Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  Once, I was drunk and took a drive over to see the Waco agents. I was in my Supra and hit a huge bank right in front of them. The car flipped over. It skidded across the pavement, and there were sparks flying from the hood. It stopped right in front of these FBI guys, and I thought, “That’s it—I’m going to jail.” But they just laughed. They didn’t have me walk in a straight line or give me a breathalyzer or anything. I was good comic relief for them: “Get this guy back. He’s funny. He flips cars.”

  That was the only car I flipped, but I crashed quite a few. On New Year’s Eve I was driving drunk in a small town outside of Austin, doing about seventy down a gravel street, when I hit a patch of ice and spun out. I rammed into the side of the bar I was going to. I took out about half of their outside wall and still got free drinks. They were like, “Man, it looks like you could use a drink.” The bartender drove me home afterward. She was kind of hot if you were drunk, but otherwise, not so much. But we had sex even though I wrecked her bar. And as it turned out, her husband was the sheriff of the town. She didn’t tell me that before we fucked. But I found out afterward, so I was trying to do spin control. The next day I had my car hauled out so I didn’t get in trouble right away. But this psycho bitch told her husband we had sex, and that was the beginning of the end for Ministry in Austin. After that they wanted me out—all because of this chickie who drove me home after a car wreck and balled my brains out.

  I had plenty of other run-ins with Johnny Law before I had my own private little Waco. There’s a whole wing of the courthouse that I paid for with fines and penalties. The cars I had—my Supra, the RX7, my black Ferrari—were faster than the cop cars, so I knew I could outrun them—but I couldn’t outrun their radar. They’d catch me speeding and phone ahead to a car further down the road that would chase me. I’d be driving with cops behind me with their flashers on. I’d hear, “Pull over” on the megaphone, so I’d stash all my drugs and when everything was cool I’d pull to the side of the road. These guys were like characters from The Dukes of Hazard; they knew my cars and they knew me on a first-name basis. “Now, I told you, son—don’t come speeding through my town like this.”

  “Al, we just hooked up last week and I told you don’t be driving through Bee Cave, Texas, at one hundred miles an hour on my shift . . . ”

  I accumulated so many speeding tickets that I basically bought off a small Texas town and gave them a $12,000 donation to clear my record so I didn’t have to go to court anymore. It was probably only about $6,000 for the tickets, but I gave them $12,000 to sweep my name clean.

  Sometimes they’d have me get out of the car to see if I was drunk, and I usually was, but I had a system: I used to practice saying the alphabet backward. I memorized it. Gibby thought I was crazy and would make fun of me. But whenever I was asked to get out of the car, I’d sigh with exasperation and say, “Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T, S…” and so on. The cops would say, “Well, I guess if you can do the whole alphabet backward you must be sober. Just don’t speed. It’s dangerous.”

  There were a couple times I drove through, doing 180, and they’d say, “Well, I dunno what to write this ticket up as because my radar detector doesn’t go that high. But I know I was driving 120 to 130 behind you, trying to keep up on the reading that I got, so you must have been doing 200 miles an hour.”

  As much of a heroin-hazed headfuck as most of 1993 was, I remember a lot of strange shit that happened that year. I was in and out of jail for stupid things—public indecency, fights, drunk and disorderly conduct. I got arrested at the Austin airport with crack and needles in my bag—I forgot it was there, and there was no getting out of that one. Overall I’ve had four or five disorderly conducts and three felony heroin convictions. I’ve spent about two months of my life in jail, which is pretty good considering the laws I’ve broken.

