Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  It’s not a myth that junkies hang together. Like finds like. Water seeks its own level. And not all junkies are scumbags—though many of them are. Some are just lost souls, misguided fuckers, or glamour seekers. The vocalist from Alice in Chains, Layne Staley, was the latter. He did drugs before I met him, but he was always a sniffer. He’d snort heroin or coke. For some reason he came to see Ministry in Hawaii when we played right next to Pearl Harbor. He got backstage into the dressing room and saw Mikey shoot up. So he asked if he could try. I looked him right in the eye, held up a syringe, and said, “Are you sure you want to do this, man?” And he nodded. I feel really bad about that because we turned him on to needles, and now he’s dead.

  I don’t feel responsible, because he was gonna find someone to shoot with; it just happened to be us. He did a dose and passed out and didn’t wake up. He was barely breathing. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive. I had to keep checking. Then he woke up, got some more dope, and shot up again. He took to needles like a fish to water, but I could tell he got into it for the glamour. That was a mistake. Other than the fact that he died from drugs, there’s no glamour in being a junkie. It’s the hardest job in the fucking world. It makes dealing with Madison Avenue’s top executives or Hollyweird types seem like a joyride at Disneyland. You have to wake up, scrounge around for money, and then figure out where your dealer is. Half your day is gone by the time you finally score so you don’t get sick. A good day is getting past noon without throwing up blood all over yourself.

  Who wants to live like that? I hope there is some kid who will shoplift this book and be in the same situation that I was in. I hope he’ll think, “You know what? He’s right. This sucks. This lifestyle sucks. I’m done.”

  The problem with me was that I had a lot of enablers, people who felt like as long as the music was flowing and the profits were pouring in, they were golden. They all knew I wanted to die—I made that clear. They didn’t fucking care. I even had a manager who said to me once, “You’re worth more dead to me than alive.”

  What a great position to be in. Feed the beast that doesn’t want to be here anyway. That way you’re not doing anything ethically or morally wrong because, hey, he’s the one who said he wants out. “So go do a bunch more of that shit and write me a couple of hit songs and we’ll call it even.” That’s what I dealt with all through the ’90s.

  A lot of diehard fans call The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste one of the top three Ministry records, but I can’t stand it, mainly because of the condition I was in when I made it. I could feel the machine slowly taking over and felt helpless to stop it. I don’t feel like the songs are the best I’ve written or that they’re even in my top one hundred.

  By the time we were done with the last song, I was chasing Barker around the studio with a chair because I couldn’t stand him anymore. I hit him over the head with the chair and he stormed out. He was dazed but not severely injured, though he complained about it for the next year. Before we went on tour we hired drummer Martin Atkins from Public Image Ltd. to add contrapuntal polyrhythms to the beats Rieflin was playing. On their own neither of them was good enough, so I figured that maybe together they’d enhance each other’s creativity. Atkins did all the Muppet drum fills, like Animal, and Rieflin kept the beat. But it was horrific, man. Rieflin didn’t seem like he even wanted to be there. Years later R.E.M. hired him to replace Bill Berry, and he seemed okay for them. But for the intense, agro shit I wanted to do, not even close. It was a totally incompetent band. Barker couldn’t play bass, Connelly couldn’t sing, and Atkins couldn’t drum.

  Before we started that tour the only thing I did right was hire Mikey Scaccia to play guitar. Technically, he was way better than I was. He could play anything—punk, metal, blues, rock. His solos were tasteful and savage. They fit the music and weren’t self-indulgent, unlike most lead guitarists. I may have been the first guy to bring heavy guitars into industrial music, but Mikey made Ministry the machine it became. There’s no question about that.

