Name: Jonathan Houseman Davis KoRn: Vocals, Bagpipes, Drums Nickname: HIV Born: January 18, 1971 Marital Status: Married ("in his heart") Wife: Deven Davis Half Brother: Mark Davis Father: Rick Davis Sister: Alyssa Davis Son: Nathan Houseman Davis

Jonathan Davis was born in Bakersfield, California on January 18th, 1971.

Jonathan went to Highland High School…the same high school as Beavis and Butthead.  Jon hung out with the so-called freaks and misfits in school. He frequented gay clubs. He still does.

When Jonathan was sixteen, his father "found" Jesus and saved himself. His father used to be big band keyboardist, and owned a music store. The priests made his dad burn Jon’s Motley Crue posters and tapes.  At the time of his religious discovery was when his father began dissing Jon’s love for music, though he had been an avid supporter to that point.

The first show Jonathan had gone to was in L.A. to see Cradle of Thorns…years later they were signed to Jon’s record label Elementree under the name of Videodrone.

Jon thought that Fieldy was an asshole throughout his childhood, because Fieldy used to make fun of him.

Jonathan grew up in Bakersfield where his brother Mark says "there's nothing to do but drugs and drink and f**k".

Also when16,  he became a coroners assistant at the Coroners Department in Kern County. He went on to graduate at the San Francisco School of Mortuary Science. "I had a sick obsession with embalming and autopsies, but I didn’t want to f**k the corpses or nothing. I just got off on cutting people open. I could do things that serial killers did and get paid for it. I could hack up the bodies." "I cut up people that I knew: drug overdoses, car accidents, a guy that died when a
typewriter fell on his head. That kind of stuff shows you you could die at any minute. It helps you to live for the moment; appreciate your life."

Jonathan, about the morgue:  "A motherf**ker f**ked dead bodies. This guy, he was a freak. Every time I’d go to the mortuary to drop off bodies, he was all [creepy voiced], ‘Hi, Jonathan, how are you? Come here…’ And he’d always be rubbing me."

After seeing victims of car crashes, suicides, and sexual abuse-including people he had known or talked to the day before-he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and has nightmares to this day, one of which is exorcised in the Follow the Leader song "Pretty," about a young incest victim.

Jonathan earned his nickname "HIV" after the "faget" term he was dubbed in high school. Jonathan stood apart from his peers because of his different style of dress, mimicking his pop star idols Duran Duran. Jonathan does not however have AIDS or the HIV virus. 

Spend any time with Davis and one is likely to be subjected to an endless barrage of queer references and gay jokes. Just watch Deuce. But what might initially come across as small-town homophobia turns out to be something more, a by-product of a lifetime of sexual confusion. One Davis-penned song, entitled "Faget," reflects on time spent as a Duran Duran-loving New Romantic, when the singer would don makeup and hang out in gay bars. "Everyone thought I was gay my whole life," says Davis, "so I have to joke about it just to deal with it."

As a reminder Jonathan has "HIV" tattooed on his upper left arm. "That tattoo has probably saved my life. You know in situations when passion and lust take over your brain.... I take a look at that tattoo and I remember that the virus is out there and you never know who's got it" says Jonathan.

Jonathan wasn’t even baptized as a Catholic until his mother’s remarriage. "I don’t believe in organized religion—I dealt with them hand in hand, and a whole
bunch of Catholic priests tried to molest me. Telling me I was gay and I should go home with them and stuff."

On his upper right arm is a tattoo of a crazed bishop ripping up his skin. "The bishop is a symbol of the atrocities that religion is making. He's ripping up my skin to reveal Christ. It's more of a symbol of how corrupt religion is. I don't believe in any of it because of sh*t like televangelism. Do you really think that all that money really goes to charity?"   "Before I got in KoRn, I tried out to be Jesus Christ just so I could face his ass." says Jonathan of the show Jesus Christ Superstar. "He was such an asshole to me, but it still made me cry to watch him hang by his neck." 

Jon swapped his coroner’s job to a steady diet of Top Ramen and a garage at Long Beach when he made the try-out for Creep. His father cried when he helped him moved his stuff and has been quoted as saying later that he was happy that his son was at least "chasing his dreams." After Creep, Jonathan went on to join the band Sex Art as lead singer. It was in this band that he was spotted by Munky and Head at a local club. They asked him to try out for their band, which was then called L.A.P.D.. Jonathan went and tried out. "I didn't want to do it. I went to a psychic and she told me I was stupid if I didn't do it" he says. And so, KoRn was born. Within two weeks of Jon’s arrival, the band recorded versions of "Predictable", "Daddy", "Blind", and "Alive." They entitled this demo Neidermeyer’s Mind. Paul Pontius (the A&P rep for Immortal Records) waited through four KoRn shows as a silent observer before confronting the band.

In Long Beach Jon befriended a speed dealer. "It’s just about being up," he explained. "If I didn’t have to sleep, I’d love it. If I could just stay awake and there was no such thing as sleeping…there’s not enough time."

