The KoRn Guitarist Who Chose Faith Over Fame: Brian “Head” Welch’s Story

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Brian “Head” Welsh was a rock star who thought he had it all. He was the co-founder and lead guitarist of the Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum band Korn, one of the biggest and most controversial rock bands on the planet. He lived in a mansion, had millions in the bank, and legions of fans.

00:00:40
Speaker 2: All over the globe.

00:00:42
Speaker 1: He was living the good life, and it should have been perfect, but it was all alive.

00:00:47
Speaker 2: Here’s Brian Welsh with his story.

00:00:50
Speaker 3: I grew up just loving music.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: Man.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: My parents in 1980 bought me AC/DC’s Back in Black. I turned that record on, it was over. I was like, I want to be that. Stared at Angus Young, I stared at his picture like it just played. Then I got every album out there and just played that, Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osbourne, like all these, all these bands. And, and, you know, I just wanted to be a rock star, man. I met the guys in Korn in elementary around 1987. These guys, they went and started hanging out with this other guy named Pete Capra, and he was like, “Dude, there’s some new music. There’s some new bands coming out.” And he showed them Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith The More before they either of them got big. So they were, they were, they started getting to that music, and then they started forming this band away from me. They, they went and moved down to Hollywood, California, because we grew up two hours away from Hollywood. And I was stuck with this girl, and I treat her sorry, I actually really loved her, but I was, I was stuck back in this bad relationship, and I treated her bad. And, and she was a sweet girl, actually. And I was controlling. I was so insecure. I had this self-hatred that I grew when I was probably junior high. You know, I got picked on and didn’t like the way I looked, and was just, you know, body. I felt like I was fat, and just everybody with you puberty before me. So it was like, that’s the worst, you know, so everyone’s kicking my butt, you know, I’m this little guy. Let me alone. But I look in the mirror, and something in my mind and my heart was like, “I don’t like you. You’re not good enough, you’re ugly,” you know, all this stuff, all these, you know. And so I carried that. I remember I went down to Hollywood, California, and visited the guys because they’re still my friends, you know, and they were just like, “You should move in with us, you know, just stay with us, man. You’re not doing good.” And, and so I moved in with these guys, and I became, I started them with their instruments, and I turned into their roadie. I’m carrying their gear. And, I mean, they’re carrying it with me because they don’t got nothing, right? They’re like, they have to pay to play. That was Hollywood back then. And so, but yeah, well, they would. I was the worst roadie in the history of roadies. Because they’re my friends. I’m like, they tell me to do something like, “Shut up!” So I did that for a few years, and as divine intervention would have it, Alice in Chains came out, and then what some faith, the War start getting really big. Metallica was huge. Ozzy’s No More Tears, that record came out. So this low music thing, grunge thing was happening. But, uh, and so, thank God, these guys got out of their little funk rock face, Chili Peppers rip-off thing. And I like Chili Peppers, don’t get me wrong. It was just too much of a “they’re copying them,” you know. And so they asked me to join, and thank God, because I was just, I was partying like crazy. One of my roommates—we all lived together. We lived at the beach, like right close to the beach. But, you know, the rent was expensive. But you pile six people in there, it becomes like two hundred bucks each. And so, who would like—if we had one guy in the garage. I was in the closet. Then there’s two bedrooms, and then a pool room where someone slept in. It was crazy, but I was. I love the alcohol. I was addicted to alcohol from like age 16. I just my dad was a drinker, man. He, he ran some Chevrons with my uncle, a couple like gas stations. And, you know, one time he was just—he would drink. He wouldn’t drink all the time, but he would slip back and forth, you know. And then when he drank heavy, he would drink heavy. Like one day he came home and do some bank runs for the business, and he had a water bottle, and I went to grab it, and I take it, and he’s like, “Give me that! Give me that!” And I smell like vodka. It was straight vodka, you know. I didn’t confront him or nothing, but I was just like, “Whoa, Dad’s partying?” And so we have that, that, that kind of curse in our family line, right? And so I stepped into it at 16. And so when I joined the band, we instantly, we got Jonathan Davis in the band. We went to the Huntington Beach Pier. We were just drinking some 40 ounces of beer, and we’re like, “Okay, we’re in a band. Now what are we gonna call ourselves?” And Korn popped up. The singer Jonathan said, “What about Korn?” It’s a couple of stories going around, but we just thought it was cool because it was with a K and the backwards R. People are doing that like crazy now, right? Back then, it was like, different, you know, spelled a word different, you know. And it was a cool branding thing, and we tested it in Huntington Beach, small little beach town. No one knew what Korn was. We just plastered stickers everywhere, stop signs, businesses everywhere, all over the place. And everyone in the city was going,

00:05:46
Speaker 2: “Man, what is Korn?

00:05:47
Speaker 3: What is this Karn?

00:05:49
Speaker 2: What is that?”

