Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  I seriously can’t remember any songs from Dark Side of the Spoon even though we toured for it. I found out we were nominated for a Grammy for “Bad Blood,” but we didn’t win. I knew we wouldn’t so I didn’t go. Apparently Deftones got the award. But it’s kind of weird realizing that I went through an entire eighteen-month period and have no recollection of it. I had to go back and do research to discover that Rey Washam and Louis Svitek did electronic programming on the album. It seems I wasn’t even up to that. Ty Coon did some singing. For anyone who cares, here’s what I told my cowriter, Jon Wiederhorn, about Dark Side when he interviewed me about the album before it came out in June 1999:

  Dark Side of the Spoon seems to take the organic qualities of Filth Pig and combine them with some of Ministry’s older, faster rock techniques.

  There are definitely some classic Ministry riffs in there. The good thing is that both Paul and I don’t have radios, and we don’t listen to what’s going on in music today. We don’t know any of these new bands, and we haven’t for years. So it almost sounds at times like we ripped ourselves off, which is cool. The Stones have been doing that for, like, fifty years. You can experiment with all kinds of stuff, but eventually you go with what feels right and natural. There’s a song on there called “Bad Blood,” which has a real Rape and Honey flavor to it.

  Was Dark Side an easier record to make than Filth Pig, which was a bit of a nightmare?

  Actually, yes and no. Filth Pig was the hardest record I ever did because we did it at a studio in Texas that we were in the process of building. It took so long. Things would break down, and all of a sudden we found out what being studio owners was like. We spent a lot of time acting as studio owners as opposed to musicians or artists. A lot of time was spent waiting for parts to be put back in machines. That was a really difficult album. Technically, this was a lot easier to do.

  There are some refreshing, experimental moments on there. You’ve got saxophone and some unconventional guitar sounds.

  On every record we try to learn a new instrument. The last record was pedal steel guitar, and that brought in a lot of organic sounds. With this record we went with slide guitar samples and Paul’s brother Roland playing sax. I tried to take some of the shit that I listen to in my spare time, like really old jazz and country, and incorporate them with shit that we’re more comfortable doing—like shit with heavy beats. Some of it worked, and some of it didn’t. But it was a lot of fun. There’s some jazz stuff with contrapuntal beats. And I experimented a lot with guitar. Basically anything that’s out of tune and squeaky like a turkey getting fucked is my playing. But there’s a place for everything. And there’s a reason we record all kinds of shit; it’s not just to waste our time. Even if we scrap it, nine times out of ten we’ll eventually find something redeeming about it.

  Are you a perfectionist in the studio?

  It depends if I’m in a rush to get out of there and take a shit or something. About eight months ago this record was done for the most part, and I just said fuck it, and I scrapped it. We kept two of the songs and did a bunch of other songs. We’re fickle like that. It’s a ladies’ choice. But the thing is that there’s no such thing as perfection, is there? That’s basically what people strive for, but it’s the journey that matters. It’s not ever reaching perfection, because if you did. . . . First of all there’s no such thing because it’s all arbitrary and relative to individual taste, but say you did reach what you consider perfection. Where do you go from there? So it’s just the striving for it that matters. The point is that if I didn’t feel at the time that those songs were really heartfelt, then I set them aside until I can understand them. We’ve got a bunch of shit set aside from this record, so who knows? The next record we might have a demented, ethereal jazz record from some of the outtakes from this that we didn’t understand.

  Did any of these songs come from old sessions?

  “Bad Blood,” which has a slide guitar and is really noisy with a heavy arena beat—that’s something we’ve been trying to put on a record since Rape and Honey. Every record we’d get some sort of permutation of that guitar riff, and it never really quite made sense until this record. We’ve got different versions dating back to 1985.

  There’s a spontaneous vibe to the record. Did you jam together more than usual?

  Yeah, definitely. It was a different way of doing things, which is a whole bunch of fun. The only other Ministry record that we jammed on at all was Psalm 69. But it’s fun to play with Rey, that’s all there is to it. He creates this monster ZZ Top–like groove that makes you want to plug in and make noise.

  How did the vibe for the Dark Side of the Spoon sessions differ from the Filth Pig sessions?

  I had a lot more fun this time, that’s for sure. Filth Pig was drudgery. I felt like I had the weight of the world on my fucking shoulders. We had a management change; everything was going haywire. All the fucking planets aligned, and the sun turned into the Pringles can smiley guy. So to fight through that and get that record to mean something was rewarding. It was the first time I was ever fucking naked on a record. I’ve focused a lot on conquering fear lately. I did a spoken-word performance, which I was terrified to do, and we did the Bridge School Benefit at Neil Young’s behest, which worked out great. There were no distorted vocals, just acoustic guitars and bring your own hootenanny. We were singing on acoustics and hanging out with the hippies and tripping for the day. It was a lot of fun.

