Barker.
So how did I wind up spending weeks in El Paso at Al Jourgensen’s 13th Planet sanctuary and studio, conducting interviews for this book? It probably has as much to do with blind luck as persistence. I talked to Jourgensen one more time for MTV for Ministry’s 2007 release The Last Sucker. Again, all seemed copacetic. So when I got a deal to write my first book, Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal, I figured I’d have his full cooperation when I requested an interview for the chapter on industrial music. During the interview I pushed him for tales of lunacy from the glory days of Wax Trax! He laughed and told me that he was clean and had a beautiful place in El Paso now. He was a good citizen, he took out his garbage, and he wasn’t ready to endure the possible repercussions of reopening closed doors. He did say, however, that if I wanted to visit him in El Paso for a few days, we’d get drunk and he would regale me with stories that would have me pissing myself with laughter, but they would all be off the record. I seriously considered ditching my wife and two young children for a weekend getaway in El Paso with Uncle Al, but I couldn’t justify getting out of dodge to party it up in Texas and come home with urine-stained jeans. So I graciously turned down the offer.
Then the stars aligned. Revolver assigned me to interview Jourgensen for their “100 Greatest Living Rock Stars” issue, and after an upbeat, entertaining conversation, Jourgensen again invited me to visit him in El Paso. Without a pause, I shot back, “I’ll be there the minute you give me the go-ahead to do your authorized biography.” He thought it was a great idea and suggested I come to El Paso before Ministry began rehearsals for their 2012 world tour in support of their comeback album, Relapse. Unsure whether he was serious about the invitation, I ran it by his wife and manager, the charming and gracious but laser beam–focused Angie Jourgensen, and we finalized plans. I returned to El Paso in April for a second round of interviews and did a few follow-up phoners. Considering the chaos and turmoil that Jourgensen has endured during his thirty-year career, I anticipated a few bumps in the road. But the Jourgensens and their extended family of engineers, assistants, and musicians treated me like a peer. And as much as he hates doing interviews, Jourgensen rose to the task with great charisma and color, regaling me with dozens of amazing and overwhelming stories. Many were hysterical, others were tragic, horrifying, or heartbreaking, and in the end I was able to assemble a book full of heart and humor that makes Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt look like Goodnight Moon.
What’s most amazing about Jourgensen is that underneath the rock-star image he’s the perfect host and an all-around good guy—charming, goofy, mischievous, and still a little unstable. Every interview was accompanied with copious quantities of red wine and Shiner Bock beer, but regardless of how drunk he got, he was lucid and endlessly entertaining. I never actually pissed myself from his stories, but there were countless occasions when I laughed so hard that the microphone on my recorder missed Jourgensen’s pearls of wisdom and only picked up uncontrollable guffaws. One night after a few too many, we both crashed for the night and it was Jourgensen who wound up peeing himself while passed out on the living room couch of his man cave.
When my recorder wasn’t on, we watched the New York Rangers battle for a 2011 playoff berth, caught a couple Yankees’ games on his big-screen TV and drank more beer. As well as we were getting along and as intimate and revealing as the interviews were going, it was clear that talking about his past was rattling Jourgensen. He’s not someone who dwells in what has been; he’s far more interested in where he is now and where he’s going in the future. The interviews brought back a flood of memories of incidents he’d buried in the back of his brain. Now they were coming out like angry bees whose nest had been poked with a stick and Jourgensen was getting stung. To anaesthetize the pain and put on a peak performance—as he does in concert—he numbed his jitters with alcohol, starting in the morning with a bottle of red wine and drinking through the day until 4:30, when he felt comfortable enough to talk about the past.