00:05:50
Speaker 3: We knew that people would either love it or hate it, but they would not forget it. And so, yeah, we start playing shows around in Orange County. Then we played anything that we could do to get people to our shows. We would tell our friends. We found a place that had school buses, and we rented a school bus and put a keg in the back and said, “Give us ten bucks, you can ride in the bus.” We’re gonna go play Hollywood. Anything we could do. So we got there, and our names started getting around. This weird band Korn is coming in. They’re bringing a bus with all these fans, and the place is going off. And so record companies started hearing about it. Next thing you know, we got a couple of different record companies getting ready to offer us a deal. We ended up signing with Immortal Records. It’s a. It’s a. It was a label off of Sony Music. And so we recorded our first record. That’s when we got introduced to methamphetamines. And, man, yeah, it’s crazy because I didn’t like it the first time because I’m used to going to sleep. You know, you got a routine in life.

00:07:03
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Brian Welsh, who’s the co-founder and lead guitarist of the Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum band Korn, while he’s sharing his story here. And, my goodness, what a story! You know, the typical 16-year-old kid going through some bad things in high school.

00:07:20
Speaker 2: And that’s a whole lot of us, folks.

00:07:22
Speaker 1: When we come back, more of Brian “Head” Welsh’s story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here again, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every story we are here is uploaded their daily, and your support goes a long way to keeping the great stories you love from this show coming. Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Brian Welsh, who is the co-founder and lead guitarist of the Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum band Korn. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:08:23
Speaker 3: I just, I did not thought it was like a couple hours high or something.

00:08:26
Speaker 2: I didn’t know.

