RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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It was August 2002. Korn were headlining the Paredes de Coura festival on a field north of Porto, Portugal. Tens of thousands of kids from across Europe had been camped out for days. The band's members, road-tested from nonstop touring, were so dialed in that they no longer needed a soundcheck. Imagine that.
What I remember is the faces: sunburned, solemn, ready for battle. When Jonathan Davis bellowed, "Are you ready?????" over the opening bars of "Blind," the answer no longer mattered. It was coming.
What unfolded could easily have been mistaken for a riot between mortal enemies. What it was, was the closest thing to perfect harmony between a band and an audience I have ever witnessed. The fury of bodies colliding, hypercharged by the fear and loneliness and tragedy of being young, righted itself into something almost breathing and moving in unison. The riverbank shifted under the weight of it. The trees bent. The earth literally moved under my feet.
I was there alone for the management company known as the Firm. Korn was Jeff Kwatinetz and Pete Katsis's band, but if you signed with us, everyone in that building was your manager. The only difference between me and the kids down front was a laminate. I'd been one of them — fighting for oxygen in a pit — and I never stopped being one of them. Nobody in our building ever did. That was the whole qualification for the job.
Pete Katsis died on Aug. 6 this year. He was 69. He paved the road that took the Korn live show from the Roxy in Hollywood to that field in Portugal, from club band to the world stage as one of the preeminent live rock acts on the planet.
I have never written a word about any of this. Neither has anybody else. Go look — 20 years, one of the loudest companies in the business, and there's nothing. No oral history, no tell-all, no anonymous former executive airing grievances. There was never a rule. In a town where every story you own gets converted into leverage eventually, this was the one thing nobody ever bargained with. Not even the guys who left screaming, and some left screaming. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century
I'm saying it now to honor Pete and what we all did together. Any word against one of us was a word against all of us. To understand Pete's impact is to understand that moment in time, when music and culture ate off the same table. Everybody watched MTV. Everybody waited for Tuesday, the day records were released — in a store, as a physical object. If you wanted the album, you got in a car.
The country was eight months past Sept. 11 and still grappling with what it was going to be. The answer coming back was louder, bigger, together. Spider-Man did $80 million in a weekend, a box-office first. American Idol premiered that summer and was instantly the most-watched program on television. One country, one channel, one weekend, one thing everybody was talking about on Monday. There was a singular feed, we just weren't using the word "monoculture" for it yet.
And the whole business ran on the reveal. You'd sit on a record for a year. Nobody heard it — not a leak, not a snippet, not a teaser. Then one Tuesday morning it belonged to everyone at once, and by Wednesday it had changed what people said to each other. Music and film were the only two industries on earth that could take over a day. Not sell something on it — take it. That made music 10 times bigger than it was, not because the songs were better, but because the moment was shared.
At the Firm, we were sitting dead center in the middle of it. Linkin Park was the biggest band in the world off Hybrid Theory , still the best-selling album debut of the 21st century. Korn wasn't a band, Korn was a culture. Limp Bizkit could gather 100,000 screaming kids anywhere you chose on a globe. Snoop Dogg changed how the whole country talked with a single verse. Backstreet Boys sold a million concert tickets in a day, which is not a number about a band — it's a number about a world where everybody found out at the same hour. Every one of those acts and 25 more were managed out of the same building, on the same floor, by the same 15 people. One week in the fall of 2002, the Firm clients had 19 albums on the Billboard 200 at the same time. Nineteen. One company. Related Content Linkin Park Pick Themselves Back Up in New ‘Unshatter’ Documentary Trailer Las Vegas’ Sick New World Meets the Metal Moment The Grammys’ Best Rock Album Race Pits Alt-Rock Icons Against New Generation See Limp Bizkit Pay Tribute to Sam Rivers at First Show Since Bassist’s Death
There wasn't a market research document anywhere in that Beverly Hills office. No data science, no focus group, no strategy team. We were everything for each other. Our weekly staff meeting looked like the galley between races at OTB — one person's in a suit, another is in yesterday's clothes and hasn't been to bed. Somebody's blasting a rough mix loud enough to do permanent damage, somebody else is screaming to start it over. That was the entire apparatus. Plus a few other wackadoodles banished from labels, serving out their sentences in our nuthouse. There was a closet full of phones people had thrown at the wall and dents in the drywall nobody ever explained. Rules weren't there to be broken, they were there to be amended — you went at the same exit again and again until it moved. Get caught? So what. Go again. We were all good at what we did. Together we were the greatest of all time.
Making Korn work inside Sony took exactly one relentless true believer: a marketing guy named Al, part lost porn star, part biker, still trapped in 1977, and the biggest pain in the ass alive. He'd follow you into the bathroom and keep pitching while you stood at the urinal. He'd also sit on the floor with a band for hours finding their colors and their fonts, and cry at the mention of his m...
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