For someone who suffered through twenty years of addiction to cocaine, heroin, crack, and Methadone, Jourgensen is extraordinarily coherent. Occasionally he’ll repeat himself, but for the most part, not only can he recall past episodes in vivid detail, he also analyzes them and puts them in context. One of Jourgensen’s favorite expressions is “If you remember the nineties, you weren’t there.” His clarity while discussing Ministry’s peak decade negates that axiom—at least partially. For someone who was obliterated with drugs and alcohol, his recollection is astounding. More significantly, his productivity during that time as well as in later years is practically unparalleled. In addition to pumping out Ministry and Revolting Cocks albums, Jourgensen wrote records for: Lard, his side project with the Dead Kennedy’s Jello Biafra; Buck Satan & The 666 Shooters with Rigor Mortis’s Mike Scaccia and Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen; Pailhead with Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye; and songs for Acid Horse, PTP, and 1000 Homo DJs, which at one point featured Trent Reznor. He also has produced music for GWAR, Skinny Puppy, Prong, Limp Bizkit, Rigor Mortis, the Melvins, Frontline Assembly to name a few, and he remixed projects for Red Hot Chili Peppers, Anthrax, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Cheap Trick, and Smashing Pumpkins, among others.
Not long before I left the 13th Planet compound, we were talking politics when Jourgensen took a short walk to his living room bar fridge to get a couple Shiner Bocks. On the way back his feet got tangled, and he tumbled down the two steps leading up to the bar. He landed square on his knees, slid about a foot, yet didn’t spill a drop from either bottle. We toasted his impressive feat of agility and kept talking. Then it was time to head to the airport to catch my flight back home.
When I arrived in New York I checked my cell phone voice mail and discovered that Jourgensen had left me a message: “I just wanted to fill you in on the further adventures of what’s happened since you’ve left the compound,” he began. “I had another fall and broke my knee, my elbow, and my jaw. I also knocked out a tooth. And when I woke up I had tattoos on my face.”
At first I was startled and considered calling back, then I laughed. There was no way Jourgensen would be able to talk if he had broken his jaw, and how could he possibly pass out and wake up with tattoos when there was no tattoo artist at 13th Planet? The next day I found out from Angie that Al’s claims weren’t far from the truth: He took another nasty spill and was headed to the doctor to see if anything was broken. The tattoos, she explained, were temporary tats she had stuck on his head while he was unconscious. In some ways it’s good to know that at 13th Planet every day is still Halloween.
Prologue
911.
What’s Your Emergency?
You know you’re in trouble when you try to say goodbye to your wife and all you can do is gargle blood. I was dying. Well, that was nothing new. I’d tempted fate for more than four decades. I’ve had kidney failure; liver failure; hepatitis A, B, and C; and I tried to invent D, but all the doctors I saw were too dumb to grasp my creativity. I lost a toe, all my teeth, and nearly an arm, and I’d overdosed on heroin twice and had to be resuscitated.
That’s how I was supposed to go out, like a rock-star cliché with a needle in my arm and a groupie on my dick. But that wasn’t happening. See, I’ve always done things back-assward. I became a singer even though I hated singing, sold out to a major record label before anyone even knew who I was, and then wrote slow, desperate, crushing music when everyone wanted to hear fast thrashy stuff.
So there I was, bleeding to death from a goddamn ruptured ulcer. Turned out I’d had ulcers for years without knowing it. I mean, what the fuck? I’d always thought ulcers were the kind of thing that neurotic old ladies got and then they took some medicine and got better. Like I said, back-assward. In retrospect the whole thing is a blur, and I don’t remember much except sitting on the toilet and blood pouring out of my asshole, falling off the toilet, puking pints of blood, and trying to crawl across the floor. Then I was
in an ambulance.