  The first single on Dark Side is “Step.” What’s that about?

  That’s a diatribe into all the fucking rock stars that figure, “We’ll just get a little ten-dollar-a-day addiction and get our little headlines and then go off to the Betty Ford Clinic. Then we’ll apologize to all the fans and take a page out in Billboard and Variety about how sorry we are and get some more headlines.” They may say they’re just doing the right thing, but what they’re doing is just really fucking trivializing something that’s really dangerous. Addiction is not a funny or lighthearted thing at all. I don’t mean to sound like some square. It’s just not something that’s to be trivialized. “Oh, well, if you get addicted just go to Betty Ford. Everything will be alright.” It’s just not that simple, man. There’s a whole lifestyle involved with addiction. And basically what they’re talking about is the symptom and not the cause. And everything will be okay if they apologize. I mean, if you’re an addict and you want to go in there and help yourself, that’s fine, but it’s not about apologizing to your fans. Like, they’re waiting with bated breath, and they won’t eat dinner unless some fucking rock star singer goes in and gets help. Who fucking cares? Keep it to yourself.

  Is a lot of this record about coping with an addictive personality or addiction?

  That’s why it’s called Dark Side of the Spoon. As much as I love Pink Floyd, it’s all about heroin addiction, man. It’s a difficult thing. I can speak from firsthand experience. Without sitting here spilling my guts, yeah, I’ve had problems throughout the years. But I’ve always said I’d much prefer to be a drug user than a used drugger. If I’m able to enlighten myself with something and get somewhere I want to be or achieve some open mindedness, then I’m achieving something. But if you just keep doing it and doing it, you become the used drugger.

  You’ve taken some different approaches to vocals. At times “Breaking the Chain” almost sounds like Jim Morrison. . . . Don’t end the interview

  now, please.

  No, no, that’s fine. That’s actually a compliment. The reason I could do that was because I did Filth Pig, in which I tried to sing in ways I never tried before. That gave me the confidence to do that. And that’s Ty Coon, my girlfriend, singing backup on there. She’s a musician as well. She’s in a band called Hot Heels.

  How did you two meet?

  It’s funny how we met. We’d met a while ago, but I was in the studio and she called me. Here, let me put you on with her.

  Ty Coon
: I called him to let him know that I was listening to Howard Stern, and they were interviewing Rob Zombie, who they had a little friendly spat with. Somebody called in and just railed against him and said, “Hey, get your own look. You’ve ripped off Al Jourgensen for years. He’s the real thing.” I called Al to make sure that it wasn’t him calling in and that sparked a more intimate friendship. He’d listened to our band, and I really wanted to get going on some music. I went down to the studio, and one thing led to another.

  Have Ministry always embraced chaos as a form of order?

  More so anarchy than chaos. Chaos has a bad press agent. It’s been given a dirty connotation. It didn’t used to be that way. Chaos was not a dirty word at the start. But they play on fears, the people that transcribe what history is. The lowest common denominator is fear, and they play on that. Like [Karl] Marx said, keep the people at their windows, which just means focus everyone on a common enemy and they will listen to you because even if you’re bad, you’re not as bad as the perceived enemy that you can whip up. And then coalesce everyone into a common frenzy.

  I’m surprised I was able to make as much sense as I did in that interview because there’s no question I did a speedball just before talking to Jon and probably right after as well. . . . Did I mention I hate doing interviews? All I have left from the Dark Side era are slivers of memory, like surreal bits from a dream. The only vivid memories are the ones from when I would do something that threw my world out of whack—like stepping on a syringe needle and having my toe amputated—or the ones in which I made a complete spectacle out of myself. The regular stuff, like playing the Lisbon Coliseum or the Roskilde Festival in Denmark . . . sorry, can’t process a thing. Some of the memory shards are about visiting my good friend Danny Wirtz at the Blackhawks private lounge.

  The Wirtzes knew I was a crackhead, but they liked me, so they turned a blind eye and cut me a lot of slack. I was back there drinking and talking hockey with Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and John Candy. A lot of the former players were back there as well. I hung out with Bobby Hull, the Golden Jet, one of the greatest offensive players of all time. I once said to him, “I saw you when I was nine years old at an autograph signing at a car dealer.” He remembered the event, which was really cool. So I added, “You could have been my stepdad if you had hit on my mom instead of that defenseman, Korab! I coulda had a really cool stepdad, but you fucked up!” He was loving this shit, and he actually remembered that signing forty-something years ago.

