Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  Lang’s handlers and producers got mad at me because when I walked in the SSL board had different colors on the EQ channels, so I made them tape the normal colors I’m used to onto each knob of the board. Then I brought in candles, incense, and strobe lights to make it my own place. But they had a lot of work left to do on her album, and I was distracting them. They were pissed off. And the rest of the guys in Skinny Puppy were mad at me because they didn’t want me there in the first place; Ogre did. He wanted me to inject a little Ministry into the Skinny Puppy sound with some chugging, distorted guitars and spoken-word samples. I wasn’t trying to make a Ministry record. I went by Ogre’s guidance, and I know how to produce. But the rest of the band wasn’t on board. Keyboardist Dwayne Goettel was doing more heroin than I was and was fixing to be dead soon, and cEvin Key wanted to work with their longtime guy, Dave Ogilvie, so the animosity was as thick as New York cheesecake. cEvin hated me and Ogre liked me, so cEvin started hating Ogre.

  On top of that, I was staying at the engineer’s house to save on hotel bills, and for whatever reason he thought I was banging his girlfriend. I wasn’t, but he got all in my face about it. I didn’t get fucked the whole time I was there, but I think I did a pretty good record, man. When it first came out in November 1989 the band’s fans went fucking ape-shit. They hated me more than Skinny Puppy’s engineer hated me. I was a heathen berserker for changing their sound. Everyone thought I ruined the band and that Skinny Puppy could never recover from Rabies, but that’s the record that Ogre wanted. Now it’s considered one of their best records—typical shit for me, man: I do stuff, everyone hates it, and five years later people start coming around to what the fuck I was thinking at the time. The songs with a lot of guitars, “Rodent” and “Tin Omen,” are now two of their most popular songs, and “Warlock,” which is typical of Adrian Sherwood–influenced production style, became a big hit. They did a really popular video for “Warlock” that features scenes from a bunch of gory horror films.

  But I had my own horror show to return to. By the time I got back to Chicago I was a full-blown addict. And that’s not glamorous—it’s deadly. It’s not what a “rock star” does; it’s what a pathetic junkie does. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a heroin addict that hasn’t overdosed and almost died—me included. The first time I OD’d was at a party in Chicago. I can’t remember whose party it was; I just remember Patty was there along with a bunch of old friends, most of whom were also druggies. We were all doing smack. Well, if you tempt fate enough, she’s gonna try to bite your dick off—or at least chew your balls till you’re squealing like a neutered cat. I don’t know how much I had injected, but it was a bunch. Next thing I knew paramedics surrounded me and had the metal handles of a defibrillator held to my chest as someone yelled, “Clear!” I was flying five feet into the air. Those electrical machines are amazing—probably the greatest invention since Penicillin. It turns out I had been out for four or five minutes with no pulse. Considering I had to jump right into the next Ministry record, I think I would have rather stayed dead.

  Intervention 4

  Sascha Konietzko—

  Ministry Introduce KMFDM to the Masses

  When they formed in 1984, KMFDM were at the forefront of the European industrial music scene. But it was an underground notoriety. The band was heavily influenced by Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubauten, and their shows included onstage fire eaters and animal-intestine flinging. As they evolved, KMFDM became more musical, incorporating throbbing electronic dance beats, Adrian Sherwood–inspired samples, and bracing guitars into their sound. Although they had already been making noise for five years, they didn’t get to America until Jourgensen invited them to open for Ministry in 1989. Frontman Sascha Konietzko recalls the insanity and acclaim that ensued.

  When did you first meet Al?

  sascha konietzko In late 1988 I got a letter in the mail from Wax Trax! saying that Ministry wanted KMFDM to open their US tour. That got postponed a couple times because Al had a bout of mono. Then finally in December 1989 we flew to Chicago and met the band there. And we went into rehearsals and started touring on December 29. It was for Ministry’s The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste and KMFDM’s UAIOE album.

  Did you know Ministry’s music before you toured with them?