  During the tour for The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste all the skinheads from The Land of Rape and Honey days went away and were replaced by angry, pent-up thrash fans. That was fine, but there were so many of them, and a lot of them seemed mad that we weren’t Megadeth. Because we had violent mosh pits at our earlier shows, we decided it would be a good idea to put up a twenty-foot-high fence that surrounded the whole stage. It looked cool, and we thought it would protect us from the potential lawsuits that occured when some idiots fucked with me onstage and I jumped into the crowd to beat the crap out of them. But it didn’t work out that way because kids were climbing the fence, diving off, and landing on the floor. And then people would stomp on them. Or they’d fly off the fence smack into some knucklehead in the mosh pit, and one or the other would get hurt. Being onstage it was like watching spiders crawling all over the fence, and I hate spiders, especially the spiders I sometimes used to see when I was on acid. When I dosed before we went onstage I couldn’t tell if these things on the fence were fans or giant spiders, so I’d swat at them to get them down. They freaked me out.

  The lawsuits were a major nuisance. One kid broke his spine after he climbed to the top of the fence and dove off. But we won every lawsuit because the thing was designed for safety; it just wound up attracting these spiders, who would climb up and try to get onstage and then miss and fall, and then they would sue us when they got hurt. Some people got pissed they couldn’t get onstage, so they’d spit at me and try to throw bottles through the fence. Then they’d get really mad and throw change. We’d pick up about $50 in quarters and dimes after some shows. One guy in Detroit found out we had this fence, so he brought darts to the show and whipped them at me. The cool thing is that they weren’t cheap darts. They were $10-a-piece feather darts and he had about $150 worth of the things. That’s real hate. I narrowly dodged one, and it went into the speaker cone of one of my Marshall amps and blew that out. The fence blocked most of the other darts, but four of them landed on the stage. The thing I don’t get is that if you hate a band that badly, why pay money for a ticket and bring expensive darts to their show? He probably bought the record, too, to make sure he hated it. Who does that?

  In addition to the lawsuits there were tons of arrests on that tour. We played twelve states in a row during the US leg of the tour and on any given night someone from our band or crew was ultimately arrested and taken away by the cops. Some of the charges were serious. The best part about it—apart from the fact that I somehow avoided getting busted for anything—was that the guys who I didn’t like and who mostly didn’t do drugs got arrested a bunch of times. One of our hired-gun band members (an English guy with a bad attitude) was busted for statutory rape a couple times. Martin Atkins got arrested because he had sex with a groupie who claimed he attacked her. Even Barker was arrested for fucking jaywalking. I was loving that shit. On that tour I wasn’t a musician—I was a fucking bail bondsman.

  When we weren’t on the road with Ministry, we were causing trouble at Trax Studios. My second collaboration with Ian MacKaye was one of the more memorable projects: Pailhead started in London and we finished up in Chicago. He did the vocals and I played guitar and did background vocals for the EP Trait; it was an explosive combination of our two styles.

  What was really cool was that Ian was usually straight-edge, but he knew how fucked up we were and wanted to hang with us, so he drank a bunch of beer. It was the first time he had beer in years, and it was the shittiest stuff—like $4.99 a case—and tasted like metallic tent water. It was called Brewnigs, but we used to call it Nigbrew. We drank a shitload and got wasted. I had the code to the studio manager’s phone, so I accessed it and dialed up a sex line, and Ian talked on the phone for two hours. I think he was just messing with the girls, who were telling him how they were going to spank him, but he couldn’t get enough. He’d never done anything like that, and he was like a kid in a candy store. A week later the studio
owner came in and asked, “What’s this bill for $200 for?” Because all these black Chicago house musicians were recording in Studio B, we played the racist card: I said, “I don’t know anything about this. It must be the black guys.” I hung it all on them, and they actually got in trouble for it, not us. I don’t think the house musicians remembered whether they did it or not, because they were wasted too.

  I also hooked up with Dead Kennedys vocalist and Alternative Tentacles Records owner Jello Biafra in 1988 and we started working on Lard. Jello was playing a Dead Kennedys show in Chicago at the Metro, and I was there. Somebody introduced me to him, and we started talking and discovered we were both at that Ramones show outside of Denver, where there were only about twenty people in the audience? That was a good icebreaker.

