Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  Did RevCo shows always end in drama or arrests?

  LVA Not always, but more often than we would have liked. We played a church in Detroit, and three girls came to the sound check and they said they weren’t allowed in because their boyfriends had tickets for the show but didn’t want to come with their girlfriends. Al said, “You know what? You can be dancers onstage.” Al had these girls in their underwear and a big Revolting Cocks T-shirt. When it was time to go on, the girls were dancing and their boyfriends were in the audience. It was all fun until Al wanted to rip their T-shirts apart. And one of the girls had to give me a blowjob on stage. The boyfriends got really upset and went backstage while we were onstage and stole all the girls’ clothes. One girl didn’t want to go naked, and Al was, like, fighting her to pull off her T-shirt. Finally he got it off, and she ran offstage topless and in a panic; she ran through the emergency door and was outside the building in an alley with homeless people. She ran back to the front door, but the doorman wouldn’t let her in because she was half-naked. So she ran back to the emergency door and was banging on it. Her fists were bleeding and she was crying, but we only opened the emergency door when we came off stage. The homeless people were trying to attack her. The evening ended with the parents of these girls showing up to pick up their naked daughters backstage, and I was the only guy who was there as a spokesperson for Revolting Cocks. Al thought I had a great accent so was the best one to explain to these parents that everything was fine and everything was done in good order. Every day was a circus. Every day was insane.

  He mentioned something about midget tossing.

  LVA When we played Numbers in Houston, Texas, there were five midgets who would always show up, and they would curl up into a ball and stage dive, and people would play volleyball with them, with the midgets as the volleyball! While we were onstage playing there were five midgets bouncing around. These guys came back three months later wearing harnesses with handles on their back. And they asked us to throw them into the audience as far as possible. And this became a national sport—dwarf tossing. It’s actually illegal. They got in a lot of trouble with the American Midget Federation. But these five guys took it one step further and put on Velcro suits and put up a Velcro wall. You had to throw them against the wall as high as possible—that was the game. And then someone on a ladder would peel them off. One of the midgets was gay and he fell in love with me. He was chasing me backstage at Club Numbers. He wanted to give me a blowjob and take me home to smoke joints. And I was like, “I don’t want to have no blowjob by a midget!” So I climbed on tables and screamed like a little girl. That’s where the name “Sex Midget” came from. So the whole tour they were telling me, “Luc! Gumby! The sex midget is here! The sex midget wants to give you a blowjob. You should enjoy it! Why don’t you like blow jobs?”

  Whenever anyone talks about Revolting Cocks, they talk about drugs.

  LVA Back in those days it was pretty straightforward. You had coke and speed. Adrian Sherwood had a speed dealer who only had three clients: Adrian, Lemmy from Motörhead, and Gary Moore. They did so much speed, they were enough to keep this dealer in business. Back in those days I was around drugs, and it was all fun. It was like, “We’re having an amazing time, and on top of that we get to use some really weird drugs.” It was all within measure, and nobody was hooked on anything. It was just fun. There was a guy we called King George, and he had a mobile home. He would ride behind our tour bus and would show up at sound check and ask us what exactly we wanted. He had a lab in the back of his mobile home, and he would make special cocktail pills for us made of LSD, ecstasy, and something else. Before the show every Revolting Cock would get a special custom-made pill. But then this guy got busted and went to jail for three years. The thing is, he remembered us, and when he was released he had a new mobile home and lab and followed our tour bus. It was a big rolling party.

  Were you with Al when he took a turn from someone who was a fun party guy to someone with a death wish who was falling into the throes of heroin addiction?

  LVA I left the tour when they started doing heroin. I had a recording studio back in Belgium, and I had ordered a big mixing desk, and I had to be back in the studio to install it and get the studio up and running. But I was on a tour with Jeff Ward when they started doing heroin, and it was bad. When we played Detroit Al went with some black guy into the projects to score. He was so high, it was impossible to be with him. I think when I left for Belgium was when the party was over—not due to me leaving, but that’s when they made the big step of going for heroin.

