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Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story
Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story
Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story
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Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story

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The amazing true story of an out-of-control rock star, his devastating addiction to drugs, and his miraculous redemption through Jesus Christ.

In February 2005, more than ten thousand people in Bakersfield, California, watched as Brian "Head" Welch—the former lead guitarist of the controversial rock band Korn—was saved by Jesus Christ. The event set off a media frenzy as observers from around the world sought to understand what led this rock star out of the darkness and into the light.

Now, in this courageous memoir, Head talks for the first time about his shocking embrace of God and the tumultuous decade that led him into the arms of Jesus Christ. Offering a backstage pass to his time with Korn, Head tells the inside story of his years in the band and explains how his rock star lifestyle resulted in an all-consuming addiction to methamphetamines. Writing openly about the tour bus mayhem of Ozzfest and The Family Values tour, he provides a candid look at how the routine of recording, traveling, and partying placed him in a cycle of addiction that he could not break on his own.

Speaking honestly about his addiction, Head details his struggles with the drug that ultimately led him to seek a higher power. Despite his numerous attempts to free himself from meth, nothing—not even the birth of his daughter—could spur him to kick it for good. Here Head addresses how, with the help of God, he emerged from his dangerous lifestyle and found a path that was not only right for his daughter, it was right for him.

Discussing the chaotic end to his time in Korn and how his newfound faith has influenced his relationship with his daughter, his life, and his music, Head describes the challenging but rewarding events of the last two years, exposing the truth about how his moments of doubt and his hardships have only deepened his faith.

Candid, compelling, and inspirational, Save Me from Myself is a rock 'n' roll journey unlike any other.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 13, 2009
ISBN9780061753541
Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story
Author

Brian Welch

Brian "Head" Welch was one of the founding members of Korn. In 2005, after an intense spiritual awakening, he was instantly delivered from years of substance abuse with almost no symptoms of withdrawal. Today he lives and prays with his daughter Jennea in Arizona.

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    Save Me from Myself - Brian Welch

    HOW I FOUND GOD, QUIT KORN KICKED DRUGS, AND LIVED TO TELL MY STORY

    SAVE ME FROM MYSELF

    BRIAN HEAD WELCH

    FORMER LEAD GUITARIST OF KORN

    To my two best friends:

    the Holy Spirit and my daughter Jennea.

    I’m forever grateful to both of you

    for saving me from an early grave.

    CONTENTS

    Epigraph

    Author’s Note

    Prologue

    PART I: TO HELL AND BACK

    PART II: HEAVEN ON EARTH

    Epilogue

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Epigraph

    "They overcame him

    by the blood of the Lamb

    and by the word of their testimony"

    —REVELATION 12:11

    AUTHOR’S NOTE

    My life. What a trip it’s been so far. Like most people, I’ve had enough ups and downs in my life to drive a man crazy. Like most people, my heart has been beaten up pretty badly throughout the years by myself and by others. Like most people, many of the things that I’ve chased after in my life have left me feeling empty and unsatisfied.

    Unlike most people, I had a childhood dream to become a rock star that came true. I was able to do what I wanted to do, go where I wanted to go, and buy what I wanted to buy. Unlike most people, I gave all this up—my music, my band, my career, everything—when I had an encounter with God. After that, all I wanted to do was focus on my future, sweeping everything from my past under the rug and moving on with my new life. Or, at least, that was my plan until a friend suggested that I write a book about my life.

    At first, I didn’t know how I felt about that. I didn’t know if I wanted to dig up all the painful memories from my past, because they were just that: the past. As a new follower of Christ, I had been undertaking the process of crucifying my past and starting a new chapter in my life. I mean, why would I want to relive the past if I’m trying to forget it?

    Well, I prayed about it, and after a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that exposing all the darkness from my past would be part of my healing process. I also came to see that discussing some of the stupid things I’ve done might save a lot of people from going down the same roads of destruction that I traveled on.

    It was with this goal of helping others that I decided to write my story, to share some of my inner demons with others, so that perhaps you or someone you know can avoid the trouble that I came to know all too well. That’s my heart’s intention, anyway. Don’t get me wrong—my past wasn’t all bad. I had some good times, but most of those always seemed to lead me into trouble.