  The day I presented the Best Country Music Album award at the 1993 Austin Music Awards at South by Southwest I didn’t break any laws but I sure cause a ruckus. Since Barker was doing most of the Ministry press, management thought it would be a good idea to get me some public exposure to prove that I was still alive. So they set me up with this public engagement. Bad idea. I was wasted and had already puked in a corner. So I was smoking cigarettes to chill out and settle my stomach. Suddenly this guy told me I can’t smoke in the club and gave me some chewing tobacco. That was fine with me—I’ve chewed Copenhagen and Skoal—but he had this long weed Beech-Nut shit I had never done before. I was okay with it for a while, but then the same fucking asshole came up to me and hit me on the back and said, “Hey man, you’re on. What are you still doing here?” And when he hit me the entire chaw went down my throat. I immediately turned green. I went onstage, and Barker opened up the envelope and handed it to me. I opened my mouth and BBBLLLEEEAAARRRGHHH! I puked on Barker’s hands, the microphone, and all over myself. The place reeked immediately of stomach acid and sour tobacco. I cleared my throat and said, “Yeah, it’s Junior Brown and Tanya Rae.” They wouldn’t even come up onstage and get the award because they were so disgusted. I went downstairs back to the bar, and everyone started giving me a hard time. Then Gibby laid into me, and that was the last straw. I swung at him, connecting to the side of his head. He swung back. And we went at it for a minute or two before some guys broke up the fight. It was the first big fistfight I ever had with Gibby—but not our last.

  Maybe because of Ministry’s subversive, rebellious attitude, a lot of metal fans have embraced our aggressive music. Many of them actually consider us a pioneering industrial metal band because we took aspects from electronic or industrial music and then merged them with the caustic bite of thrash metal. That may be true. But I’ve never been a fan of thrash metal. Just look at the so-called Big Four: Metallica are boring and self-indulgent, as much as I still like Kirk; Megadeth are even worse, and Dave Mustaine’s an egomaniac asshole; Slayer are unlistenable noise, and their guitarist, Kerry King, is an asshole. But I have to admit I have a soft spot for Anthrax. Like I said, the attitude and guitar sounds on the album Speak English or Die by their side project S.O.D. were a revelation for me. And their guitarist, Scott Ian, is a personal friend. I met him when he came onstage with me and did a couple songs. Then in 1993 I did remixes of “Potter’s Field” and “Hy Pro Glo” on their album Sound of White Noise. When they came through Austin that year I got onstage with them and did a couple songs. It was so much fun that I decided to get in my Supra and drive to the next city they were playing so we could do it again. That’s when Scott said I should leave the car, have someone pick it up, and go on the bus with them. It was a good idea because, unlike most metal bands, Anthrax didn’t drink or do drugs back then, so it was an opportunity to ease up on the heroin a little bit. I still brought my own stash just so I wouldn’t get sick, but going out with Anthrax was the cleanest I had been in a long time.

  At the time Anthrax had just signed a huge deal with Elektra Records, and even though thrash was quickly fading in popularity, they were still drawing good crowds. And because they tried to be fun and exciting, not mean and brutal, they drew lots of hot chicks. The thing is that you never know where these girls have been—or, rather, you know exactly where these girls have been. So I always made it a rule not to fuck any of them without a condom. After one show the band had a few boxes of pizzas on their bus, and those guys were chowing down. In the back lounge this hot piece of ass unbuttons my shorts, pulls out my cock, and starts blowing me. She took off her shirt. She was a redhead with nice, big tits, and I’m a sucker for that. So I was licking her nipples and she was sucking me off. Then, without warning, she lifted her skirt, sat on my cock, and started fucking me. I recoiled in horror because I wasn’t wearing a rubber. So I threw her off of me, stumbled into the main lounge where Anthrax were eating their pizza, and opened a new box. I scooped up two handfuls of piping hot cheese and tomato sauce and rubbed it all over my now-limp cock, making sure not to miss a spot from the shaft to the tip even though I was
burning the fuck out of my dick. Scott Ian and the rest of the guys looked at me like I had gone crazy, so I turned to Scott and exclaimed with great desperation, “The acid in the tomato sauce will kill any viruses or bacteria, right? Right?!”

