND: John brought me into the band. I guess I was the artsy guy. In the beginning I dressed in drag and I wanted to look like a girl who was trying to be hard. Everyone thought Limp Bizkit had a butch female guitar player. Then I started wearing masks onstage to look like a cartoon or turn myself into different characters. I played in my underwear and painted my head jet black from the neck up when I didn’t feel like doing anything else. That was my “burnt match” costume. All you could see was teeth ’cause I had big black contact lenses. And I had a couple of skeleton suits and an oversized kung fu suit. The artiness was always meant to be a big part of the band. The goal was to have musicians who could cross over into as many different styles of music as possible and mix them all together.
FRED DURST: At the same time as I liked rap, I liked Ratt. And Nirvana and Soundgarden were big influences to me. The people who slam us as being on some bandwagon are the people who don’t care about growth. They don’t care about reality, and they don’t want to listen to music evolve. They just want us to be removed. And as long as those people keep writing shitty stuff about us, the more people become curious, and the more it’s good for us.
WES BORLAND: Fred’s really unpredictable. You never know when he’s gonna freak out and totally lose it. It happens all the time. He will just explode and try to knock the monitor guys over the head with a microphone stand. He has attacked people onstage, kicked entire speaker stacks over. He’s walked offstage after one song. Sometimes we’d be at a huge show and he’d break every single microphone that was handed to him and not sing. Or he’d sing for a minute and then break it on purpose. And he’s paying for all of it, but he doesn’t care. I’ve done the same thing. We would all get in these zones where we would freak out and you just can’t stop.
JONATHAN DAVIS: I’ve flown off the handle like a motherfucker. I’ve screamed at everybody and become a real dickhead because I love this music so much. It’s my fucking baby, and I take it really personally. I’m known for having fits. I’ve smashed lots of stuff—picked up my equipment in the studio and chucked it across the room, thrown chairs, knocked over things. It just gets frustrating when stuff isn’t working out the way I want.
WES BORLAND: Korn was one of our influences, and I think some of the guitar tones and a few of the rhythms sound like Korn, but it’s not the same band at all. Fred raps most of the time and Jonathan doesn’t rap at all. They were our big brothers. They helped us out insanely in the beginning, but we quickly got to the level where we didn’t need to always have their name tagged on to everything we do.
FRED DURST: I met Korn at a show they did opening for Sick of It All. There were twenty people there, and afterwards I tattooed Fieldy at my house. We became real good friends, and I gave them our demo, and they loved it, so they gave it to Ross and he helped us get signed.
FIELDY: Fred ended up tattooing “Nor” on Head’s back. It’s supposed to say Korn, but it looks like “Nor.”
FRED DURST: They fucking liked the tattoo the night they got it! Fuck Head, that motherfucker. He was fucking begging for the tattoo. I drew it up and we were all fucked up. It was real late. And Fieldy was going, “Yeah, get it man, get it, get it.”
FIELDY: We took Limp Bizkit under our wing and brought them on tour because we liked them. If we like a band and we get along with them, they’re gonna tour with us and we’re all gonna get crazy. We paid Fred $500 to go out onstage naked and play “Faith” by George Michael, so he went out and did it buck naked. And the stage was only about 3 feet off the ground, so people’s faces were right up against his dick. We just sat back and giggled our asses off.
JONATHAN DAVIS: He had his dick tucked for the first part of it, then he popped the thing out and it was just slapping against his body. The people up front were all talking about how he had a small dick. You could see them all putting their thumb and forefinger like two inches apart to show how small it was. It was fucking embarrassing. That was funny.
Once the first wave of nu metal bands proved they could sell records and draw crowds, labels clambered to snatch up other similar-sounding groups. With the help of their musician friends, Orgy, Staind, and, of course, Limp Bizkit were soon hot commodities.
FRED DURST: We got an offer to sign to Mojo/MCA, and then we got in a major car wreck and all of us almost died. It was weird. Before the car wreck, we were on our way out to California, and we said the only way we won’t be on Mojo [and go with an earlier offer we’d gotten from Jordan Schur & Flip] is if we flipped the van or something. We were asleep, and the driver fell asleep at 6 a.m. in the middle of the desert. He over-rotated and tried to correct. The van flipped five or six times. My fe
et got crushed. Everybody got banged and cut up. One guy who came along with us broke his back and was just lying on the street in the freezing cold desert. I took it as an omen and we went with Flip.
WES BORLAND: We’ll never be able to repay Korn for what they did for us. All we can do is show that love to other bands, which is what we did for Staind. Then Staind wanted to move away from us and do their own thing, which was fine.
AARON LEWIS (Staind): [At first,] Limp Bizkit didn’t want anything to do with us. Fred thought we were devil worshippers. He was freaked out by our first CD cover [Tormented], which was a bleeding Bible with a knife in it. But we worked that out and explained we weren’t devil worshippers or anything. Then he heard our music and liked it.
WES BORLAND: Staind’s demo tape blew us away. Fred brought them to Florida, let them stay at his house, brought in some DAT recorders, and did a demo with them and sent it out. They played a showcase in LA at the Opium Den, and a bunch of major labels started drooling. It was kind of the same thing Korn did for us and Orgy. We’ve all looked out for each other.
RYAN SHUCK: We had never really played in front of a bunch of people as Orgy when our first record came out. We’d all been in other bands and played clubs—guitarist Amir Derakh was in the hair metal bands [Rough Cutt and Jailhouse]—but when Orgy got together we threw a curveball with our approach to music and it caught on. We didn’t have to play a lot of clubs and go through that whole drawn-out play-for-three-years thing. Korn signed us to their label Elementree. So after [1998’s] Candyass came out and we started touring, we became the band that we are. We did things a little backwards.
JAY GORDON (Orgy): Some people freaked out about our name, but back in the Roman days people didn’t used to feel that was a problem. And it’s not about group sex. It’s actually definitely a musically based name and it all came from how the different styles in our music work together. It’s a word I put on a bass case one day, and the guys loved it, and I thought, “Cool. We’ll just call our band that,” not even thinking of what would happen down the road.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 43