But it’s typical rock and roll and the kind of shit you have to deal with when you’re running the business. I used to be on the other side and didn’t give a fuck what happened. I caused all sorts of havoc, pulled disappearing acts, and caused records to be delayed because I was busy getting high, crashing cars, getting into fights, destroying shit. I wasted millions of dollars, and my response to all of it was “So what? Fuck you. Without me you wouldn’t have a pot to piss in.” But now it’s different. It’s still my show, but Angie and I are the ones who have to clean up the mess when the dog shits on the carpet. And you can plan all you want and have everything airtight as a hermetically sealed asshole. It doesn’t matter. Something weird and unexpected always happens on a rock tour. I don’t care how many buffers you have between yourself and the real world; it will all boil down to something insane and unexpected, like a sixteen-year-old cutting herself in the middle of a school day. I guess for some people, part of the thrill of rock and roll is not knowing what’s going to happen next. I don’t have that kind of personality; I like knowing what’s going to happen. But I don’t have a crystal ball and I’m not Nostradamus, and that’s one reason why I’ve never liked the road and never felt comfortable going on tour.
To be honest, I even hate being onstage. I’d much rather be in the studio creating stuff rather than recreating stuff. When I recreate spray on some Febreze, and get the songs to sound fresh. We bring it on, but I hate every minute of it. I get anxious being out in front of an audience; I feel like I’m compromising myself by not getting to play my newest stuff—the stuff I like—and having to drag out all the old songs I made when I was seriously impaired and working with people who took advantage of me and who I hate. All I have is bad memories of that shit.
It’s funny because the guys I’ve played with, like Mikey and Casey Orr, love being on stage. They live for the ninety minutes they’re up there and feed off the adulation of the crowd. Not me, man. I’ve always felt like a jukebox. Put a quarter on my tongue, twist my ear, and I’ll shit out the hits so the people in the crowd can crash into each other like wild rams, fight, and throw shit at the stage. I’ll give ’em a good show, but don’t expect me to enjoy it.
Here’s the deal: I grew up listening to Zeppelin. I always wanted to be Jimmy Page. The Robert Plants of the world want to be on stage. They want to be rock stars and love the adoration of the audience. I’m disgusted by it. I just want to be in the studio with my guitar and my soundboard, and I wish everyone would leave me the fuck alone and let me do that. But that’s not how this business works, so I’ve spent the majority of my life traveling around the world and playing for angry people who don’t even like my music for the same reasons I like it. My music’s not all about violence and anger and blind rage; there has always been a lot more to it than that, but people cling to what’s most powerful and what they can easily understand.
It’s like with Ministry and politics. Everyone looks at Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs, which had samples from the first George Bush, as my first big step into politics. And then they see the three albums I did during the second Bush administration, Houses of the Molé, Rio Grande Blood, and The Last Sucker as my rediscovery of politics after years as a junkie. That’s totally not true. I was keeping an eye on these clowns in the White House and these idiots in Congress—Democrats and Republicans—while I was doing drugs. And before I was even signed I was writing about politics as well.
From the time I was ten I started consciously watching the news. I read the daily paper every morning before school, and I started getting really aware of all the crazy shit that was going on in the world, though I couldn’t really articulate it that well back then. One thing that had a big effect on me was in 1981 when John Hinkley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan and says he did it to impress Jodie Foster, and I’m like, “Wow, the world’s falling apart.” That was back when the draft was still going. I was two years away from being drafted and having to go to war for some ideal I didn’t give a fuck about. So I started getting politically active. I didn’t have a Dick Cheney family or Bush family to get me out of the draft. If there was a war and my number came up, I was gonna go. I was going to be a bullet stopper for somebody and I wasn’t pleased about that.
