The studio had an intercom button, so if I needed anything I could call someone. I was working alone one night at Trax, editing, and I made my cut with the razor blade to edit the song. As I went to grab my grease pencil to make a mark on the tape, I discovered it was a brown grease pencil. The tape was brown. The pencil was brown…how was I going to see a brown grease pencil on brown tape? I had the tape in my mouth, holding it steady so I could make the mark when I got the white grease pencil. So I hit the intercom and said, “I need a white grease pencil here.” So Reid came down and handed me another brown grease pencil. I said, “No, I’m not out of grease pencils. I just need something I can see. Brown on brown—are you an idiot?”
That was typical. I finally got my white grease pencil, did my edits, and left. A little while later I hooked up with all the Wax Trax! people to co-run the label with them. We needed a studio to record my stuff and to record other bands, so we discover this studio that’s on Halstead Street in the gayest part of Chicago. It’s called Trax, and it’s right next to this male dominatrix bondage bar called Tracks. I’m thinking, “That’s funny. I worked in the suburbs at a Trax with that dumbass owner.” But I shrugged it off. I go into the office, and it’s the same fucking guy, Reid Hyams. It worked out well, though, because he was a complete pushover with no short-term memory. We just took the place over. There were two main rooms there. We block-booked the A-room studio for a full year. The entire Chicago house movement, which was just starting to blow up, was using the B-room. And we hired all the employees, everyone from groupies we wanted to fuck to hip dudes we liked to hang with. Reid would look at someone and go, “Who’s that person?” And I’d tell him, “Reid, you hired her.” He’d say, “That’s funny, I don’t remember hiring her.” And we’d tell him again that he hired her, and he’d be like, “God, I got to cut back on my drinking. I don’t remember anything.” We hired everyone who worked at that place.
On top of that we’d break into his office if we knew we were going over schedule. He wrote all his bookings in pencil on a calendar. So I’d erase whatever he had written and put our names in. Reid would come in the next day and say, “Gee, I thought I had Ministry out of here by next week. They’ve still got three weeks on the schedule.” Then he’d get on the phone and cancel all the other acts coming in, and then they’d get pissed off.
We could make Reid do anything. We could make him drink a big glass of carpet cleaner with beer and say, “Reid, chug that,” and he’d do it then say, “Gee, I feel funny and I think I’m throwing up blood.” Before we did the first Lard record at Trax, Reid wanted $30,000 for the time to do the record, and all Jello Biafra and I could come up with was $18,000. So we took Reid to a bar down the street at a Mexican restaurant. We fed him about eighteen margaritas. We weren’t drinking anything. And by the time we left, $12,000 came off the price of the sessions. He was so drunk that he signed the contract on a bar napkin: “This will cost no more than $18,000,” and he signed it. Then he fell out of his chair and we left him there.
We basically ran Trax Studios, and if someone was an employee, there was a hierarchy. The way a person would climb their way up to being an engineer or a receptionist was to work the door. The bars in Chicago close on Friday at 4 a.m. and on Saturday at 5 a.m. So on Friday at 4:30 we would have a line a block long to get into Trax Studio. So these eighteen-year-old kids we’d hire would be out there like they were working the rope at Studio 54. They’d screen the people in line, which wasn’t too hard because there were only a few criteria: You had to be a really hot chick, have a lot of cash, or have drugs. The police department in that district was a block and a half away, which might seem problematic, but they all hung out with us too. We didn’t have to pay them off either; they’d hang out and do coke with us as long as we had Krispy Kremes or Dunkin’ Donuts available. These cops actually protected us. It was complete enabling.
In the studio I had this big white Clockwork Orange–type bubble chair with Jensen car speakers in it. I was like Jim Morrison sitting there in my throne, and whenever someone new came in, an intern would escort them over to me and they’d have to kiss my ring first before they could get any drugs or anything to drink. Sometimes if there was a really hot chick, she’d have to agree to blow me as an initiation rite, and most of them were into it. It was total debauchery and insanity—like Plato’s retreat on steroids. It’s amazing we got any work done in there for the amount of drugs we were doing. There were people fucking in the corners and other people tripping and licking the walls and looking around like mental patients who just got off the special bus that had stopped at the studio. It wasn’t even an erotic thing; it was more like an experiment to see how much debauchery and insanity we could generate in one place.