  Clearly they wouldn’t, but the last thing I needed on top of a heroin addiction was AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease. I found out years later that I have Hepatitis C, which is like bush-league AIDS, but I don’t think I got it from a groupie; I got it from sharing needles. Like I’ve said before, it’s a miracle I’m even still alive. Some people aren’t so lucky (or unlucky, depending on how depressed you are). For example, I was there the night River Phoenix died at the height of his career. It was Halloween 1993, and Johnny Depp had invited me to play at the Viper Room with his band P. Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers was on bass, Gibby was on vocals, Johnny was on guitar, I was playing pedal steel, and Benmont Tench from Tom Petty’s band was on keyboards. He was already mad at me because I puked on his keys during soundcheck; he thought I was scum. During the real set I got so fucking wasted drunk that I tackled Johnny while he was playing a solo. It was his big, shining moment, and I thought it would be funny. I got up from my pedal steel, bum-rushed him, and ruined his lead. About two minutes later somebody comes up and whispers in Johnny’s and Flea’s ears about something, and they go running out onto Sunset Boulevard. Gibby and I were standing there like, “What the fuck just happened?” We got offstage, and all these chickies came up to me and Gibby—and that was cool, because I had played with Johnny once before, and the girls were all over him afterward. So these chicks all looked like totally fake, plastic, hot Hollywood blondes, like Christina Applegate from Married with Children. I mean they all looked like her. So we shrugged and took these twenty Christina Applegates back to the dressing room, which was Johnny’s office. I said, “What’s going on?” And one of them said, “I think Johnny’s mad because you tackled him and he went out of tune.” I talked to her for a little while, and it turns out she was the real Christina Applegate.

  Ten minutes later Johnny came back, completely stressed out, and said to me, “Al, everybody—get out now! Everybody’s got to leave!”

  Christina said, “See—it’s you.” And I was thinking, “Just because I tackled him? This can’t be right.” So I went up to Johnny and said, “Look, dude, I don’t tell you how to act in your movies. So don’t tell me that a little frivolous fun on stage makes you cancel a concert and throw everyone out.” I told him, “That’s a bit excessive.” I’m poking him in the chest, saying, “I mean, what the fuck is your problem?” because Christina put this bug in my ear. I said, “If I fucking made you go out of tune, so what? You know how many times I’ve been out of tune?” And he was looking at me like I was crazy because he didn’t know that I didn’t know River Phoenix had overdosed at the club and died. I was just going by what this idiot chick told me. I said, “Unless you got another fucking beef with me, go get me a fucking jack and coke and don’t tell me how to be a musician.” I told Johnny that, and I don’t think he ever forgave me. He just looked at me like I was completely insane. So he ignored me and yelled, “Everybody get out now!” I left along with everyone else. And then I found out what had happened from Mikey, who was in the audience up front during the show being my pedal steel tech. He really just came along for the ride and realized the liquor store next door was going to close and wanted a pack of cigarettes. So he went out the Sunset Boulevard door and, literally, almost broke his ankle on this guy he thought was a homeless person in an Eddie Munster costume. Mikey got pissed and started kicking this guy, who turned out to be River Phoenix. By the time he got back from the store, police cars were there and Joaquin Phoenix was on the phone and trying to resuscitate him. I guess Mikey’s kicks didn’t do the trick.

  Ministry only played a handful of shows in 1994 because we were supposed to be diligently working on the follow-up to Psalm 69. In reality, when I wasn’t getting high I was looking for a new place to live. I had settled in the tiny town of Horseshoe Bay in 1993, and within ten days Drug Enforcement Agents were sniffing around my home and recording studio. They put so much pressure on me that I decided to get out of town before I got in some real trouble there. I moved back to Austin while I looked for a new home, and in 1995 I bought a five-acre compound in Marble Falls in Burnet County, Texas, a town about forty-five miles northwest of Austin and eighty-five miles north of San Antonio. It’s a retirement community that has a population of about six thousand people, which made us less conspicuous than the 450 people in Horseshoe Bay, but we still stuck out like a bunch of Hell’s Angels at a corporate Christmas party. Everyone there was thirty years older than I was; I had dreads and was a dope addict. So the police were called up every day to get me out of the neighborhood. But damn, I made that place look cool for a while.

  I met a local guy who made sculptures out of animal bones—Turner Van Blarcum. He’d collect a bunch of roadkill, strip the flesh, bleach the bones, and make this amazing stuff. He made my microphone stand, a chair, which was more like a throne, and a bunch of furniture by adhering these bones to the outside of the wood. I also had animal embryos in jars of formaldehyde, which for some reason really freaked out visitors. But the decorations and design work I did to the place was nothing compared to the way it was when I bought it. Basically, it was an elaborate brothel. My bedroom had this gold hardware in the sink in the shape of a cock and two testicles for the hot and cold water. There were thirteen bedrooms, and every ceiling had a mirror so you could watch yourself fucking. The place was originally a retreat for all these Texas oil barons who would take their secretaries and girlfriends up there. They had an airport runway behind this sex den so they could fly in and out. Twelve people owned the place and would take turns using it. Then some of their wives found out and told them, “You are selling this place today. Otherwise I am taking half your money and leaving you.” I got the place for supercheap, and I think I made it even more decadent. We had a tennis court that I never used for tennis. I turned the outside into a shooting range. I had four or five guns—a Glock 9 mm, a .22, and a shotgun—and would go out there and shoot targets on trees.