  Why did Al have numerous conflicts with members of Revolting Cocks and Ministry? Was it because of his drug problems?

  LVA No, I think it’s because a lot of people who worked with Al only get recognition for being in RevCo or Ministry. Then other people say, “Oh, but you were in Ministry—you must be very rich!” The thing with Al is that whenever he had one dollar, he would spend $100 on the future. He would invest everything and then double that. Like the Fairlight. If Al hadn’t bought that, which cost as much as a little house, Richard and I would never have been able make the Big Sexy Land album. Everyone who works with him should know that they’re never going to see any money. In RevCo I get some money, like enough to buy a beer, maybe two beers. In the heyday of Big Sexy Land RevCo toured four times, and I made maybe $1,000 in the whole year. Al invested everything into the future, and whenever any money came to Al he would have to give it to people he still owed money to and make sure that we could make the next step. From a lawyer’s point of view you could say, “Oh, he’s ripping everyone off.” That’s not true. It’s sad and he’s heartbroken now because every single guy except me thinks he ripped them off, while he has invested everything in the future. Meanwhile, the best music any of these people ever made in their career, they did with him.

  chapter 6

  The Land of Rape and Honey

  The Road to Sodomy and Gonorrhea

  Most people in America live in Eastern Standard Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, or Pacific Time. That’s how they run their lives and determine when to go to work, when to eat, when to fuck, when to go out, and when to sleep. For twenty-two years I lived in another time zone, which I used to call DST—Dealer Standard Time. It’s something any junkie can relate to. By the time Ministry was doing The Land of Rape and Honey, between what the record company was paying me and what I was making for doing remixes for other artists, I had some decent money coming in. And Patty and I were spending most of that money to get high. We’d sit around all day and wait for the dealer. Our whole lives revolved around these losers’ schedule, when they could make it to the house or the studio. Sometimes we’d wait for hours and hours. I was shooting up eight to ten times a day by that point. I realized I was a full-blown junkie because if I didn’t get it that day or if my dealer was late, I’d be freaking out and shaking and throwing up. That’s when I realized I had a problem.

  When I wasn’t getting high or making music I was getting in some kind of trouble. When I was working on Rape and Honey I didn’t have a car, so I got this 750 Maxim motorcycle from Jim Nash, the owner of Wax Trax! He gave it to me because he had already dumped it once. I didn’t know how to ride, and this bike was far too big and heavy for a beginner; just keeping it upright was a chore. I only had the bike for a week when I was going down Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive on Quaaludes. I was cutting through lanes of traffic when I blew my balance and lost control. The bike tipped over with me still on it. I skidded for about five hundred feet, getting road rash up and down my back and thighs. I was hamburger meat. It hurt like hell, but I couldn’t do anything until I stopped sliding. A cabbie saw me, stopped, and asked, “Are you okay?” I said, “I’ll be okay if you can drive me home.” So I got a ride home from the taxi driver for free. Because I was dripping sausage blood everywhere, he was like, “Dude, you should go to the hospital.” But I went home and recovered and asked a friend to pick up t
he bike for me.

  I should have just left it there because later that week I crashed it for the second time. I had just left my house and stopped for a red light behind a truck. The light turned green and the truck moved forward, but then suddenly the driver slammed on his brakes. I revved the bike right into the back of the truck’s bumper and went flying off like a human projectile. I flew straight through a Chicago Tribune newspaper vending box, helmet first. And I couldn’t get my head out of the box. I was stuck like a miserable cartoon character. Patty heard the crash from our house and had a gut feeling that it was probably me. Some bystanders came and helped me, and one of the guys was stepping on all the crunching glass around me. They extricated me, and then Patty arrived and said, “I knew this was going to happen.” It wasn’t my fault, man. That bike was cursed.