00:08:27
Speaker 3: I just was oblivious. And so, yeah, I just, I tossed the turn. I hit my friend up at 10 a.m. I was like, “Dude, I didn’t sleep all night!” And he’s like, “Oh no, dude, let’s go to Taco Bell.” So he picks me up. We go to Taco Bell, and I start eating this taco, and like the roof of my mouth is like sore or something from the meth. And I’m like, and if I can’t, I was like, “Taco tasted gross!” So everything I loved. It took away my sleep, took away my Taco Bell. And so I don’t know why I continued. But when we were starting Korn, man, this guy—once we figured out that you’re supposed to stay up on it, and we’re like, “Okay,” but we just won’t sleep. And we would go two or three days without sleeping, freaking out, all spun out meth heads, so, you know, looking. But we try to write songs. Try to write a song when you’re high. It sounds like you’re Mozart or something. Then you sober up. You wake up the next day after three-day run or something. You listen to it, and it’s like you’re not even in key. It’s just like, “What is this?” It sounded so good on the drug. And so, yeah, I was off and on. But we started Korn. It was off and on with that drug. But, you know, we would get sober, the producer would be like, you know, “Yeah, they just got to get off that stuff. We need to record an album.” We got the record done, and we started touring right after that and started gaining fans right away. But like, we knew we had something book. I never thought we would get like real big. I thought that maybe we could get like a club-level big, maybe like tour America, you know, and play some club. The pack-out just like crazy, you know. It was crazy, crazy, but small, and it just started growing. And it was a trip because, uh, when our second record came out, it hit number three on Billboard out of the whole country. I see myself at 3 a.m. on MTV. You know, all the Korn’s playing, they’re playing the Korn videos. And then I look out my window, and I see a beat-up BW Bug, and I’m like, “Wait, when I watched my heroes on TV, I thought they were rich and famous.” I’m like, “I got a little bug out there.” So the money wasn’t pouring in yet. So, yeah, the second record came out, man. And when you, when you tour, the crazy thing is, you don’t think about when you’re, when you’re a kid. Is that the touring cycle is just—it’s like anything else. You get up and you do the same thing every day. Right when you get on the road, you’re in a different city, and at first you’re just like, “Oh, man, I we’re in Baltimore, we’re in,” you know, wherever it is, and you’re like, “This is so cool.” But then it’s the same people, and you load into a building that looks the same. You don’t have time to go look at the city, and you get up and you play the same songs. The only thing different is a crowd. But it starts to feel like the same thing. And within, like, in two or three years, I realized that it’s not all glamorous like you think. Even the big shows, it’s the same thing, man. You do the same thing every day, and it’s like a career. It’s a career, it’s a fun one because you’re playing, you’re doing what you love. So we’re thankful, though, because we kept growing and growing and growing. And after our second record cycle, we went into the studio and started really going for it, and our record company was just like, “Let us do whatever we wanted. We don’t really understand this Korn band, but people seem to like them, the guys with the suits, so let them keep doing what they’re doing.” So we went in, and that’s when we got a little bit more. We just wanted to try things that we did in the first couple of records, and we get We wrote “Got the Life” and “Freak on a Leash,” and those big songs. That record—we spent a lot of months—and that came out, went through the roof, man. TRL and MTV was huge, and we were just on there every day. Skyrocket. I called my dad then, and I was just like, “Dad, we are number one in the country this week and selling like 150,000 records a week.” It was crazy, and we were on TV every day. MTV News followed us, and it was surreal, man, to be in that mainstream of pop culture. It’s just, it was crazy. I mean, we were selling out arenas left and right all over the place, and money was just pouring, pouring on us. We couldn’t make enough. We were getting money from shirts, we were making money from records, we were making money from just guarantees, you know, $300,000 to $500,000 a night or something like that. And back then, you know, it’s a lot. Now, what am I talking about? And so it’s just, it’s like, you know, and it was just crazy. And, uh, by that time, I had got married, all of us had got married and had started having kids. But meanwhile we’re on the road being the rock star too. And, and so we just—it was like Vegas, “What happens on the road stays on the road” type of thing. We had some good times, but it, it seemed like every year that passed, it got a little bit darker and darker than darker, you know. And, uh, we started losing our souls, the soul being the mind, will in the emotions, and she started losing our, our core of who we were. It was like when I saw Fieldy or Jonathan or Munky, I was like, “That’s not him.” And I look in the mirror, and I’d be like, “That’s not me,” you know. They look at me, and that’s—we just became a different people. Well, then a year or two after we had got married and had kids, divorces, five, had a five, everybody got divorced, broken homes, kids going with whoever, and divorce settlements, millions of dollars going to these girls and our wives. And they’re just—some of them just blowing through it. Mine was the worst ever. I was on tour. My biggest and one of my greatest memories is touring with Metallica, System of a Down, and Kid Rock. My wife when she, when she was 14, she ran away from home. So she lived kind of on the streets and on couches. And so in Huntington Beach, she left Lake Tahoe and moved to Huntington Beach. So when we were married, I was on tour with Metallica. She ended up running into some old punk rock dudes that were from when she was a kid, right? And they used to like, well, look out for her because she was 14. And so she was like, “Hey, I married this guy. Come hang out with me. He’s always gone.” So they’ve ended up moving and partying, started stealing things out of my house, taking things to a pawn shop. And my friend owned the pawn shop, so he’d call me and say, “Dude, you send me a picture or whatever. I saw this in your living room.” And I’m like, “What?” I call my wife. I’m like, “Who you having over our house?” She’s like, “Nobody!” just trying to lie. And I’m he heard rumors and everything. Meanwhile, one of the punk dudes, she ends up getting a boyfriend. And I don’t know what to do. I’m on tour with Metallica. This is my dream come true, man. I’m riding in planes with him. This is crazy. And I end up flying home. I was like, “I’m taking this kid on the road. I don’t know what I’m gonna do or how I’m gonna do it, but I have to protect her because there’s these meth heads and skinheads around my kid, right? It’s my little girl.” So I take her with me, and I’m like, “I need some—I call management. I need someone to help me with this kid on the road.” And I’m like, “What am I gonna do?” So we ended up going into the enemies’ camp and stealing one of theirs. Britney Spears’ dancer was off the road with her, so we hired her. She was—they were. We hired her in between tours with Britney, and she became my daughter’s nanny. So we did that for a little bit. And, man, we just tried to make the best of it. My heart was broken because my wife cheated on me with my daughter around, and when the skinheads were in my house, and I just my hatred started rising up. I just—we had these guys that were in the—because we toured with Ice Cube, you know, from N.W.A. And so we hired this guy from Ice Cube, and so he was connected with the Crips in L.A. And so I’m like talking to him at night, all drunk or high on drugs and saying, “Man, this guy has done this to me. I need to do something to him. Can your guys can I pay for—” And he’s—he was like, “Yeah, you can do that.”

00:16:55
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Brian Welsh, the co-founder and lead guitarist of the Grammy Award-winning band Korn, tell the story of his spiral up with wild success—something even he couldn’t have dreamed of—and at the same time, the spiraling out of control of his personal life. The next thing you know, they’re at the top of the Billboard charts and touring with Metallica. And as each year passed, Brian noted, things got darker and darker.

00:17:25
Speaker 2: We became different people.

00:17:28
Speaker 1: There were five guys in the band, there were five divorces, and there were five broken homes. And then Brian Welsh gets an idea in his head that he should take his daughter with them out on the road. In this highly dysfunctional setting with men who have no idea how to be responsible adults.

00:17:48
Speaker 2: What happens next?

00:17:50
Speaker 1: Stay tuned to Our American Stories, the story of Brian Welsh. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Brian Welsh. He’s the co-founder and lead guitarist of the Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum band Korn. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:22
Speaker 3: I got guys that will do anything, you know. And he said, “You cross that line, you can never go back, though you can have a target on your back.” So I was just—I could never do that, but I just wanted to so bad. And it was, man, I just, I made the best of it. I had her on the road for like two months, and it was crazy because we had these big, old, you know, like that guy, that g—