One of the guys we worked with had a Great Dane, and told some of these chicks to get warmed up with the dog before they came in to fuck us. Eventually we would all pass out and wake up in the morning, and there’d be naked groupies sleeping in the hallways. It looked like the place had been hit by a tornado. It was severely fucked up for a while. There where thefts, stabbings, overdoses. Fortunately no one died. But people overdosed right in front of me, and we’d revive them by pounding on their chests or pouring water on them or cleaning out their airway while they were choking on their own vomit. Try getting high as shit on acid and coke and then go save someone who’s choking on their tongue or their puke. It’s not easy. But we did it. There were girls who would be bleeding out of their fucking pussies. Blood would be pouring out of them while we were trying to make a record. It’s amazing we actually got any music made in there.
Intervention 3
Luc Van Acker Analyzes
the Turbulent Depravity of
Revolting Cocks and
the Mystery of Ministry
Luc Van Acker was destined to be the first vocalist and keyboard player for Al Jourgensen’s main side project, Revolting Cocks. But before 1985 he didn’t know it. He had played some guitar for the English band Shriekback and was hanging out in Brussels with Front 242 member Richard Jonckheere (aka Richard 23) when he stumbled into a gig with the first RevCo lineup. Jonckheere left the group a year later, but Van Acker remained in the band until 1989, then returned in 1991 and again in 2006. Aside from Jourgensen, he’s the band’s longest-lasting member.
You were one of the original Revolting Cocks. How did the band come together?
luc van acker Al was a DJ, and he was working at Wax Trax! with Jim and Danny. Because he was a DJ, Al discovered Front 242 and invited them to be Ministry’s support act in America. They got along very well on tour, so afterwards Al invited Richard 23 of Front 242 to do a dub-remix project with him. When Richard came back to Brussels I met him at a bar called the DNA, and he said, “I’m going back to Chicago to do this studio project with Al Jourgensen, and I’m going to phone him tonight.” I went with him to his apartment and he put me on the phone with Al, and Al said, “Who the fuck are you?” I said, “Well, I played some guitar with Shriekback.” Al knew Shriekback very well; he used to play their songs when he was a DJ in England. He said, “You have to come over with Richard.” When Richard and I arrived in Chicago, Richard didn’t speak much English. He could only say two words: “great” and “fuck.” So I had to help him out at immigration. Before we went to Chicago we wanted to dress up real tough, so we went to an Army store and bought old military clothes, including these hats. We didn’t know that in America they looked like duck hunter hats. When we walked through immigration Al was screaming at us, “The Belgian duck hunters have arrived!” We looked over, and he had turned around and pulled down his pants, so the first thing I got to see from Al was his ass from the balcony at the airport.
When did you decide to call yourselves Revolting Cocks?
LVA We went to a bar in Chicago around the corner from Wax Trax! the same night we arrived. Al wanted to learn French, so me and Richard were coming up with all these insulting French expressions, an
d we tried them out on the waiter. We said “sal fish,” which means “revolting cock.” After a while the waiter got annoyed and said, “What are you saying to me? Sal fish? What is that?” And so we said, “It means revolting cock.” And he said, “You are revolting cocks!” Al decided that from that moment on we were Revolting Cocks. Right after that we had a party at a club, and there were seats on the stage. There was a photographer there, and he was with his girlfriend. I stood up to go to the toilet, and the girl’s chair was right on the edge of the stage, and she fell off the stage on her head and got a concussion. It wasn’t my fault, but this girl had to go to the hospital, and immediately after that we had not only our name but also our reputation as an obnoxious band. We were thinking of changing our name because some people were offended by it, but after a couple of weeks people were screaming at us from the other side of the street like, “Hey, Revolting Cocks!” And Jim Nash from Wax Trax! had printed up advertising that said, “Coming soon! 12” Revolting Cocks!” We hadn’t played one note yet.