In 1982 I wrote this new wavey pop song called “America,” and it featured the lyrics “America, home of the free / Not the place for you and me / Standing joke amongst the free / Stabbing at the Statue of Liberty.” It’s hardly Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” but at least it’s not “Enter Sandman.” That was the start of my political approach to lyrics. When I was in Berlin in 1986 Reagan was still in office, the Cold War was still going on, and I was finishing up Twitch right on the edge of the Berlin Wall. I was doing vocals on the roof fifteen yards from an East German sniper with MIG 15s flying. This guy was fucking with me all day, pointing his gun at me from this guard tower. He probably didn’t want to be there and probably thought I was some spoiled rock star who never had to worry about armed conflict. That really put some perspective on the military for me. I was just this dopey guy, like, “Hey, I’m up here from Texas. I banged my high school sweetheart the other day in a pickup truck, and you’re up there fighting for survival and taking orders from someone, and if you question them you’ll probably get shot.” All of a sudden I was like, “Holy shit, there’s this real East versus West conflict, and right now I’m right in the middle of it.” So the first real political Ministry song I actually put out was “Just Like You” from Twitch,” which is bitching about Reagan’s policies. That’s where the line “Many more years of nothing but fear of anything you do” came from.
Fast-forward twenty-five years, and everything’s pretty much the same with a different name on it. I’m doing stuff that means a lot to me and pursuing important political causes, but when we do a show I’m about as insignificant as that idiot on a Berlin roof, who this sniper could have taken out with a little tug of his finger. Sure, I’m the “rock star” people have paid all this money to see, but really I’m more like some kind of jerk-off monkey, playing hits for the kids so they can get violent and beat each other up in the mosh pit and flip me off and spit at me. There’s no satisfaction in that. I’m not some unhappy housewife with no self-esteem who feels like I deserve to be abused, and that’s why I charge so much money for my concerts, because if you want me to go be a traffic cop for a bunch of juvenile delinquents, you’re going to pay me well. Honestly, I’d rather be in the studio in a creative environment with my engineer Sammy and create shit that will last forever on disc as opposed to being a part of some fleeting moment at a show where you’re just watching kids slam into each other and hoping none of them sue you. Basically, my goal by the end of the show is to make sure nobody gets stabbed. My criterion for a good show isn’t “Did it sound great? Did I nail all my lyrics?” It’s more like, “Damn, it was a good show. Nobody got disemboweled in the pit.”
I know I sound like a bitter old man, but Ministry literally takes years off my life. It’s so intense. I gotta literally live that Alien Jourgensen character 24-7. It’s like what Robert DeNiro did for Raging Bull. You gotta gain forty pounds and learn how to box. And then you go out there and take a beating. There’s no rewind button in life. Every time I tour for a few months, that’s time I won’t have to produce other people’s stuff, make more music, and do the shit I like to do, like lying on my couch watching sports or lefty political news programs. And since my last near-death experience I’ve become acutely aware that time is something I might not have a lot of. I know I’ve joked about it, and I’ll continue to do so, because what good is life if you can’t laugh at it or at least see humor in some pretty awful stuff. Which brings me back to March 27, 2010—the 13th Planet Compound Massacre. Everyone tells me that’s what it looked like. I was passed out for most of it.
Here’s what I do remember combined with what Angie and Sammy told me later. I was lying on the co
uch with my helmet on, feeling pretty crappy, and suddenly I desperately had to take a shit. I stumbled to the toilet, dropped my pants, and sat down. Only I didn’t shit. All that came out of me was blood, and there was so much pouring out of my dick and my asshole that I started to panic. I didn’t want the toilet to overflow, so I took off the helmet, held it to my ass and let the blood pour in there. Then I had a major seizure because I had lost so much blood. I fell off the toilet and tried to put the helmet back on, and about twelve ounces of blood matted down my hair and ran down my face, pooling with the blood that was dribbling out of my mouth and nose. That’s where Sammy found me an hour later and went to get Angie. It looked like the aftermath of a murder scene. There was blood on the floor, all over the toilet, and running across the tile floor. I was having massive seizures and I was blue. Angie called 911.