  SK Not at all. I went and bought the only record I could find in a record store, and it ended up to be With Sympathy, which was this fucking horrible synth-pop album. When we heard that we toned down our set because we thought, “Oh no, this is not a good match for our kind of music.” We mellowed out our set and left out the harder songs. Then we went to the first rehearsal in Chicago, and there was Ministry with three guitars, two drum kits, and this balls-to-the-wall sound. Within two or three days I got totally filled in and got to listen to and own all the Ministry records.

  What was your first impression of Al?

  SK He was surprisingly nice. He was soft spoken when you were with him alone, but as soon as there were other people around he became more of a wild guy. There was always a difference between the private Al and the public Al. And I got along very well with the private Al. In fact, nobody wanted to room with either me or Al, so Jolly Rodger, our tour manager, arranged that Al and I would share a room. I saw some pretty strange and funny stuff go on there because there were drugs and girls. A very old friend of mine who passed away, Charlie Regal, used to say, “I like to be surrounded by life, however I don’t like to partake in it.” That’s sometimes how I felt.

  What were some of your strangest experiences?

  SK Every night Al fired us. He would get high and then come up to one of the KMFDM guys and say in all sincerity, “You’re off the tour” or “I don’t want you to use our van anymore.” His then-wife Patty always had to make peace. But there were some funny episodes. He set [Ministry guitarist] William Tucker on fire with a bottle of whiskey. He went into William’s bunk and poured liquor over him and then lit a match. William was swearing and rolling around to smother the flames. Once, when we crossed the United States into Canada, Al started cleaning the back lounge, and I took the opportunity to use a public toilet take a piss. As I was coming back, the bus started rolling away, and I had to run one half mile to catch up with it. And in Salt Lake City Terry Bones, the UK Subs guitarist, fooled around with an underage Mormon, and the police tried to find the offender. Terry was nowhere to be found, but everyone else was. We were all lined up with our hands against the bus, standing there for ninety minutes, and then a blizzard started. Terry wasn’t there, so the girl couldn’t identify him, so they had to let us go. Having never been on a tour of the United States, I just thought, “Of course, this is what playing in America is like.”

  How did you get along with the guys in Ministry?

  SK Everyone who was completely straight or completely on drugs was super-nice. But there were a couple of people who treated us like total assholes, worse than you would treat the shittiest support band. Chris Connelly was the top asshole amongst them all, and Martin Atkins was a close second, for sure. Chris was so fucked up every day he didn’t even know what bus he was on. He would haplessly float about in swimming pools until someone would

  get him.

  Did you get back at him?

  SK On the last show of the tour one of the guitar roadies decided to reload the Akai samplers with samples that would throw Chris completely off. Chris was standing there, bent over for five minutes with his finger at the ready to hit that one note that triggered, “Kill. Kill. Kill. You will not kill!” on “Thieves.” And the roadie and I replaced the sampler with someone saying, “I’ll be having a chicken to go.” Connelly just stood there totally bewildered. We almost shit our pants laughing.

  How often do you see Al today?

  SK Not very often, but we’re still friends. He’s very likeable and has tons of humor and lots of heart. I went over to his house and met his daughter, Adrienne, when she was fou
r or six. They were having a Christmas party in Chicago. It was a lovely, decked-out dinner. Al didn’t make it because he passed out in his hot tub. But I’m so indebted to the guy because he gave me the chance of a lifetime. He said, “I want this fucked up band from Germany to open for Ministry.” If he didn’t do that, we would never have gotten our asses over to America, and I would not be where I am now. It jumpstarted KMFDM’s career. All of a sudden we were getting paid, and we sold fifty or seventy thousand records.

  KMFDM recorded at Chicago Trax studios after touring with Ministry. What were those sessions like?

