Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  Actually, she wasn’t always faithful. One time I caught her fucking a fairly well-known guitarist. I wasn’t upset that she slept with him. She was a stripper and even though I was faithful to her, I knew that was an occupational hazard. She had a thing for rock stars, and this band he was in was pretty big at the time. One night in 1978 they played Boulder and then went to the strip club where she worked. And she wound up with this guy. We weren’t tied together; all is fair. But what isn’t fair is that when I went to her house the next day I knocked on the door and this fucking guy answers it wearing my black velvet robe. So I went off. “Get that robe off you, motherfucker!” I didn’t care that he fucked her; it was all about the robe, and I beat his ass. He couldn’t even defend himself, and I’m a shitty fighter. He just whimpered while I hauled off. A roundhouse to his jaw, a couple jabs to his face, a punch to the gut, and he was down. I felt like Muhammad Ali—I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! It actually felt great to win a fight and emerge unscathed.

  I could never stay mad at Shannon. She put up with so much shit from me. And when we weren’t listening to crazy music at home or going to punk clubs to get drunk, we went to all the shows that came through Boulder and Denver—which weren’t too many back then. By the end of 1978 she decided we needed to move to a bigger city if we wanted to be a part of scene that mattered. I didn’t care about any scene; I just wanted to be with her. The deal was sealed around Christmas when I got busted for dealing coke.

  Everything would have been fine if I hadn’t gotten greedy. R. R. had been hooking me up from Florida, and I was doing swift business. But when you hang in drug circles, you meet some shady people, and when you’re doing lots of drugs yourself, your judgment is sometimes impaired. Usually I had a sixth sense when it came to the people I was dealing with—how legit they were, whether they were crooks or narcs. But impaired judgment coupled with greed is a dangerous combination, and I got hooked like a little fish trying to snatch up the biggest worm and not noticing the barbs on the other side of the hook that are going to make a huge hole in the side of his mouth.

  One day these two people stopped me at a bar in Greeley. They had mustaches and totally looked like cops now that I think about it, but I wasn’t thinking back then. I was eighteen and dumb, so I would talk to these guys, who said they could take me to a new level of dealing. They said all the right things: They liked my business ethic and they wanted to help me get into the big leagues. We had a couple drinks, and they told me they wanted me to help them out with a huge deal. I salivated like a homeless man in a pizza shop and started calculating what that would bring in. But I knew these were some major stakes and that was a major responsibility. People wind up face down in snow banks or in the bottom of rivers with gunshots in the back of their heads over these types of deals. I said, “This is kind of over my head. I have to get permission from my guy in Florida.” These “businessmen” said they totally understood and respected my professionalism. I felt like I was moving up in the crime world, but at the same time I had an uneasy feeling—I think it was the moustaches. I called R. R. in Florida, and he flew back up to Greeley and met with these guys and said, “It’s okay. Bring these guys down to Florida and we’ll do the deal. They’re cool.” They flew me and these moustached guys on a chartered jet from Greeley to Miami. When I got there R. R. told me my job was to count the money from these guys—who turned out to be DEA agents—and put it in a briefcase. When we got down there the agents were expecting a bigger deal than they got. I started getting paranoid and had a bad feeling in my gut about the entire situation.

  So I went to the motel I was staying at in Coral Gables, Florida, and didn’t hear anything from anyone for a day. So I’m freaking out, trying to figure out how I would get back to Colorado. I thought about calling my relatives in Miami to try to stay with them, but my first instinct was to get out of this motel. I went to the 7-11 and got a Welch’s grape soda. And as soon as I walked out of the store ten unmarked black sedans pulled up. They were all DEA, and a voice booms over a megaphone, “Put that soda down. Drop it!” like it’s a bomb or some sort of James Bond-type automatic weapon. I never got to finish that grape soda. Maybe that’s why I switched to wine—it’s all grapes to me.