When the paramedics arrived it must have looked like a scene from CSI or one of the many other popular crime shows I’ve never watched. I kinda wish someone taped it so I could watch it later after I recovered. At the time recovery seemed about as likely as getting struck twice by lightning. They usually don’t let anyone but patients ride in the ambulance, but my blood pressure was 30/20. I had lost 65 percent of the blood in my body, and no one thought I would survive, so they let Angie ride in the ambulance after they carted me out of the house on a stretcher. I wouldn’t have been the first celebrity to croak from a perforated ulcer. That’s what killed writer James Joyce when he was fifty-eight, jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker at age thirty-five, J. R. R. Tolkien when he was eighty-one, and Rudyard Kipling at seventy-one. That’s not such bad company.
Angie checked me into Providence Hospital in El Paso under the name Dick Sohard, which is funny, but she didn’t do it for laughs. El Paso’s not a big city. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, and she didn’t want any media attention. In Los Angeles, when a musician goes to the hospital for something, a publicist gets on the phone immediately to notify the press, and by the time they get to the hospital, there are camera crews waiting. It’s just another example of the music industry trying to make money from ambulance chasers and press vultures looking for a big scoop. We wanted to avoid that, which is why nobody found out I almost died until much later.
I remember waking up in the ER and Angie was holding my hand and crying. I looked up at her, and because I had already died twice before from overdoses, I said, “Third time’s the charm, baby. Sorry, I gotta go.” I really thought I was a goner. Then I passed out. Next thing I know I’m in the ICU with ten thousand tubes sticking out of me. I hate doctors. All they want to do is take away your body parts and make things worse, but this time I had no choice but to listen to them. I didn’t have the strength to move or the energy to argue.
They gave me blood, poked me and prodded me, and determined I had to have immediate surgery. They got out a tube with a camera and a laser attached to it and stuck it down my esophagus to look at the damage. It must have looked like the aftermath of a Vietnam village bombing in there. The main ulcer that caused all the damage had opened up over an artery between my stomach and large intestine, and then they found five more active ulcers. They cauterized all that with the laser and then another seven ulcers that had been scarred over years ago when I didn’t know what was going on in my stomach. Because I had lost so much blood, the doctors gave me a complete transfusion, replacing every ounce of the poisoned blood in my system with new fresh blood. Out with the old, in with new, just like an oil change at Jiffy Lube. Besides, Keith Richards highly recommends it!
A couple days later, although still in the ICU, I could tell I was getting better because I started getting cranky. They took the intubation tube out of my throat, but I was still pretty doped up and was flipping through the channels on the TV, barely half-cognizant. Suddenly it dawned on me that they didn’t have the cable hockey channel on their TV. The NHL playoffs were about to start, and the Chicago Blackhawks were playing. Now, far be it for me to
second-guess these experienced doctors who just saved my life, but I’m the biggest Hawks fan ever. My dad used to take me to games when I was six years old. I know the owners of the team. Their son Danny Wirtz is a good friend of mine, and I’m always at the games when I’m in Chicago. So I pushed the call buzzer, and when the nurse came around, I said, “Look, I really need the hockey channel. I’ll pay for it—just have it wired into my room.”
Well, they said they couldn’t do that and I needed to rest. Nobody tells me what I need to do. After three days in the ICU I pulled all the fucking wires out from my arm—I was supposed to be there a week—and said, “C’mon Angie, we’re leaving.” She tried to argue that I needed to stay in the hospital, but she understands that when I have my mind set on something, nothing’s gonna stop me. I looked around for my clothes and my cell phone, but they had stashed them away and wouldn’t give them to me. I said, “I don’t care. I don’t fucking need clothes.” I walked into the lobby in my tissue-paper hospital gown. Usually you wear those things open in the back with your ass hanging out. I turned it around so I was full-frontal because I thought that was a much cooler lock.
By this point Angie finally got my doctor to come over to try to talk some sense into me. She’s looking at me in my gown with my dick hanging out and says, “I strongly advise you stay in the hospital so we can monitor your recovery. If the ulcers open up again, you could die.”
And I said, “Yeah, but the puck drops in three hours. I’m going home.”