  But heroin’s a great painkiller, so while I was healing I at least had an excuse to keep using. The thing is that I was a very functional addict. As long as I had my fix, I could keep my shit together and get some work done. So somehow, despite all the coke and heroin I was doing, I was cognizant enough to make The Land of Rape and Honey, which everyone calls this ground-breaking album and the true birth of industrial music and all this shit I couldn’t care less about. But I did care about that album. It’s what I wanted to do way back when I was on Arista—it just took a while to get there. Some of those songs were even written back before Twitch; they just needed to age like a good wine to the point when they were ready to be consumed and people would understand them.

  For most of the album we bulk recorded a bunch of shit. If you listened to it right then, it sounded like snippets of noise, nothing you’d consider remotely useful. People think there’s rhyme and reason to what I do, but almost everything is plucked out of thin air. It’s almost like these passages are transmitted to me in my sleep, and when I wake up I go and get my engineer so we can translate what I just heard in my head. That’s how I write all my songs. We don’t calculate them out or anything; they just come together, It’s almost spiritual. These snippets and riffs and random chaos swirl around for a while, gradually falling into place. It’s like assembling a giant three-dimensional puzzle made out of pieces that keep changing shape. I don’t know how it happens—it seems impossible—but somehow it works.

  So when we did The Land of Rape and Honey I’d take the stacks of material we recorded on these reel-to-reel tapes back to the house I was renting, which was four blocks from the studio—a fucking bar crawl home—and I would edit the tape for twelve to fourteen hours. I would have razor cuts all over my hands from that much editing. There was no digital equipment back then. It took me twelve to fourteen hours per song, but it was really invigorating because I was using the same cut-up method that William Burroughs used, only I was doing it with music, which is why he and I hit it off a few years later when we met to work on the song “Just One Fix” from Psalm 69. I did a lot of cut-up editing on The Land of Rape and Honey, which was fun and artsy, plus there was no one to fuck with me or bother me. I was at home with my cheap headphones doing all the editing, and I really got to know those songs.

  When I worked on a song I’d make a mark on the tape for each beat so I knew I’d have the timing right. Then I chopped up all the tape in equal-sized pieces, threw it all on the floor, and mixed the pieces around. When I picked them up I didn’t know if they were forward or backward, so in a way it was like musical Russian roulette. I’d pick the pieces up and reassemble them in this random order. And I’d listen to it. If it sounded good—which it did a lot of the time—I’d keep it. If it wasn’t right, I’d chop it up again and keep experimenting. And I tried getting a little avant-garde like Salvador Dali or something, which was really fun. I’d rub some of the tape pieces in coffee; others had cigarette burns or urine stains. And in the end we strung it all together and it worked, which was really fun. It was a special six months in my life. I was working on stuff that hadn’t been done before and finding new ways to approach music. I felt like, “Wow, I’ve conquered something, man.” In the end The Land of Rape and Honey was the perfect storm of hallucinogens, heroin, cocaine, and a month of me wasted out of my mind, editing all these reassembled bits of tape on a two-track. It’s amazing how primitive it was.

  That was also the album in which I started using distorted vocals. It’s funny because people think I got the idea to use distorted vocals from someone like Throbbing Gristle or Einsturzende Neubauten. They forget I was an old-school psychedelic hippie—I got it from 13th Floor Elevators. Way back in 1966 their singer and guitarist Roky Erickson used to distort his vocals to make them sound more raw. There was one song in which he was just blasting. It just sounded like the whole mic was going to explode, and I thought, “That’s the sound I want!” The technology back then was nothing like what we have today, so he couldn’t make them sound totally robotic, but that was my real inspiration to add distortion to my vocals. I also started using guitar again. Not a lot, though. It’s subtle, mostly for effect, and it comes in some of the places where people don’t hear it. It’s funny because the total supposed guitar rock hit—which I hate to this day—is “Stigmata,” and that doesn’t have any guitars on it; the guitars are all sampled. There’s two chords in every riff, and the second one is bent with a pitch shifter. It’s all electronic—and that was supposedly our first big metal moment. For years, when we played that song, we’d do it with live guitars to make it heavier. That didn’t stop me from hating it, though. Of course, the biggest song on the album is the one I can’t stand, and suddenly I have to play every night for years. Back-asswards, right? The problem with “Stigmata” is that it’s too simplistic. It was a throwaway. I needed another song for the album, so we banged that out in five minutes. But it doesn’t go anywhere. I never thought it was going to be big or do anything. I thought other songs had better potential for selling records. But I’m usually the last one to know what other people are going to like.