  I had a bunch of visitors, and that’s a bad idea when you’re a heavily armed drug addict. It’s especially stupid when you’re friends are people like Gibby Haynes, Phildo, and Jello Biafra. One time I almost pulled a William Burroughs and shot Jello. He was being all anal and trying to tidy the place, and he pissed me off, so I got really drunk and then got my .22 and started shooting at Jello’s feet, making him dance like in the John Wayne movies. He ran up to his room, locked the door, and put furniture up against the door. He stayed there for three days and wouldn’t come out until Curly, who was the estate manager of the place, convinced him that I had thrown all my guns in the pool. But being unarmed kind of sucked because there were these hostile deer on the premises. One was a seven-pointer buck, a huge guy that would hang out by my car all fucking day and wait for me. When I came out he would hiss and try to ram me. So if I wanted to take a trip into town to score crack, I would have to run around this giant beast.

  It was kind of my fault. There were smaller female deer on the property, and Mikey and I thought it would be fun to put dried corn on the tennis court to attract them. The court was huge and had twenty-foot chicken wire caging the entire thing. The deer would come in and eat the corn, and then they’d get confused and be unable to get out. I had this tennis ball machine I had inherited that fired tennis balls at over 120 miles per hour. So Mikey and I would play deer tennis, chasing them around with this machine until they figured out where the door was. That was an everyday activity. We didn’t hurt the deer; we just terrified them, which drove this deer pimp crazy. So when we wanted to go somewhere Mikey would distract the buck and I would run around to start the car. Then Mikey would hop in the car and we would speed off while this thing was chasing us. Sometimes he rammed the car.

  We had all sorts of critters o
ut there. There was a blind, rabid armadillo. It would charge at anything, banging into trees and the side of the house. The thing would run really fast and haphazard, but we didn’t want to get bitten, so we always had to dodge it or sweep it away with hockey sticks. There was a tarantula the size of a football living in the house as well as a skunk. And then we got infested by wolf crickets, which look like really hairy mini-flying tarantulas. When the landscaper cleared away all the brush that was by my bedroom, the crickets had nowhere to live, so they crawled under my Jacuzzi and into the master bedroom. There must have been a thousand of them there. It was serious Amityville Horror shit. Mikey was in my room when we saw them, and one jumped in his hair. He was freaking out, trying to get it out. I ran out of the room and locked him in because I was high as fuck and wanted to contain the infestation because I thought these things wanted to kill me. He was pounding on the door because he had a bunch of these crickets in his hair and crawling all over him. Finally he broke the door down with a chair and then tried to strangle me. We had to call an exterminator, and that took care of the crickets, but there were other beings in the house that weren’t at rest.

  The place was more haunted than my brownstone in Boston. Hookers had overdosed or died in the tub there. An oil baron murdered at least one girl. So the vibe was really creepy. Ghosts would move things around all the time. You’d be in the bathroom on the toilet and would see the sink knob turn. Talk about a freaky vibe.

  In addition to doing heroin, cocaine, and acid, we were taking loads of pills. But no sane doctors in Texas would prescribe the quantities we wanted, so we’d get them on the street, where they were expensive. Then, because I had an airstrip on my property, Phildo, Mikey, and I decided to charter a plane and fly about an hour to Laredo. We would land on the Texas side and call this clinic in Mexico. They would pick us up in a van and write scripts for whatever we wanted: Xanax, Rohypnol, Tuinals, Quaaludes, and pretty much any other downer you can imagine—no doctor’s appointments or anything. We’d figure out the maximum amount we could bring back for each legal drug, and then the van would take us back to our plane and fly us home to Marble Falls.