  He gave me his number, I called him up later, and he came to Chicago. Then he started dating the receptionist at the studio we worked at. So he stayed even longer. We were good friends for a long time, but Jello’s such a freaky guy. First of all he’s a germophobe. He wears plastic gloves when he opens doors, and when he visited my house he brought his own mold cleaner with him and went straight to the bathroom and started spraying, like there were some bacterial growths that would develop limbs and huge eyestalks and splatter infected phlegm all over him. When he first came into the studio to sing in the booth I was all ready to hit record when he declared, “I need some tea!” So we made him some tea. Then he said, “I need lemon.” He practically sang it. So we got him lemon. Then he said, “You can’t rush me. I need time.” He was sitting there, sipping his tea with lemon, the clock was ticking, and Barker, Jeff Ward, and I were all waiting. Jello finished his tea and started warming up his voice with all this operatic shit. I was like, really? Isn’t this supposed to be punk rock? And he needed Splenda for his tea. He was a total diva. Then he got to the mic. We didn’t know what he had planned, but we were expecting some wild political lyrics. We hit play on the track, and he just started screaming into the mike like an idiot. He didn’t have any lyrics. He needed a two-hour warm-up just to scream. They weren’t even words. Then he demanded more tea and wanted to do it again.

  I said, “No, not until you’ve got some words to go along with the screaming.” I eventually locked Jello out from the studio because he was such a pain in the ass. But he’d still come to the studio and yell his ideas for the songs under the door. It was an interesting project, though, because it still had samples, but Barker and I would play more loosely than we did in Ministry. And eventually Jello chilled out. He came back with some real lyrics, so I let him back in the vocal booth to sing them. It’s amazing because for a guy who doesn’t drink and doesn’t do drugs, he’s one of the craziest people I’ve met—but real crazy as opposed to junkie crazy.

  Me, I was both real crazy and junkie crazy, as I proved to the guys in Metallica at a Ministry show in December 1988. We were playing the Ritz Theater, and the Metallica guys were there. When we used to play “Stigmata” I would leave halfway through the song so I could get down to the dressing room and have a nice quiet drink by myself while the band was still playing onstage. That night I finished my vocal parts, slammed the mic down on the ground, and left to navigate the treacherous stairs of the Ritz and have a moment of peace. I get to my dressing room, and there are these three wankers with mullets drinking my beer. I said, “How did you get down here?” and they said, “We’re Metallica.” And then they turned away from me. I said, “Okay, this is my dressing room. Why are you still here? Scramtallica.” They told me to fuck off, which was the wrong thing to do. I grabbed my deli tray, looked at these arrogant fuckers, and grabbed handfuls of carrots, celery, and rolled-up ham. Then I dropped my pants and shoved all this stuff up my ass. I looked like a fucking peacock. I must have had a twelve-inch plume of deli tray food coming out of my ass. I turned around and charged at them backward. That’s called a flying ham sandwich—you shove food up your ass and charge somebody. They dropped their beers and ran for their lives. A long piece of celery actually made contact with Lars, which he never forgave me for. But I didn’t care. I could tell right away he was an asshole. And I was cranky. I really needed a fix.

  For a crazy junkie, when I wasn’t doing shows I was cranking shit out left and right—as long as it wasn’t Ministry—which is painfully time consuming and soul ripping. One of the funniest things I worked on was some tracks for GWAR for their Scumdogs of the Universe record. I liked those guys, but I knew they didn’t have any money. So I drafted up a contract that said get me a pizza, a case of beer, and a gram of bad coke, ’cause I knew they couldn’t get good coke. I also insisted that they come to the studio in Chicago every day in full stage gear. I told the studio owner, Reid Hyams, they were actually from Antarctica, and they came in with their swords and battle axes and freak the shit out of everyone. No one knew who they were back then. The first night of work GWAR ate my pizza in their costumes. I had nothing to eat. The next day they got my beer and drank it all. I got one beer out of it. And the third day I got my coke. It was horrible coke. So instead of snorting it, we got a mirror out and spelled “Fugazi” with it. And then they took Polaroids of the mirror and we Fed-Exed them to Ian. This was right after Pailhead, and Ian was pissed. And then GWAR snorted this shitty coke before I could get to it. I got one line, one beer, and no pizza out of the whole fuckin’ deal.