What was the chemistry like at the start? Did everything immediately click?
LVA Yes, from the start. Al had just bought a Fairlight, which was a very expensive sampler back in those days. It came from Australia, and when you opened the box it had a champagne bottle in it. So we drank warm champagne and started working with this computerized sampler. Supposedly you could make sequences with it, but we never figured out how. We could make one pattern. So all the early music of Revolting Cocks is basically that one looped pattern—very hypnotizing. We never found out how to make pattern two. It’s silly. But we were very creative people, and the energy between me, Richard, and Al was exceptional. We bounced ideas off each other, and we realized if you put the three of us together in a studio, we would come up with something amazing.
With such limitations on the sampler, how did you come up with such interesting electronic music?
LVA Me and Richard went around Chicago with baseball bats and we hit the hoods and windows of abandoned cars and sampled it. Richard had a very expensive Sony cassette recorder, and we sampled lots of sounds into the Fairlight. We used the Fairlight extensively. Of course, the low pitches on a synthesizer always sound the best, so the three of us would spend the whole day fighting like kids for the lower part of the keyboard. If you ended up on the right side, you could only do “bleep, bleep, bleep,” and that didn’t work for the music.
Why did Richard 23 leave Revolting Cocks after Big Sexy Land?
LVA Since Ministry was signed with Sire, Al wasn’t supposed to be in another band at first, so Revolting Cocks was just me and Richard, and Al was producing. But then Richard went home and Al came over to Belgium and then London to finish Big Sexy Land. After the album was done they had a disagreement about a track called “You Often Forget.” Al was working with Adrian Sherwood in London, and he did a dub remix, because Adrian was very good at dub mixing. Richard hated the dub mix. He thought it sounded like Mickey Mouse, but Wax Trax! had already released it as a twelve-inch. Richard was very upset that he didn’t have any say in the whole thing, so he quit.
It seems like Adrian Sherwood’s production style was hugely influential
for Al.
LVA I was in London at Southern Studios when Al was mixing Ministry with Adrian Sherwood, and Al would go to the toilet and copy down the studio settings Adrian used for his effects on toilet paper and put them in his trousers. When we got back to the hotel Al would take all this toilet paper out of his trousers and shout numbers at me, like “37, 43,” and I would take notes. But Al would not remember what those numbers were for anymore. I still have this notebook full of the numbers of Adrian’s settings. Al was an absolute big fan of Adrian Sherwood, and they were really good friends. But of course Adrian Sherwood was not so happy Al started to use all his tricks.
Any funny stories about the Big Sexy Land sessions?
LVA Al shaved his head when he was in London and he glued on the biggest Mohawk I had ever seen in my life with paper glue. He would convince everyone in the studio that it was his real hair. He had to shave his head again when it started growing back, and it was my job to help him glue the gigantic Mohawk back on his head so he could spend the whole day telling people it was his real hair. To me that was the most hilarious thing of the whole session. The Ministry record he finished at the same time, Twitch, is a very, very important album in industrial music. I’m sure Trent Reznor listened to that record day and night. That’s the sound of the beginning of industrial rock.
Al says he hates it.
LVA Yeah, but Al doesn’t hate it. The thing is, he hates the people who like his music. That’s the problem. He loves the music he made, but he hates the people because it doesn’t match. He went on to become Mr. Metal, and now he hates all his metal fans because he’s gone on to a different evolution again. When people would show up at shows or signings with that first album, With Sympathy, he would destroy it. He would shit on it and give it back to them because that was a part of his life that he had gone away from now that he had moved on. After this one particularly disastrous signing session at a disco, we walked back to our rooms escorted by this beautiful woman, who was in front of us. And as the girl went up the stairs to take us to our rooms, Al said, “God, I want to put some beef up her ass.” And all of a sudden the organizer of the show shouted, “That’s my wife, you asshole!”
Was Al the sole voice of Revolting Cocks?