"I’d wake up in the morning and do a line," Jonathan says of his speed addiction. "Speed in the morning, I’d have it all lined up for breakfast so when I’d lay down and go to sleep, I’d wake up and just snort and it’s like, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m up.’ It was bad. It’s like, you do one line and stay up all night, but then you have shit to do the next day so you have to do another line to be able to keep staying up to get that shit done. Eventually you start spinning out from sleep deprivation."  Helmet in the bush was written about Jon's speed addiction.

To write lyrics for the first KoRn record, Jon returned to Bakersfield and wrote lyrics at an old recording studio called Fat Tracks.  "I like being miserable. I guess I’m punishing myself. I guess I punish myself everyday. I don’t know…I haven’t really analyzed myself lately. I just like the pain."

Jonathan's lyrics have created nothing short of controversy and many of his songs come from the people around him, including his stepmother who is the subject of the song "Kill You", about how she constantly harassed, punished, and tormented him, and the appropriately titled "Mr. Rogers" which was originally to be called "Be My Neighbor", a song which was inspired by the television show Mr. Rogers.

"When I was a little kid watching Mr. Rogers, that sh*t was scary. He was a freaky old man... Land of Make believe and Mr. f**kin McFeely and sh*t... made me sick. So back when I was doing speed, like for 5 or 6 days I'd be trippin out and my brain would start to get freaky and get schizophrenic and stuff, and I'd tape it and watch it everyday over and over... I don't know, I was sick in the head. As a kid he told me to be polite and all it did was get me picked on. I f**king hate that man. Thanks for making me polite and trusting everyone, and easy to take advantage of. So I spent 3 months on that one song, just tweakin' on it, and it was totally just my Mr. Rogers obsession, about how evil I thought he was. Pretty much drug induced."

And as for the much discussed "Daddy" from KoRn's debut album, Davis says "People think Daddy was written because my dad f**ked me up the ass, but that's not what the song's about. It wasn't about my dad or my mom. When I was a kid I was being abused by someone else and I went to my parents and told them about it. They thought I was lying and joking around, so they never did sh*t about it. They didn't believe it was happening to their son. I don't like to talk about that song, this is the most I've ever talked about it."

When Daddy was recorded Jonathan became so emotional that they left the tape rolling. At the end of the song you can hear a door creaking. That's Jonathan walking out of the sound studio. Daddy has only been performed live once (entirely), but Jonathan became too emotional and so they stopped playing.

At a young age Jonathan went through the painful ordeal of parental divorce. His father Rick later remarried.

Considering that Jonathan has portrayed his father as an abusive enemy of all that he was and wanted to be, the two seem to get along surprisingly well. When asked about "Dead Bodies Everywhere," about how he didn't want his son to be a musician.

"Initially there was some nervousness on my part," he says of first hearing songs describing his relationship with his son.

"But it forced us to sit down and go over all the issues and resolve them. And we did, didn't we?"

"Yeah," says Jonathan obediently.

"I had lost everything in bankruptcy, and I was going through a divorce, and at the moment I looked at my son and said, 'Always have a day job to fall back on.' And fortunately he didn't listen to me. But everything's okay now."

"We were both f**ked up." Jonathan concedes.

"I still remember when I drove back home after you moved to Long Beach," his dad says. "When I saw you were living in one corner of a garage, you have no idea how many buckets I cried driving home. But I thought, at least he's pursuing his dream.

"I'll be damned," dad continues, "now you're a little drunk in front of your kid, making music and touring all the time, just like I was."

Jonathan says "Since I was 13, all we talked about was pussy. It wasn't until I started writing songs about him that we started talking about all that other stuff. He's not that bad now. But at that time it felt horrible. When he asks me, 'I wasn't a bad dad, was I?' What am I going to say? 'You were an asshole'?"

But the truth is that Jonathan now does understand, at least a little. "Ever since I've had a kid I totally have new respect for my dad," he marvels. "He did f**k me over, but I can understand why. When he left to go on the road, he needed to put food on the table. He needed to pay hospital bills: I was asthmatic, I was in the hospital every month from the age of three to the age of ten. When you're three years old you don't think about that sh*t. It really freaked me out when I left to go to Japan and my son said, 'You got to go work? Bye daddy.' Then he rolled over, like 'don't talk to me' It hurt my feelings more than anything in the world."

In November 1998 Jonathan married his girlfriend of seven years, Renee. "Man, I gave her a wedding she will never forget! I was fully in all armor and wearing a Kings Crown; she's a fairy. There were all kinds of little fairies and sprites jumping in the trees and sh*t, it was crazy. Renee came up with it... we were like sitting there and thought wouldn't it be really badass to be all medieval. We saw that film... remember Excalibur? Kinda like that, and she went on from there and did it all up. It was a f**kin' bad-ass wedding...it was definitely dope. People were trippin' the f**k out. Everybody had to dress in costumes and sh*t so it was just a fun time. The whole thing... the castle we were in and everything... the whole thing was just awesome."

