Former Korn guitarist Brian Welch finds Jesus

Then he checked himself into rehab; that didn't work, either. One night on break from tour, he woke at 2 a.m. after a "downer" binge of alcohol. He walked to Jennea's room and saw an empty bed. Welch frantically searched the house and saw the backdoor to the pool was wide open.

Welch panicked and ran outside. His 2-year-old was curled up on a pool chair, sleeping a few inches from the water. "Things were just out of control," Welch says, "I knew I couldn't keep living like that, but I couldn't stop."

When Jennea was 5, she toured with Korn. "Jonathan always made me laugh. He's so funny when he jumps around onstage," she says of Korn's singer.

The band loved having Jennea on the road, too, Welch says, with one exception. "I made a rule that if anyone cussed around Jennea, they had to give her a dollar. By the second or third day, she was making, like, $50 a day, so I called it off."

One day, Welch heard Jennea singing. The tender voice of his daughter tugged at his fatherly heartstrings. Then he realized what she was singing. "All day I dream about sex," Jennea purred. The song was one of Korn's early hits.

Welch's insecurity mingled with the guilt he felt about being a bad dad. "I'd come home, and I'd just keep doing drugs. I had heart problems. I was so scared my daughter would see me doing drugs," Welch says. "I was so tired of living, so tired of drugs, of touring, of life and pain and heartbreak and tormenting things happening to me."

He soon gave into an invitation from a real estate partner to visit Valley Bible Fellowship, an evangelical church in Bakersfield. There he saw a quote that had already been haunting him, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

He says, "It was like a big, fat trashcan full of ice cold Gatorade after I'd been stranded in the desert for five years. I'm thinking, how do you come to someone who's dead? I was drawn to it, but I couldn't figure out what it meant. Come to a Bible, and look at the Bible? Then he explained to just come in prayer.

"I decided to just go home and talk to Jesus like he's there. Nobody's gonna see it. Either it's gonna work or it's not. Once I did, everything else started to fall away from me. I started throwing the drugs away. If I didn't have Jennea, I mighta died, 'cause I just didn't care. I was miserable when I found God."

"He was a little nutty about it there in the beginning, and that scared me," admits Maryellen, Welch's mom.

Nutty, to the tune of $3.7 million. When Welch typed "I quit" in an e-mail to Korn and its managers, he knew that a multimillion-dollar windfall deal with Virgin Records was months away. But God was telling him to quit. He was sure of it. And God had done one thing the band couldn't — free him from meth.

The other members of Korn were more than surprised when they saw Welch on TV, talking about demons, Jesus, and the music he used to "pollute" the world with.

"One minute, he's doing our thing; next day, he's a born-again Christian and he's saying that we're satanic," Jonathan Davis told the Sydney Morning Herald. "That shit's crazy. I kept thinking, 'This is not happening.'"

After his baptism in the Jordan River, Welch wrote both a letter and a song, "A Cheap Name," to rapper 50 Cent.

"You're a huge force for the devil right now," Welch wrote in the letter, publicized by MTV News. "He's going to put demons around you that tell you I'm crazy . . . to convince you that money, fame, and power are the things you should worship. God told me to tell you he loves you and playtime's over and it's time to come home. He said he's been with you, keeping you safe this whole time."

Welch became a laughingstock.

Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan issued a statement that he, too, had quit rock 'n' roll to follow Jesus. Keenan e-mailed MTV News and confirmed, "I did, in fact, find Jesus. More news to follow. God bless ya."

When MTV News told Welch about Keenan, Welch replied, "This is a beautiful, beautiful outpouring of the Holy Spirit."

But it wasn't the Holy Spirit. It was a prank by Keenan, who's known by music journalists for such games.

Korn wrote two songs to Welch. In "Ever Be," the same Jonathan Davis who made Jennea giggle on tour (Welch's tattoo of Jennea on his left arm is taken from a photo at Davis' wedding) sings, "You're the infection my friend/Disgusting right to the end/Didn't I know it then? . . . You're all that's wrong/With your dumbass psalms/Yet that's all that you will ever be . . . It must be hard to be you/Nothing's alright with you."

The reaction from fans varied. "I don't think I've seen anyone this fucking insane giving up being in one of the biggest bands of all time for this imaginary bullshit," one fan wrote on a metal site, www.roadrunnerrecords.com. "No one can fucking prove God exists. Therefore, this motherfucker is insane in the head. Hopefully he will just go away and die."