  SK Ah, man. It was one of those places where when you go in and you don’t remember if it was daylight or night. It was a place where time stood still. There was a guy there who was a police officer who always tricked people with fake arrests. He confiscated drugs from kids on the street and brought them to the studio. There was always everything you wanted there. Going into that place was like walking into an acid trip. It was fun to stay sober and watch the debauchery and be able to walk away without having to be part of the clean-up crew.

  chapter 7

  The Mind Is a Terrible

  Thing to Taste

  Misfiring Synapses and Overdriven Guitar Therapy

  A lot of my fans are into metal—most of them, probably—and that’s cool. I like some of that stuff. I was always into Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Motörhead, and Judas Priest. But there were two things that inspired me to add really heavy thrash guitar to Ministry. The first was the 1985 SOD album Speak English or Die. The band was formed by two members of Anthrax, guitarist Scott Ian and drummer Charlie Benante, along with their old bassist Dan Lilker and this crazy vocalist Billy Milano, who sang really offensive lyrics. But it was the guitars that hooked me in. Even though they were so crushing, they grooved and there was brutal melody there. Hearing that reminded me that my first instrument was guitar and that all this keyboard shit really started out as a distraction. I knew I wanted to go back to playing loud guitar, and hearing Speak English or Die sealed the deal for me. To this day I think that’s one of the best records ever.

  The other band that convinced me to make Ministry more of a metal guitar band was a Texas group called Rigor Mortis. They were opening for Morbid Angel at a place right down the street from where I lived, and I was blown away. They were so tight and precise, and the guitars were like these exploding landmines. The tone was fuzzy and penetrating, and it made the rest of the music so much heavier. I invited them to hang at my house after the show. I didn’t even get to see Morbid Angel because we left after Rigor Mortis’s set. We partied all night and immediately became friends. I played them some of my shit from Rape and Honey, and that blew them away. They brought me a cassette demo of their new songs, which then blew me away. Pretty much right after I met their guitarist, Mike Scaccia, I said, “We have to work together.” Six months later Rigor were on a break, so I invited Mikey to come to Chicago and combine his speed metal riffs with my industrial shit. It wasn’t contrived and it definitely wasn’t a ploy to make a lot of money; it just seemed like a good idea and it worked. Mikey didn’t actually play on The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste; he joined for the tour. But the guitar sound I brought to the band on that album was raw and rudimentary. I hadn’t touched a guitar for years when I picked it up and started noodling again. My thrash riffs worked, but they were all feel, no technique. I knew how to form a power chord, and if I strummed really fast, I could get that mechanized, jackhammer sound that complemented the brutal sound I was searching for.

  Back then there was such a huge division between me and the other main guys in Ministry—Barker, Connelly, and Rieflin. Part of it was because I had all the good ideas and was doing all the drugs—well, almost all of ’em. Every so often Barker would use something. Once, he and I broke into Sire’s offices to do some drugs. I locked the door of Howie Klein’s office behind us. I don’t know if I was trying to bond with Barker. He puked all over Howie’s office—projectile vomited everywhere. We had to keep the door locked because we didn’t want Howie to be pissed. We cleaned it up, threw the paper towels, in the garbage can, kept the door locked, and stole a bunch of his CD promos.

  “Fix it in the mix” is a common term among producers. A lot of artists say you can’t do that; if a song isn’t good enough to begin with, if the performances aren’t tight and the feeling isn’t there, a good mix is just going to make shitty playing sound shittier. For Ministry that just isn’t true. I call it scooping the poop. I’m not an artist or a producer—I’m still the guy who cleans up race horse’s shit, just like I did when I was young. And in the case of The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, it’s amazing that I could walk straight enough to scoop properly. The album was practically shat out of the bowels of complete insanity and debauchery. We’d be in there working, and I’d look out the studio window and see a five-foot-tall Great Dane fucking a girl. We built a motorcycle ramp in an alley behind the studio, and we’d ride the motorcycle up the ramp and crash it into a fence about eight feet away. We fired off shotguns in the studio and sampled the noise. It was Caligula on heroin, coke, and acid. And that was just the beginning.