    Another reason I really wanted to write this book is to help explain to my family, friends, and fans how I came to this major decision to drop everything and follow Christ. You see, I was a master at hiding my pain and anguish from absolutely everyone. I was always the one who made everyone laugh—everyone except myself that is. I would always act like a goofball, appearing to be a normal, happy guy when I was around people. But it was all a front to cover up the internal prison that my heart was in. Behind closed doors, I was a very depressed, lost soul. As you read this book, please remember that while my outer life looked happy to the rest of the world, there were a lot of things happening inside me that no one knew about. This is the story of that inner life.

    It’s important to understand that I’m not trying to glamorize any of my partying past in this book—honestly, I’m just trying to be obedient to God. I really feel like God wanted me to tell my story how it happened. So that’s what I did. In this book, you’re going to read about a lot of darkness that went on in my life before and during the Korn years. And if it offends you, well…some of it is offensive. But it’s also the truth.

    You’re also going to read about how God has taken every bad thing I went through and turned it around for good. That’s just what he does. I’ve been completely clean and sober for over two and a half years; my life has never been happier.

    And if he did it for me, he’ll do it for anybody.

    Anyway, I hope this book touches your heart in some way.

    Thanks for checking it out.

    HEAD

    PROLOGUE

    I was at home when I heard her voice.

    It was the voice of my daughter, Jennea, who was skipping around the living room and singing. There was something familiar about it that I couldn’t quite place. I was too wrapped up in the sight of her jumping around the house, singing in her cute, innocent, five-year-old voice, and looking like a modern-day Shirley Temple, with her hair dangling down in curly, light-brown ringlets.

    A few days earlier, we had returned from my summer 2004 tour with Korn. Jennea had not been with me for the whole summer, but she had come out with us for a couple of weeks toward the end of the tour. Jennea was (and is) the love of my life. She was always so happy, and her happiness was very contagious. Even so, having her on the road with me was always pretty difficult—not because I didn’t want her there, but because being on tour with one of the world’s craziest rock bands was no place for a five-year-old girl. Still, she was amazing to have around. Everyone on the tour absolutely adored Jennea, and they would all try to behave around her. Our bass player, Fieldy, made up a rule that anyone who cussed in front of Jennea had to give her a buck. It was an attempt to train us to watch our mouths around her. Everyone really tried, but a few hours after we made the rule, she had already made about fifty bucks, so I called the deal off.

    I wish I could say that cussing was the worst of it, but unfortunately it was just the tip of the iceberg. I wanted Jennea to watch me play guitar every night, and so I gave her these special headphones that people use at shooting ranges to drown out all the noise. During our set, I would always try and make eye contact with her. Some of the time she would notice me looking at her and she would wave and give me a huge smile. Other times I would try to get her attention, but she would be staring into the madness going on in the crowd. In general, it was just some crazy dudes screaming the lyrics in the front row, but this was not always the case. There were some times when the madness became too much. There would be girls in the front row making out with each other, or girls with their shirts up flashing all of us in the band. It was no place for a kid to be.

    Jennea’s presence on the road that summer was made more complicated by the fact that 2004 had been by far the worst year of my life. I had reached my own personal gutter. Here I was, the guitarist for one of the biggest rock bands in the world, raking in millions of bucks and playing huge concerts all over the globe, but I was completely miserable. I didn’t understand how a person who had everything he wanted, with millions of dollars in the bank, could be unhappy.

    The thought of this made me so depressed that I turned to the only thing I knew that could comfort me: drugs. That year, I pretty much lived on beer, pills, speed, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Part of me wanted to get cleaned up, but another part of me wanted to die from a drug overdose. When I was on tour that summer, I fantasized about passing out and dying while asleep on my tour bus. Then, after I was gone, everyone would miss me and feel sorry for me like they did for all those other dead rock stars. Eventually, I would snap out of those dark thoughts and think about everything and everyone I had to live for. Believe it or not, even in the state I was in, I had full custody of Jennea, so I would think about her and how much she needed me. I would think about her beautiful light-brown curly hair and her smile that could chase away all my thoughts of death. I would think about how I was a suicidal rock star single father who desperately needed help.

    After the shows, I would try to hang out with her and be normal, but it was hard because of my addictions. I tried not to do drugs while she was around, yet I needed them to function. So I would sneak off somewhere to snort a line of meth, or wait until she fell asleep to do it; I was a complete prisoner of the drug. The only positive thing was this: When Jennea was with me, I didn’t think about dying.