Finally she gave me a shoebox full of pills for my stomach and agreed to let me check out. They got my cell phone and my clothes, and Angie drove me home. She yelled at me the whole way home and called me an idiot, but we got back just in time for the first puck drop, so it was worth it. I got to watch the whole hockey game.
chapter 1
resurrecting the beast
After my stomach exploded, I recovered at home for a few weeks and took the medicine the doctor prescribed. I was doing really well and starting to feel better. They told me not to drink, but drinking . . . man, that’s harder to quit than dope. I’ve been drinking for years. It’s water to a camel for me. So I made this deal with Angie—no hard liquor. So I’d sit on the couch and drink wine until I had a good buzz, watch some sports or news on the TV, and pass out for a few hours. For me, that’s healthy living. I was taking my stomach medication. I was getting better. But I started to get really bored. I still wasn’t allowed to work on music, so I read, watched sports on TV, and kept up on the news, which, if you ask me, is more stressful and frustrating than working on an album. For a change of pace I went to get some new tattoos. Thirty-three years ago I went to a locally famous tattoo artist, Guy Aitchison, and he did sleeves on both my arms in two four-hour sittings. I figured because I was just reborn, it was time to get some ink to mark the occasion. I got this local El Paso artist Marty Lopez, who’s really good, but he’s a grinder. He did my back, chest, arms, and hands. My whole upper body is done, and I’m thinking about working on my lower body, but I’m getting a little too old for the pain. A grinder is good when you’re twenty and you relish the experience and the pain, but fuck, I’m in my fifties now, and the last thing I need is complete and utter pain. So maybe I’ll wait on getting my legs and ass tattooed.
But it’s funny—while I was getting this ink done and complaining about it to everyone, my daughter, Adrienne, who’s twenty-seven, was living with us. She’s really into piercings and has holes in places where I don’t want to know she has holes. She heard me complaining about a tattoo I had gotten, and she goes, “Dad, you are a pussy. You’re whining about your tattoos, and you don’t even have any piercings.” So I looked at her and said, “No, you’re a pussy. You don’t have any tattoos.” So to settle the bet we drove to Marty’s Shoppe Dos & Tattoos, where they do both piercings and tattoos. I walked in and got a whole bunch of piercings. I didn’t care. They were just poking holes in me. It hurt for a second and then it was done—piercings
are easy. I got four piercings in each eyebrow, one on the bridge of my nose, one in the middle of my nose, and two on the sides. Then I got two stud holes—one either side of my bottom lip. Then it was Adrienne’s turn. She got her arm tattooed from the elbow to the shoulder with a pattern of tarot cards. Then she looked at me and said, “Okay, you are not a pussy. This hurts way worse than any piercings.” And I didn’t even take her to see Marty, the grinder.
After a few weeks of relaxing I was going out of my skull. I needed to do something creative—I needed to make music. So I figured I’d give my fans something I’ve been promising them for thirty years—a country album by Buck Satan & The 666 Shooters. I used to DJ as Buck Satan in the eighties in Chicago, and Buck Satan is also one of my many aliases. Up until that point in time the recorded incarnation of the band was an acoustic set of country covers at a Neil Young Bridge School Benefit in the nineties. Before he died I got Buck Owen’s blessings to use the name for a band, which meant a lot to me because that guy was a hero of mine—him and Johnny Cash, George Jones, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson . . . all the original country guys. They’re great storytellers and you really feel the emotion in their music.
So when I got well enough to go into the studio, I called up Mikey, Rick Nielsen, and Static-X bassist Tony Campos and got them to do this crazy country album with me. It was funny because Mikey and I were the only ones who listened to country, and we had never actually written country songs before. So it was like the blind leading the blind. Rick is a great guitarist, but he’s more of a blues guy—though he’s a quick learner—and Tony didn’t know how to play country bass, so he gave the music a real punk vibe. But it was great. I was cut off from everything but wine and beer, so I’d have a couple bottles with me in the studio and write these parts that seemed like they could work in country
Ministry Page 3