  I spent a day in jail, which was no big deal. After all, I’d been in a violent orphanage and an institution—I could handle a night in a minimum-security Florida jail. Shannon was able to bail me out with money she saved from stripping. My parents hired an attorney, and my lawyer argued entrapment, so I got off with probation instead of having to spend the rest of my life as someone’s bitch. The caveat was that I had to finish college. Shannon had just been accepted at the Art Institute of Chicago, so I went back to Chicago with her. At first her mother was my legal guardian, since my parents didn’t want to have anything to do with me at the time. The Art Institute of Chicago didn’t have a music department at the time, but wanted to start one up, so I was accepted based on my minimal musical qualifications. I basically set up a music studio for them. I had been playing guitar all this time, but they had all this old electronic equipment—some Moog synthesizers, Atari computers, and some tape machines. So for a while I put my guitar in its case, shoved it under my bed, and for the next four or five years I focused on electronic instrumentation, thinking, like, “Wow, this stuff is pretty cool. You can make crazy noises with it.”

  While I was figuring out what to do with all this computerized stuff, Shannon was doing installation and performance art. One of her pieces was a series of tunnels that people had to crawl through. It was kind of like a Habitrail, those mazes you put hamsters or gerbils in to torture them, only this was for people. And around each corner was a different photo of her life, so by the time you got to the end you had a full picture of her life. She also did spoken-word stuff, and we worked together on some projects. When the professors heard these Eraserhead meets Throbbing Gristle-style soundscapes I was creating for Shannon’s performance art routines, they put me in charge of the music department. I was ordering all this new equipment and showing other students how to use it. I mean, I went to teacher’s college to get laid, and here I was becoming a teacher of electronic programming. I didn’t have any formal training or anything. I couldn’t even play a real piano, yet I was instructing all these people with actual musical backgrounds. Back-assward, I tell you. Seriously, it was culture shock and a mindfuck. I was from Chicago. For years it was my home town. I felt like I owned it. Then I got used to bum-fuck Colorado, where I would drive trucks while listening to Skynyrd and shoot pool with all these rednecks. Now suddenly I’m back in Chicago, being inundated with artists and musicians and being told to create. It was a really schizophrenic couple of years, and at times I was tempted to jump the fence and check myself back into the institution my parents had sent me to for some relaxation and shock therapy.

  chapter 4

  Symphony for the Devil

  Soul Selling for Blow and Blowjobs

  In Chicago Shannon turned me on to this club called O’Bannon’s right away, and it was complete, straight punk rock. There would be a stabbing there every weekend and I used to go there all the time and just get into fights because by that time my hair had grown long again. They weren’t having me. Finally they stopped beating me up because, they were like, “This guy’s persistent. We’ve beaten his ass twelve to fifteen times and he still comes back.” I think they just got tired or it wasn’t fun for them anymore so they found someone else to beat down. The worst beating of my life wasn’t at O’Bannon’s but at some other bar. I think I was nineteen, and this guy there thought I was hitting on his chick. I wasn’t, but that didn’t seem to matter no matter how many times I told him he had the wrong guy. He took me outside and dragged me up and down the street like a sack of flour, punching and kicking me as he went. I could hear my nose break, I was spitting out teeth, and I could feel the flesh around my eyes swell like golf balls. I was coked up, which is why I think I didn’t
pass out. My shirt was painted with blood; my arms were all scraped up and cut. And I had no defense. I couldn’t even get a punch in. It turned out this guy was a welterweight champion. After, like, a half-hour of abuse, I asked him, “Why are you doing this, man? Why?” And then he stopped because I reasoned with him. He just stopped and left, and I crawled to a corner and hailed a cab.

  Because I always got beat up, I didn’t want to go out much, but Chicago had a pretty killer underground music scene in the ’80s, so Shannon would always convince me to leave our apartment. House Music was starting up, and guys like Frankie Knuckles, Jesse Saunders, and Ron Hardy dominated the dance clubs. Then there were these pissed off hardcore-influenced punk bands like Naked Raygun, Scratch Acid, and Big Black. And I eventually discovered a place called Crash Palace, where all these guys played and you could go upstairs and shoot heroin or coke and hang out all night. It seemed like a safe haven after having been a human punching bag for so long.