  My loft was right next to Wrigley Field, where the Cubs played. I hated everything about that team. I was a White Sox fan all the way. I even met some of the Cubs’ players and told them, “I hate your fucking team. I hate everything you stand for. I will never root for you as long as you’re in that uniform.” But they were Ministry fans, so they didn’t care. They brought me to the locker room and took me out to the field to take batting practice. I actually hit a ball that bounced once and then hit the wall in left field; it was a major league double. After meeting a bunch of these guys I realized they had just as little allegiance to their team as I did. Every one of those Cubs I was out on the practice field and in the locker room with hated everyone—the owners, the coaches, the uniforms, the yuppie fans at Wrigley Field, their teammates. They were just haters. They’d come to my studio and hang out and party all fucking night, watching dogs fucking chicks. I met Rick Sutcliffe and Mark Grace, who is now the Diamondbacks’ broadcaster. Mark was dating Noreen Turner. They’d come to my loft to hang out and party, and we’d be shooting up and smoking crack right there in front of them. They didn’t partake. They’d just have a beer, but they watched unspeakable activities. That was really weird because every time you see athletes in public they have to act friendly and polite, but after hours they’re hanging out with junkies and crack heads.

  While we were in the studio working, this girl came in and said, “I really want to write a book about the making of this record.” I had never met her before, but she offered us a pound of MDA—which was worth about $20,000—in exchange for the privilege, so I was like, “Yeah, that sounds cool.” We were dipping our fingers into it and rubbing it into our gums, getting wasted. It lasted us the whole record.

  About six months later I peeked at one of her notebooks because I wanted to see what the fuck she was writing. It was filled with made up words, gibberish, stick figures, and drawings of trees. She had been sitting there in a chair watching all of our madness and writing feverishly in these books, and it turns out she was crazier than we were. I went, “Um, what are you doing? You haven’t written a fucking word.” After I called her out she became more noticeably crazy, and when we weren’t looking she took a Sharpie and drew these stick figures and trees on the walls of the studio. I had to pay for the damage, so I encouraged her to leave and never heard from her again.

  There was nothing normal about the whole cycle for The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste. But there’s a funny story about the track “Dream Song.” Ogre introduced me to this crazy chick in Toronto, Angelina Lukacin, on the 1988 Ministry tour, and we hit it off because she partied so hard and was so entertaining. When we were in Chicago recording “Dream Song” I thought, “Well, let’s call up that crazy Canadian chick.” She was goofy, babbling,

  making no
sense. So I set up a recorder, and every couple days we’d call her up and tape her, and every time she was wasted and babbling about dreams and

  angels.

  I invited her to travel with us on the bus for the 1990 Revolting Cocks tour and she came with some of her crazy friends, but she was the wildest. Every other word out of her mouth was fuck. She was drinking heavily and pretty much keeping up with me, but she was causing problems and I was afraid she was going to die. She would get fucked up and swim naked in hotel pools and get us arrested for being belligerent. She was nuts, and I thought that was hot. But everyone else thought it was annoying. Finally a few of the guys told me, “She has to go, or we quit.” So I was like, “Alright, well, let me get at least one last fuck in.” We were in New Orleans at a Red Roof Inn. I handcuffed her to a shower pole in one of the rooms, fucked her and left her there drunk off her ass. I gave the concierge the keys and said, “Let her out in thirty minutes, after the buses roll out.” But before that tour it was great. Little did I know that crazy chick would eventually save my life.

  By the time of The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, I had started smoking crack to try to save my veins, which were blown by shooting speedballs of heroin and coke. I literally had no good veins left in my arms. I was shooting up in my neck, under my tongue, in my toes, behind my knee—wherever I could find a vein. By not shooting coke and smoking coke instead, I cut down my injections by more than half. I figured I’d still have the heroin high and can get the coke benefits as well without having to poke myself as much. It was strictly a pragmatic decision. There’s actually this great misconception about crack. People think it’s the poor man’s cocaine. But it’s not cheap. Yeah, it’s only five dollars a rock, but you need seventy thousand rocks all night—you can’t stop smoking the shit. It’s the most addictive thing ever, so crack is actually the most expensive drug in the world. It was harder for me to quit than heroin was.