I’m probably the biggest fucking idiot in the world for not heeding the warning signs and allowing my stomach to burst open like the guy in the movie Alien. The thing is that my whole life was upside-down for so many years I honestly didn’t realize that puking up blood every day on tour isn’t normal . . . and this is a decade after I stopped shooting coke and heroin. I mean, everyone knows life in a big rock band is crazy. And being in a crazy rock band, well, let’s just say I haven’t flatlined three times from a pulled hamstring. For six years I’d wake up in my tour bus bunk so hungover I’d usually throw up anything that was in my stomach, including blood. I didn’t think anything of it. I’d just wipe my mouth off and then start drinking again because, as everyone knows, the only real cure for a hangover is to get wasted—hair of the dog. Besides, I’d have hours to wait before the show, and there’d fuck-all else to do. Usually I had my bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey, but sometimes you can’t be picky, so vodka, beer, and wine would do—whatever was on the rider from the night before. I’d have a good buzz going by soundcheck, if we even got one. Maybe I’d eat something to soak up the booze so I could drink some more without throwing up.
I’d watch sports on the bus—preferably hockey if the season was right, but baseball was almost as good, and that season lasts for six months out of the year, so I’d usually be able to find something so I didn’t have to talk to anyone. Then I’d put on the Ministry hat and go out there and do the show. Afterward I’d celebrate with the guys in the band and any friends I had at the show. Maybe
I’d puke more blood before I passed out; maybe I didn’t. But that was the routine. And people wonder why so many musicians are alcoholics and drug addicts.
Newsflash. Being in a rock band sucks. Every time I say that in an interview the journalist laughs like I’m joking. But it’s true. Being on tour sucks. I hate the traveling, the waiting, the industry people, the press, all the celebrity shit. I hate it all. I know this sounds like a cop-out, but that’s the main reason I did drugs for so long. I needed to escape the charade and hide from everything—whiny musicians, managers, promoters, lawyers, wolves, hyenas, serial killers. I obliterated myself to the point to which I functioned on muscle memory. That was good enough to get through the shows so I could destroy myself some more. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Back in 2007 all I wanted to do was get healthy. That’s why I told everyone The Last Sucker was going to be Ministry’s final record. I didn’t feel good. I was always tired and sick, even when I wasn’t drinking. In the past I’d stop puking blood after I got off tour and had a little while to mellow out and heal. My wife, Angie, calls the process earning my health credits. Every time I sleep well or eat my broccoli or stop drinking for a while, I get more health credits that I can trade in later when I’m back on tour or in the studio drinking again. When Ministry got back from The Last Sucker tour I wasn’t just out of health credits—I was in serious fucking debt. I tried to be good and do all the right things, but I was still shitting and puking blood. That’s why I shut the band down. It was painful to wake up and immediately throw up a whole stomachful of blood. Since I couldn’t blame it on my wife and was too stubborn to accept that I was somehow responsible, I blamed it on Ministry. It couldn’t be my fault. It’s gotta be the band and all the fuckers in the music industry that are driving me to drink.
That’s not just half-assed rationalization either. Doing Ministry is the most stressful thing I’ve ever done. It has always been my main band, so every time I commit to an album or a tour, there’s a lot riding on it. Making a Ministry album is like going to war. Don’t get me wrong—there have been great moments, and sometimes it’s been more like the first piddly Gulf War than World War II, but still, there are always battles. In 2008 I had just finished the CULaTouR, promoting The Last Sucker, the final record in a trilogy of three fast, heavy albums that were structured to be pretty anti-George W. Bush. The president was leaving office in 2009, so I decided it was a good time to put the nail in the Ministry coffin and just produce other people’s stuff for a while. I wanted to earn back some health credits, make a little money, and maybe do a solo album.
No more Ministry! I was hanging out in my own beautiful private ranch in El Paso and working at my own custom studio we built on the property. I had Angie there and my best friend, Lemmy, who looks like just a golden retriever but is a hell of a lot smarter than most humans.
Other guys would come in and out of our compound, like my engineer and drum programmer, now coproducer, Sammy D’Ambruoso, who had just broken up with his girlfriend and was living in our guest house, and Mikey Scaccia, who has played guitar for Ministry on and off through the decades. Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick and Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top dropped by. These are musicians who started out as my heroes and now I’m friends with them, which is the coolest thing. I should have been happy. I should have felt great. Problem was that I felt like shit. I wasn’t getting better. Even when I wasn’t drinking, I was getting worse.