  Considering all the degenerates I was hanging out with, it’s kind of ironic that right around that time I met a guy who would become one of my closest friends, Danny Wirtz. He’s the son of the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks. I had hired a receptionist at the studio. She was one of these girls whom I told Reid he had hired, and then I acted like he was crazy for not remembering. I’d have to have a sit-down meeting with him once a week and say, “You don’t remember that? She’s been here for two months” even though she had only been there for a week. I’d say, “You’re losing it man. You hired her—you don’t remember the interview? You told me after she was really great.” He’d always leave confused and say in his Sylvester the Cat voice, “I don’t know what’s going on around here. Maybe I shouldn’t drink as much,” that kind of thing. He never caught on. Tammy eventually wound up being Jello Biafra’s girlfriend. She was well versed in how to navigate the total insanity and debauchery that went on in the studio and still somehow get the books done at the end of the day. Everyone I hired was awesome. I had a natural instinct, and I spent more time convincing Reid that he had hired them than I actually spent finding them and giving them jobs. But the receptionist also knew Danny Wirtz, grandson of Bill Wirtz, who owned the Hawks. She told me, “Danny’s a big Ministry fan and said he’d give me a couple tickets to a game if I wanted to go.”

  I wasn’t the most sensitive guy back then, so I said, “Well, I’ve already got tickets,” because I’ve had tickets since I was six years old. When I was living in Chicago, I never missed a Blackhawks game. I started at the 300 level, the cheap seats where the drunks are, and by Twitch and Rape and Honey, I’d worked my way down to 200-level season tickets. Then, when we did The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste and Psalm 69, I made it to the 100-level seats. But the receptionist insisted, saying, “No, you should go with him. He took me to a game, and it was really fun. We had our own bar.” So I said, “Okay.”

  I went and met Danny. We got along great and he told me he would love to work for Ministry in some capacity. The crazy thing about this guy—and why I love him so dearly and he’s such a good friend—is that he’s a billionaire’s kid yet is the hardest-working, sweetest, most down-to-earth, together person in the history of the world. He could have been a complete fucking brat with the kind of old-school money he comes from—because his family wasn’t nouveau rich; this is generations rich. He could have been a real prima donna or a wanker, but instead he came and worked for Ministry at, literally, minimum wage—six, seven bucks an hour. I had this billionaire’s kid as my personal assistant on the road. He knew I was fucked up, and he didn’t jud
ge me. He did whatever I wanted, and it wasn’t an easy job. He kept all my talismans in line and separated—just dumb shit. Get me to the gig on time, which by that stage, was no easy task. But that’s what he did. He did all this stupid stuff and did everything he could to get me onstage—and he never complained. Good old Danny Wirtz saved my ass more than once, that’s for sure.

  Intervention 5

  Dead Kennedys and Lard Frontman

  Jello Biafra Takes Jourgensen

  to New Heights of Lunacy

  There must have been some strange chemicals in the air—beyond tobacco, THC, and angel dust—the day the Ramones played the now-defunct Denver club Ebbets Field on their first US tour. The place was only partially full, but a handful of folks who witnessed the sixty-minute, three-chord barrage—Jourgensen, Jim Nash, Dannie Flesher, and Jello Biafra—would play pivotal roles in the punk and alternative rock scenes both within and outside of each other’s respective circles.

  In 1978 Nash and Flesher moved their Wax Trax! record store from Denver to Chicago and started releasing albums. Largely thanks to Jourgensen, they would become the industrial powerhouse, Wax Trax! Records. In 1978 Biafra formed the seminal hardcore band Dead Kennedys, with whom he released five sonically and politically incendiary records, 1980’s Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, 1981’s In God We Trust, Inc. EP, 1982’s Plastic Surgery Disasters, 1985’s Frankenchrist, and 1986’s Bedtime for Democracy. He also formed the indie label Alternative Tentacles to release albums by his and other groups.