  Hanging out at Crash Palace inspired me to start another band—enough of this bedroom studio music shit. I was pretty cocky and wanted people to hear what I could do. So I joined a group called Special Affect, which featured several guys who later enjoyed lucrative careers in music. We had vocalist Frankie Nardiello (a.k.a. Groovie Man), who later formed My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult, drummer Harry Rushakoff, who played with Concrete Blonde, and Alice Cooper bassist Marty Swanson. That was my first serious band. I joined after they had already put out their 1979 EP MoodMusic, and I played guitar; it was cool to pick up the instrument after being locked in a sound studio like a mad scientist with keyboards and computers. Special Affect made big waves in small circles. We were kind of punky new wave, like P.I.L. or Joy Division without the goth elements. A couple of our songs went over really well when we played them at this club Wizards, which booked a few gigs for us. Our most popular song was “Out of Order” which had these chimey overlapping guitars part. Another song that got some attention was “Too Much Soft Living,” which was actually the theme song to a soundtrack we put out for a movie that never really existed. Even thirty years later fans are scouring the Internet and asking me where they can see the movie and who directed it. No one directed it. We just thought it would be cool to use it as the name for our first and, as it turned out, only album.

  Marty had a sugar daddy in San Francisco, so we moved out there and stayed at his house in Sausalito. We rented a place in San Francisco to rehearse right next door to the Residents, which was great because they were always in costume. No one knew what they looked like—kind of like a new wave Slipknot before Slipknot started appearing in public. Special Affect were in San Francisco for about a month, and we got this gig at the DNA Lounge, which was a big deal. We thought we’d made it until we got onstage. About a third of the way through the set Harry fucked up some little part. I got pissed because we had been rehearsing so long in this San Francisco place he should have had his parts down. So I swung my guitar and hit him on the head, which was not the best way to deal with the situation. The guy was not only a biker; he knew Kung-Fu, so he Kung-Fu’d my ass all over the stage. He beat me silly until he was tired and couldn’t hit me anymore. The crowd loved it, but I wasn’t too happy, and the band broke up after that. I didn’t really care, because I wasn’t really into what we were doing. To me it sounded like the crazy, wanker English music that Shannon blasted all the time. I don’t even think she liked it. She just wanted to push boundaries and have me try all this different stuff, even if she wasn’t into it.

  I moved back to Chicago with Shannon and started this new band, the Carmichaels, that was around for about a minute. It was me with three guys from the Imports, singer Ben Krug, guitarist Tom Krug, drummer Tom Wall, and me. I had met Tom in San Francisco, and he came back to Chicago with me. We only did one show on April 30, 1981, at 950 Lucky Number. During the show I projected footage from the Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali movie Un Chien Andalou, and everyone in the crowd grimaced when the scene came up of a guy with a razor slicing a girl’s eyeball. (It was actually a cow’s eyeball.) We did some Special Affect songs and a couple originals, but the band broke up because Tom wanted to go to college and Ben wanted to go back to finish high school.

  At the end of 1978 the owners of a really cool Denver record store that specialized in underground music, Wax Trax!, moved to Chicago and re-opened in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. I started hanging out there and buying albums, so I got to know the owners, Jim Nash and Danny Flesher. They wanted to start up a record label under the same name. They wanted me involved because they knew I was a musician since they had heard of Special Affect. After the Silly Carmichaels came to an end, those guys hooked me up with the transvestite celebrity Divine, who was in all of John Waters’s early movies, like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Polyester. He struck a deal with Wax Trax!, and his first release, the “Born to be Cheap” seven-inch single, was the second thing Wax Trax! put out. When Divine needed a guitarist, Jim and Danny recommended me, which I think they did partly as a joke. They put me on tour with her, and that was seriously a weird gig. First of all, Divine’s name was Donald, so during the day he wanted to be called Donald. And he seemed pretty much like a dude. Then before he went onstage, he’d go into his dressing room and put on the wig, and suddenly he’s Divine. And then you only refer to him as Divine. It’s like the queen has arrived—you couldn’t look her in the eye.