    Sitting at home that day and listening to her singing, I was thinking about how amazing she was. I was thinking about how she was the cutest person in the world, and how hard it would be to leave her to go back on tour that fall.

    Then I heard what she was singing.

    It was a Korn song called A.D.I.D.A.S., which stands for All Day I Dream About Sex. These words were coming out of my five-year-old little girl’s mouth, and I knew right then that something had to change. That was the moment when I started seriously considering leaving Korn, but even then, I knew considering such a move was a lot different from actually doing it. I really didn’t want to leave. Since I was a kid, I had dreamed about becoming a rock star, and it seemed to me that quitting Korn also meant quitting on my childhood dream.

    But then I wondered how I could stay in the band when I was so miserable most of the time. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do or what I should do; I just knew something had to change, and I had to figure it out fast. The only problem was that the drugs had messed me up so badly I couldn’t make any rational decisions. When I left for our fall tour, I started doing a lot more drugs, and the suicidal thoughts started getting stronger. Death really seemed like a good option to me sometimes. I would think, You’re a loser. You’re never going to be able to quit drugs. You’re no good for Jennea. She’s better off without you.

    I really started to believe those thoughts. I had heard stories about people dying when they mixed uppers and downers together, and that’s what I was doing almost every day. I would do speed during the day, and take Xanax at night. Some nights I would go to sleep hoping I wouldn’t wake up. Other nights I would go to sleep scared, hoping that I wouldn’t die. I was completely out of my mind.

    What went wrong with me? How did I get to this point? How did I even get out of this alive?

    Well, that’s the roller-coaster ride we’re about to take. All the way to hell and back.

    PART I

    TO HELL AND BACK

    ONE

    LIFE BEGINS IN BAKO

    I grew up in a southern California town called Bakersfield, about an hour and a half from Los Angeles. In the past few years, the place has grown a ton, but when I was younger, it was still pretty small. There are two important things that you should know about Bakersfield when I was younger:

    It was hot (we pretty much baked in the heat every summer, so we started calling it Bako).

    There wasn’t much to do.

    My childhood there was pretty typical. Like a lot of kids in Bako, I grew up in a nice enough house, with nice enough parents. We were pretty much a typical middle-class family of the eighties, living at the end of a cul-de-sac in a ranch-style house with a basement. The basement was everyone’s favorite room. We had a home theater system down there (well, as good as home theaters got back then), huge couches, a huge pool table, a big Asteroids game (just like they had at the arcade), and some workout equipment. Even my dad liked hanging out down there, since that’s where he had his wet bar and a little bathroom that he used every morning to get ready for work.

    Because both of my parents worked a lot in order to provide for me and my older brother Geoff, there wasn’t a lot of time for hugs in the house. While I knew we all loved each other, it wasn’t the kind of place where everyone said it or showed it all the time. For the most part, my dad was a pretty cool guy. He coached my soccer team as well as my brother’s, took us motorcycle riding, and when he was in a good mood, he made us laugh a lot.

    But every now and then, he’d have these Mr. Hyde moments when he’d get kind of crazy. I don’t want to sound like I grew up with some abusive father or anything, because he wasn’t; when he was nice, he was really nice. But when he got angry, he got scary. Part of it had to do with his drinking; his dad was an alcoholic, and my dad drank a bit too. While my dad usually got happy when he was drunk, he definitely had his moments when his temper would flare up—even over little things. I remember a few times when my brother or I would spill a glass of milk at dinner, and he’d change into a totally different person, yelling at us with a voice full of anger, a voice that made us feel like we were going to get beatings, though he never followed through with those. A few minutes after his anger fits ended, he was usually back to normal. They were scary moments, but then they would pass.

    Overall, my mom was pretty cool and laid back—more or less your standard mom. She cooked good dinners every night, helped get us ready for school in the mornings, kept the house really clean, basically your typical mom stuff. It seemed like she had it more together than anyone else in our house, but she had her issues too—just like everyone else in the world. Growing up, I felt the most love from my mom probably because she didn’t have the unpredictable emotions that my dad did.