  When we finished The Land of Rape and Honey I took a picture off of a TV documentary about the Holocaust. It was a shot of the Buchenwald concentration camp. I digitally distorted it so it was all grainy and looked nightmarish and psychedelic. I thought it would be a good cover for this mind-fuck of an album. Well, when Sire figured out what the photo on the cover was, they got pissed. There were a lot of Jewish people there—Seymour Stein, the president of the label and Howie Klein, the VP, just to name two—and they’re all pretty sensitive about anything involving the Holocaust. I wasn’t endorsing the Holocaust or genocide, but my manager called me up and said these guys were offended and Sire wouldn’t let me use the image on the cover. So I said, “Okay, I’ve got another cover for you.” I found some roadkill—a run-over deer—cut off the head, put it in my truck, and drove twelve hundred miles from Austin to Los Angeles. My car stunk like a slaughter house with this decaying fucking dear head in my truck. But I got there. I pulled into the Warner Bros. Burbank parking lot, went into the Sire office building with the deer head, threw it on the desk of the head of the art department, and said, “Here’s your new fucking cover.” All of a sudden, we got our old cover back.

  Now in no way, shape, or form am I a Nazi sympathizer. I’m the exact opposite. I’m such a lefty liberal that I’m almost a Communist. I’ve always hated corporations, capitalism, consumerism, and greed. Buy, buy, buy, money, money, money, more, more, more—how much is enough? That’s always been my attitude. So of course, when I put a sample of Nazis sieg heiling Hitler in World War II on the title track of The Land of Rape and Honey, all these knuckleheads completely misconstrued what I was trying to say. The soundbite is meant to be a paradox, a juxtaposition; the song is completely anti-Nazi and antifascist. So of course, when these racist scumbags hear the album, all they focus on is the sieg heiling. Suddenly we’re their favorite band, and as soon as we start playing, there are Nazi skinheads ready to fight everyone in the pit. I’d have to conk them on the head with a bottle of Bushmills, wasting precious, pr
ecious whiskey. We had to stop using any prerecorded tape onstage because I’d jump into the crowd during the show and get in fights with these assholes, but while I was throwing punches I had to remember to get back onstage while the tape was rolling to hit a certain mark. Sometimes I’d be in the crowd getting pummeled or pummeling someone and I wouldn’t be able to get back up onstage to sing a part. So in the end we decided, “Look, let’s just learn these parts so we can play them ourselves without samples in case Al gets trapped in the pit with the skinheads.”

  Ogre from Skinny Puppy joined us on vocals on a few of the dates, which was fun. He was smart, articulate, and funny, and he liked getting high almost as much as I did. And Ogre would hook up with all these scary chicks—girls I was afraid of. They were all goth, with tons of mascara and holes all over their bodies. We shared the bus, so he’d go into his bunk with these chicks, and I’d just hear these insane animal noises, like he was fucking a pack of wild coyotes.

  Around that time “Stigmata” was taking off, and the album started selling. The more money I’d see, the more went up my and Patty’s arms. Still, as fucked up as I was, I was functional, which again I credit to the strong work ethic my stepdad instilled in me. During the beginning of The Land of Rape and Honey tour, Ogre asked me if I would produce the next Skinny Puppy record, and I thought that was a great idea. We went to Vancouver for that, and I lived there for two months working on this record. k.d. lang was in the studio next to us, and we freaked her out right away because of the way we all looked. I knew right away there was a bad vibe, but sometimes bad vibes make for great, tension-filled music, and that’s what Skinny Puppy thrived on.