Jonathan has one son, Nathan Houseman Davis, who was born on October 18, 1995. Before the birth of Nathan, Jonathan kept a beeper on him at all times. "This tells me when my child’s coming. If I’m onstage, I say: ‘I’m having a baby now, bye!’" "My astrologer told me it was going to be a girl. My little girl has been coming to me in my dreams, and it’s breaking my f**king heart." He was going to name the little girl Salaam Dementia, but at delivery Jonathan was only slightly surprised to see, as he put it, "pink balls", and he had to come away from the girls name Salaam Dementia. He named his son after his best friend, Nathan Cox. "I’m going down the same road my dad did. It’s killing me, because I’m doing what my dad did to me, in that I’m always on the road, but I tell myself that I’m making his life better in the future. He’ll be pissed off with me, probably get in a band and write songs about me, and that would make me the happiest man in the world."

"I miss Nathan and Renee a lot, but I wouldn’t do that to them—dragging them all over the world with me would be cruel. Touring is really crazy!! It’s such a weird feeling, last time I saw him (Nathan) he was a toddler, and now he’s already walking! I love music and I feel I have something to say but sometimes I wonder if it is worth it." Unfortunately, In 2000 Renee and Davis spilt. Though Jon now has a new Fiance' Deven, whom he is very happy with.

Recently Jonathan and Richard Gibbs produced the Soundtrack for "Queen of the Damned"; a movie based on the novel by Anne Rice. Along with The Soundtrack the score of original music was composed by them (great stuff). 

More Jonathan Facts:

• Jonathan was cast out of his home in 1989.
   
• Jonathan’s mother took a liking to a local actor who was portraying Judas in a Bako production of "Jesus Christ Superstar", and so Jon’s parents divorced when he was three. When asked about it, Jon says, "He was such an asshole to me, but it still made me cry to watch him hang by his neck."
   
• Jonathan on his adolescence: "I was into Bauhaus, Ministry, Depeche Mode, the Thompson Twins. Dude, I was a New Romantic! I was a sissy la-la. They even took me to the gay [student’s] counselor just because I wore makeup. All the cheerleaders would come and try and pick up on me just for laughs. That hurt." His favorite bans now include: Flock of seagulls, Missing person, and Duran Duran. While his favorite country singer is Hank Williams.
   
• Jonathan on his Dad:  "He did f**k me over, but I can understand why. When he left to go on the road, he needed to put food on the table. He needed to pay hospital bills: I was asthmatic, I was in the hospital every month from the age of three to the age of ten."
   
• His father owned a music store, and so he became immersed in the workings of the instruments. If he spotted an instructor between classes, he would ask them how to play. Most of them would show him the basics, and then he’d learn the rest himself. In this manner he learned how to play the piano, upright bass, violin, and the clarinet…by the age of twelve. (quite an accomplishment!!!)
   
• (Jonathan) "I thought touring would be one big-ass f**king party—chicks everywhere, the whole fantasy. It’s nothing like I thought. It’s better. If it was like what I thought it would be, I’d be dead now."
   
• After his parents split, Jonathan took up the drums; a Christmas present from his grandmother.
   
• Jonathan: "Best friends stab you in the front."
   
• Jon's hobby while on the bus is to surf the net for KoRn sites on his (apple) laptop.
   
• Jon does not  like to write music unless the instrumental parts of the song is finished, but still does sometimes.
   
• Jonathan has called his signing on the first two albums as "straight f**kin’ cathartic rage."
   
• Jon has a strong belief in guardian angels, strengthened by his own paranormal encounters with his deceased great-grandmother and great-uncle, and further by the theories of his astrologer aunt. He grew up seeing ghosts ("They were like translucent white flashes of energy"), nearly becoming one himself when he was felled by a critical asthma attack at five.
   
• Jonathan did not meet David or Munky in High School (Highland HS), though they knew of  Jon's existence. Since they had both dated Jon’s sister.
   
• Jonathan doesn’t know how to drive and refuses to learn how after working on countless car accident victims during his time as a mortician. He never forgets to buckle his seatbelt.
   
• Jon's favorite Duran, Duran song is "the chauffer"
   
• Jon is superstitious.
   
• Jon was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder.
   
• Jon tried out for Jesus in Jesus Christ superstar.
   
• Jon did speed for 2 years in high school (hes' clean now).
   
• Jon's favorite Montly Crue member is Niki Six.
   
• Jon collects dolls and some Pokemon.
   
• Jon's favorite follow the leader song is Pretty.
   
• Jon's favorite color is purple and black.
   
• Jon wears 11 and 1/2 size shoes
   
• Jon was voted most likely to own his own mortuary in high school.
   
• Jon bites his nails
   
• For Jon's 16th birthday, he had a pic of Mountly Crue on his cake.
   
• Jon's favorite song on issues, is Dirty.
   
• Jon has 2 bag pipes. One says H.I.V on it

Jonathan's emotionally charged lyrics continue to inspire and strike a cord with fans around the world, hopefully, for many more years to come.

Jonathan's Equipment:

Microphones:

• Shure Mics (now in his custom mic stand - a  metal naked woman)

Bagpipes:

• Red colored, and named HIV
• Black colored, and named HIV

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