    My brother Geoff is two years older than I am, and, like all brothers, he and I fought a lot when we were kids. A couple of times it was brutal, but it wasn’t always that way. We also used to play games together for hours and make each other laugh. As we got older and became teenagers, we began pushing each other away in a more serious manner. In general, it wasn’t personal; it was mostly that we were just into different stuff. For example, I was into heavy metal, but he was into new wave. Back then the rockers didn’t get along with the new wave crowd. Geoff used to pin his jeans real tight at the bottom and his hair was long on one side of his face—down past his eye—while on the other side, it was cut short; it was the classic new wave hairdo. I would constantly make fun of him for it and for being new wave in general. One time we were arguing in our basement about something stupid, and I picked up a pool cue and whacked him with it as hard as I could. Got him good, too. I knew he was going to kill me for that, so I ran to my mom and hid behind her until he calmed down.

    Even though he didn’t get me that time, he usually got me back. When he was sixteen, he had this yellow Volkswagen bug that was slammed to the ground with matching yellow rims. One day I took the bus a half-hour across town to go hang out at the mall all day with one of my friends, and at the end of the day, I was tired and seriously not looking forward to another half-hour bus ride home. We saw my brother in his bug, and I asked him for a lift.

    No way! he said. "I ain’t giving a ride home to no rocker."

    Like I said: different.

    Our family moved from Los Angeles to Bako when I was in the fourth grade. My dad decided to go into business with my mom’s brother, Tom, and his wife, Becky, and together they ran a Chevron truck stop in East Bakersfield, managing a staff of full-time truck mechanics, gas pumpers, and cashiers. My mom also worked with my dad at the Chevron too. Looking back on it, it was amazing that the two of them got along so well. They worked together all day, five or six days a week, then came home at night and dealt with me and Geoff. They had their problems—and we added to them—but they worked hard to make money and to make us a family.

    My parents’ house in East Bakersfield was a three-minute walk from my elementary school, Horace Mann Elementary, which was the oldest school building in Bako. One morning on the way to school, I met a group of kids that lived nearby and we started hanging out after school, mostly in my parents’ basement because it was so tricked out. While my parents didn’t love having my friends over all the time, at least that way they knew I wasn’t getting into trouble. Though I managed to avoid it, East Bakersfield had a big problem with gangs. Now, before you start picturing a lot of drive-by shootings and stuff like that, these gangs weren’t exactly a bunch of gun-toting bangers. They fought a lot, but it was mostly with knives and fists. I wasn’t a fighter, so I picked up a guitar instead.

    I became interested in music around 1980 when I was ten years old, roughly a year after we moved to Bakersfield. My parents’ very good friends (and my godparents), the Honishes, were big influences on me. Frank, my godfather, was a guitar player, and they had a piano in their house that I always liked to plink on. Even then, there was something about playing music that fascinated me, so when I saw my godfather Frank play his guitar, I started getting interested in learning an instrument myself. The funny thing is that I originally wanted to play drums, but my dad talked me out of it. I remember him telling me, You don’t want to haul around a drum kit all the time. I think he just didn’t want to listen to me banging on the drums all the time in his house. I guess he wasn’t thinking about the alternative that I would be into heavy metal, cranking my guitar all the time.

    With drums out of the question, I chose a guitar—not just any guitar, my first guitar, a Peavey Mystic. Have you ever seen one of those? If you have, you know exactly the kind of music I was into. If you haven’t, go track down a picture on the Internet. It’s maybe the most metal-looking guitar ever made.

    My whole family was really supportive of my new obsession, and my mom even started taking me to lessons every week. After awhile, I pretty much understood what was going on with the whole guitar thing. I wasn’t a metal stud or anything, but I had a good ear, so it made sense and came pretty naturally. I could hear where notes were supposed to be played, and about a year after I started playing, I began teaching myself Ted Nugent, Queen, and Journey songs. While those were fun, what made me get really psycho over playing guitar was when AC/DC’s Back In Black album came out. I remember hearing it and thinking, I want to be just like Angus Young!

    That’s when I just dove into my guitar. Here I was, close to being a teenager, not too good with my parents but really good on this guitar—I just started playing constantly. My parents took an interest in my playing, too. Sometimes they’d come into my room and listen while I practiced. Even Geoff would take his new wave friends into my room and have me play Eddie Van Halen’s solo on Eruption. He was proud of his little rocker brother, even if he didn’t want to give me any rides in his car. It was fun, just to play. From an early age, I loved playing music. Loved it.

    I loved metal. Iron Maiden, Ozzy, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Van Halen—all that stuff—and I had the look to prove it. As far as looks were concerned, I was living the metal lifestyle. I had

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