While most touring artists tend to bounce between Milwaukee venues based on availability, capacity, and who submits the best offer to their management, there are some acts you just know are going to be performing at The Rave/Eagles Club when they swing through town. For example, unless she’s playing Summerfest, you can pretty much bank on Kesha taking the stage at her beloved Rave. GWAR is a frequent part of The Rave’s Halloween-adjacent tradition. And we honestly can’t recall Milwaukee shows by the likes of Tech N9ne, All Time Low, or Insane Clown Posse taking place anywhere else in town.
The list of Rave regulars also includes Korn. The nu metal magnates have played there a total of 17 times (plus two solo shows by front man Jonathan Davis). We learned as much last week while walking up to the box office to get our tickets for The Get Up Kids—who themselves were making their fourth career appearance at The Rave—and happening upon this poster detailing Korn’s abundance of past Rave stops.
“Wow! That’s a lot of shows at one place,” we thought. Then we noticed something else on the framed Korn poster on a Will Call-adjacent wall. Ancient iPhone 8 enhance!
During that cursory glance of the show dates, we noticed that the first four of those 17 performances happened in the year 1995. Even crazier than that, we noticed that quartet of concerts occurred within a span on less than 200 days.
Just for a frame of reference, a local band playing four times at the same venue in a sub-seven-month span of time would border on being overkill. For a then-unknown band hailing from all the way out in Bakersfield, California to wind up playing the exact same venue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin four times in a mere 199 days is pretty much unheard of. Given the rarity and oddity of an out-of-town outfit landing on so many show bills in such a short duration of time, we spent some of this past weekend digging into this booking phenomenon.
Korn’s debut at The Rave/Eagles Club took place on March 22, 1995. At that time, the band’s self-titled debut album had only been released six months earlier and they had but one single (“Blind”) getting modest radio play. It was the waning days of the pre-digital download and pre-Napster era. Streaming and YouTube were still years and years away. So it’s safe to say Korn was fairly unknown when they stepped on the stage that Wednesday night to open a concert that also featured Orange 9mm and headliners Sick Of It All.
Just 60 days later, Korn was back in Milwaukee to kick off a show on Friday, May 12 in support of long-tenured English rockers Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Like last time, this tour also included Orange 9mm playing second. Korn’s second single, “Need To,” had started to hit airwaves the month prior. By the time Korn returned again to take part in Milwaukee Metal Fest IX—landing near the middle of a lineup that also feature Megadeth, Flotsam And Jetsam, Fear Factory, Clutch, and more—on Friday, July 28, their reputation was growing, their star was steadily rising, and they now had four singles from that self-titled debut record in rotation.
The days of being able to say you saw Korn open for somebody at The Rave were almost over after that Metal Fest appearance. The fourth and final time Korn played The Rave in 1995 came just 71 days later, when they returned to the Milwaukee venue on Saturday, October 7 as direct support for KMFDM on a tour that also included God Lives Underwater opening.
Almost exactly a year after the final show in that four-concert run, Korn came back to The Rave to headline an October 19, 1996 tour stop in accordance with the band’s just-released sophomore album, Life Is Peachy, that would go on to be certified Double Platinum and establish them as nu metal royalty with pop culture appeal. Since then, they’ve only come to town in a headlining capacity (even bringing an unproven Limp Bizkit with them to open their Rave show in 1997). After that Rave-heavy 1995, Korn never played the venue more than one time in the same calendar year. In fact, there was even a gap of more than five years between Korn shows at The Rave at one point, lasting between March 1997 and November 2002.
No matter what you think about The Rave, about Korn, or about the intricacies of touring, you have to admit it’s pretty wild that a relatively green band from the other side of the country that was on the verge of mainstream breakout wound up playing the exact same venue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin four times in a period of under 200 days. Can you think of any other time something like Korn’s four-show run in ’95 happened? Until the next time we’re examining posters before a concert at The Rave, we can tell you that we personally cannot.