  They made me play a pink Les Paul guitar, and there were nothing but homos up front—not a single chick. I was so grossed out. They would try to touch me, wiggle their tongues at me, and put their hands up to their mouth in the symbol of a blowjob. Jim and Danny sat at the side of the stage laughing their asses off at my expense. I fuckin’ hated it, so I lasted only three gigs. My relationship with Jim and Danny was interesting. We didn’t party together or hang out at each other’s places all the time; we kept at an arm’s distance. At the same time I loved those guys, and we had a great business relationship. They allowed me to do what I wanted in the studio and trusted my instincts, even against their own. I gave them CDs by groups like Laibach and Front 242. Then they’d either sign them or have me do it. I guess they owed me after having me play with fucking Divine.

  Working with Jim and Danny was also important because it opened my mind to gay people. I thought “gay” was something you did when you were drunk and got kinky and went to some weird bar with people in chaps and leather and fucking gimp masks, all of which dehumanized gays. They completely opened my eyes and humanized homosexuals for me. Before then the only gay guy I knew was my college coke connection, R. R., and he was cool, but I never saw him with a boyfriend, so I had no idea what he was really like in his private life. Back then, people thought gays were all pedophiles or that all they wanted was sex and were like animals. Jim and Danny had a really stable, really cool relationship. These guys were together for twenty-something years, and I’d never seen that before. Unless you’ve grown up around it, it’s really eye opening, and I thought it was cool as shit.

  I actually had a cock-sucking episode of my own, but it was one of these “Damn, I’m drunker than shit—I might as well put a dick in my mouth” moments. It was Frank Nardiello, and he has been living with guys his whole life. I had my one gay experience with him. It was the only blowjob I ever gave, and I was so wasted I can’t remember if I was any good or if he even had an orgasm. That actually happened back when Frankie and I were in Special Affect, and I don’t regret it. Hey, you’re drunk, you’re stupid—why not have a cock in your mouth? The government’s putting a cock up your ass, so you might as well have one in your mouth to make it a threesome. That might surprise some Ministry fans, but in this day and age is it spicy or controversial? I don’t think so. What’s funny is that Frankie graduated high school in Rockford, Illinois, in the same class as Robin Zander from Cheap Trick, who was his best friend. That’s how I got my Cheap Trick connection, and to this day those guys are some of my best friends in the world, esp
ecially guitarist Rick Nielsen, who played on the last Revolting Cocks album and the first Buck Satan & The 666 Shooters record. I’ll trade that for a drunken night of dick sucking any day.

  As much as I helped Jim and Danny, they’re really the ones that got the real Ministry off the ground. Everyone knows that Ministry back then was nothing like Ministry is now. Remember, back-asswards. I was still in college, and in addition to making these sound collages, I also started doing this music influenced by all the music Shannon was exposing me to. I loved Gang of Four. Joy Division was one of the coolest, most depressing bands, but then when their singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself in his kitchen in 1978, they bounced back as this British synth-pop thing called New Order. We were listening to a lot of that, and their first singles, like “Haystack” and “Ceremony,” really impressed Shannon. Then there was Simple Minds, whose early stuff was more punk and less gay than that “Don’t You Forget About Me” shit. Human League were too catchy to ignore, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark had that song “Electricity,” and this German electronic duo DAF had some stuff that was kind of like a clangier Neu! I was also listening to a lot of black music because there was a big scene of ’70s funk and soul acts that were really good: James Brown, Chic, Sly and the Family Stone, Tyrone Davis—I dug all that shit.