I’d stand up from the couch and immediately fall over and smack my head on the tile floor and lose a quart of blood from my head wound. Angie, who was usually the one to find me after a spill, was really worried. She wanted me to go to the doctor. I hate doctors, so I came up with another solution. When I was in the Czech Republic on the Psalm 69 tour, I got this really cool gothic fifteenth-century battle helmet with chain mail around it and a spike on top. It was specifically made for me, and I always thought it was an awesome souvenir and a great wall decoration. I never figured I’d get some practical use out of it, let alone that it would help protect me. But life sometimes works that way—the things you think are inconsequential or just plain useless turn out to be critical to your survival. Like this crazy groupie chick on our first Revolting Cocks tour named Angie, who, two decades later, got me off drugs, saved my life, and showed me the meaning of love and commitment. More on that later. No, we’re talking about blood, puke, and near-death experiences, all of which I’ve become an expert on. So this helmet totally saved me. Every time I’d see spots, get dizzy, shit blood in my pants, and fall over, I’d have this helmet on so I wouldn’t get a concussion. I wore it for two weeks. I walked around El Paso with it and people must have thought I was part of a dorky Renaissance fair, but I knew that if I fell, my head would be protected.
That worked pretty well, but then I started having seizures, which sucked because I would completely lose track of reality. Sometimes I’d fall down and start spasming like an epileptic, and someone would find me in front of my TV and come in and pound on my chest or give me mouth-to-mouth and make sure I wasn’t going to swallow my tongue and choke to death. I was passing out like that three times a week for a month and a half before my stomach exploded. I would have died a dozen times with this chain mail helmet on if it wasn’t for someone resuscitating my sorry ass. The seizures would sometimes happen in the middle of the night. That’s why I say my dog Lemmy is my best friend. He’s like Lassie. He’d see me on the ground and know something was wrong and he’d start barking. If no one came, he’d search around the compound to get someone, wake them up, and then lead them back to me.
Now that’s loyalty. Most dogs sleep through the night and only wake up when it’s time for breakfast. Lemmy sleeps with one eye open all the time. Maybe he sees a little of himself in me. You know how when you say something to a dog and it cocks its head and looks at you with a quizzical expression? Maybe it recognizes its name and a word or two, but for the most part it doesn’t have a clue what’s going on around it. I can totally relate with that. Most of the time I can’t understand what people are thinking or what their aspirations are, besides doing whatever they can to make money. I don’t know how I’m supposed to act in most social situations, and I can’t always look beyond today and guess what’s going to happen tomorrow. I call it walking between raindrops. I just live my life while all this shit’s happening around me. Everyone else seems to be affe
cted by it all and freaked out by it, but I just cock my head with that befuddled expression and keep going. I walk between the raindrops and I don’t give a shit. What are you going to say bad about me? Everything? Good, I own it. I love you for it. I don’t give a shit. And I’m a better person for it. I mean, people really have these pissing contests with each other and talk about who’s a better guitar player or singer and whether this person was the first person to use that kind of vocals and whether I was a forefather of industrial music or some sellout who played electronic pop first and therefore has no credibility. You think I care?
Life is chaos, man. There’s no way to second-guess what’s going to happen next. A couple days before I began rehearsals for a Ministry tour one year, Angie got a panicked call from one of the guys in the band. It turns out his daughter was in very deep psychological turmoil and his leaving to go on tour was adding to the trauma, so he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to do the tour. Another time, just as we were knee-deep in rehearsals for the 2004 “comeback” Ministry tour, our bass player at the time relapsed on heroin and the guitarist we’d lined up for the tour just bailed—all of this happened ten days out from the start of the tour. Fortunately, Eddy Garcia and Rick Razor from the Pissing Razors stepped in, learned the parts, and we were off on a fourteen-week tour by the skin of our teeth.
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