LVA No, no, no. Revolting Cocks is like the Communist party. We all bring the same amount of energy and creativity to the table. We know it’s for Revolting Cocks. So we keep stuff for our own projects to ourselves. But for Revolting Cocks we come up with the most insane stuff. There are no rules and no limits. We all respected each other enormously, and the seven of us—like [Nivek] Ogre from Skinny Puppy, Chris Connelly, Phildo Owen, and everyone else involved—they all brought their own part to the table. It’s not like there was one songwriter and he did everything. Every song had three or four bass lines. When he mixed, Al would decide to use my bass line, Paul [Barker]’s bass line, or his own bass line. That’s how we worked, and everyone would play any instrument they wanted and program stuff. But in the end Al was the dominator who knew what the track needed.
Where you involved in the chaos and debauchery that went on at the studio and on the road?
LVA I was definitely in the crazy camp, yes. It was very weird. Chris, Paul, and Bill [Rieflin] would be in one row of the plane sitting down reading dictionaries, trying to find words to describe stuff, and we would be in the back of the plane taking acid or drinking or being absolutely obnoxious. That’s how the band worked, and I couldn’t help it because it was too much fun. Although one time we were in a hotel and Paul, of all people, decided it would be a cool idea to ride a motorbike up and down the corridor of the sixth floor to spice things up at an after-show party. Everybody got scared and split because the bike left rubber marks on the carpet and there was the smell of gas.
What are some of the wilder RevCo stories you remember?
LVA From the beginning Al always had the worst taste in girls. We did a show in Florida, and afterward Al picked up this anorexic-looking girl with green hair and piercings all over her body. There were safety pins all over her and they were infected. Green stuff was coming out. It was sick. Al and I always shared rooms. And at 4 a.m. he woke me up and said, “Gumby! Gumby!”—that’s my nickname—“You have to get into bed with this girl.” I’m like, “No way, man.” And he said, “Yes, you’ve got to check it out.” And he lifted up the sheets and I saw a dick. It was a guy. Many years later, when I told this story to Marilyn Manson, he said he was that guy. I was like, “No way, no way.” Maybe he wanted to be that guy. I don’t know.
Was Al married at the time?
LVA Yes, and his wife, Patty, used to be the booking agent. She would show up at some of the gigs just to surprise us. We would be somewhere, and she would
knock on the door of the hotel room and shout, “Al! I’m here!” And Al would have some bimbo with him. One day we were in a hotel, and Al had some blonde girl from LA with him. He had gone to the bar to get cigarettes, and I was in the room with the girl. Patty suddenly knocked on the door: “Hey Al! Let me in! Surprise!” I pushed this blonde girl in the shower and turned the water on, and she was screaming and yelling. Patty came into the bathroom, and I said, “Oh, Al’s gone to the bar to buy cigarettes—go and see him!” Patty came back and started screaming at me because she thought this girl was with me. I told Al, “Patty and my wife are friends. She’s going to tell my wife I was with this blonde girl in the hotel room!” So Al said he would take care of the situation. A week later I called my wife, and she had been called up by the whole road crew, day and night, because they didn’t know about the time difference. And she’s like, “Look, I know! Please go and fuck somebody.”
Explain the legend of Mother Earth.
LVA When we played San Francisco this old woman showed up and asked our birthdays and birth times, and she would make astrology charts of every band member of Revolting Cocks. When we came back three months later she showed up again and she told us this whole theory that Revolting Cocks were going to save the planet and she had to guide us. Al thought this was so fascinating and so much fun, he took her on the tour bus. So this old woman got on board, and we called her Mother Earth. She would see signs everywhere we went and get messages from God. She would put up signs on backstage doors with clues for us. One night we were at a hotel, and at 4 a.m. I got up and had to go to the bathroom. I switched on the light, and there’s Mother Earth sitting there naked in the bathtub shooting speed. I called the tour manager, and he came with a trolley from the hotel. We put the old naked lady on the trolley, threw a few dollars on her, and pushed her in the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby. The guy who had the night shift…“Bing!” Reception put her in a cab, gave the driver the money, and we never saw her again.
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