  Another night I was in there with Ty, and although I didn’t know it at the time, she went to the ladies’ room and stuffed something down the toilet—I don’t know if it was a shoe or a tampon—but it backed up the plumbing of the entire Blackhawks lounge. That was the same day I’d ripped my pants and didn’t have any underwear on, so my cock was hanging out. It was absurd. The next game I went to they’d instituted a dress policy for the lounge.

  But the worst episode at the Blackhawks lounge happened the day I set the owner’s dog on fire. I’m surprised the family forgave me for that one, but they have a soft spot for me, I guess. Anyway I didn’t light up Dollar Bill Wirtz’s dog on purpose—I love dogs. He had this fucking Shih Tzu mop-broom handle fucking thing. It was in the grandpa’s office before he died, and Danny thought it was important that I go in and meet his grandfather, the head guy. He had his little office outside of the private bar. He was there with his wife, who had this fucking trophy dog on her lap. The dog saw me and jumped off. The lady didn’t move, and the dog ran up and aggressively tried to bite my ankles. This was back in the day when you could smoke in a sports arena.

  I had a cigarette between my fingers, and the cherry fell off and caught the dog’s fur. No one noticed at first. Danny was nervous about introducing me to his grandmother and grandfather, who owned the Hawks. I’m very humble, trying to be nice, but we’re all smelling something burning. Everyone in the room is like, “What the hell is that?” Then we started hearing the dog yipping. The cherry off my cigarette! Apparently it burned through the fur and was now boring a hole into the billionaire’s dog. This dog was yipping away; the owner of the Hawks barely took notice—“Yeah, yeah, nice to meet you”—and went back to his paperwork. The grandmother never moved, and the dog was on fire. Danny said, “Look at the time—guess we have to go, Al.” That dog was in serious pain. The hot ash had burned a hole in him. Danny went back to fix matters later. He got me out of the room first, then came back to rescue the dog.

  As strange as that was, my involvement with the Steven Spielberg movie A.I. has got to be the most surreal mainstream Ministry moment. It all started when one of my favorite movie directors, Stanley Kubrick, called me up. He said, “Hello, this is Stanley Kubrick,” and I thought it was a prank call. I said, “Yeah, right” and hung up. Turns out he was a fan. So this weird American guy living in the English countryside, whose films I love, decides on a whim that my band has got to be in his movie. After I confirmed that it was really Kubrick I said, “Fuck yeah, I’ll do a Stanley Kubrick film. Are you kidding me? Who would turn that down?” A couple weeks later he died, and Steven Spielberg picked it up. He looked at Kubrick’s notes and saw that we were supposed to be involved, so his producer, Kathleen Kennedy, called me and said, “Well, are you still going to do this?” I said, “Yeah sure, sounds cool.”

  Then we got to the studio in Hollywood, and everything was all twisted around. The script was totally rewritten, and this cuddly teddy bear was inserted in the plot. The original story was really seedy and included numerous sex scenes. Spielberg decided to cut all that out and make it more family friendly by putting in this fucking bear. And he hired the best animatronics expert in the business, Stan Winston, who refers himself in the third person. It’s weird, because John Williams, who does all of Spielberg’s soundtracks, talks in the third person as well. It’s kind of creepy being around a bunch of people who do that. Williams and I didn’t hit it off. Winston and I certainly didn’t hit it off. The bear and I definitely didn’t hit it off. But by the end Spielberg and I hit it off pretty well—by the end. He’s actually a good guy, but I think he’s lived in a bubble too long. His idea of rock is Madonna and U2, so he didn’t know what to make of us at first. He was kind of freaked out and reticent to meet us. We were on set for three days and hadn’t been in a single shot yet. We were just on call.

  Finally his handlers made us all line up, like we’re meeting the fucking Queen of England, and we were told not to talk to Steven, not to look him in the eye—just to look down and shake his hand when he approached. He got to me and I said, “Fuck you, man. We’re leaving this fucking movie. You’re on your own. I thought this was a porno movie.” He let go of my hand and looked at me with a baffled expression. And I said, “‘A.I.’ Anal Intruder.’ That’s what they told me. I’m walking. Right now.” I was in full costume; I’d been on set for three days. He left in disgust. His handler was scribbling notes and said, “I’ll take care of this, Mr. Spielberg!” I chased him down and said, “I was just kidding about the porno thing man. I’m thrilled to be a part of this.”

  At first he didn’t seem to know what to make of what I had said. He lifted his head slowly, looked me in the eye, and then smiled. So everything was good with me and Steven. Toward the end of my three-week stay there, he started asking my advice about stuff, figuring I was in touch with youth culture or something. He’d show me a rough of a scene he just shot and ask me what I thought, so we became friends. On top of that he came up to me every day and gave me a new “A.I.” acronym. But they were all lame. “Animal Indecency” was one of them. I just said, “No! ‘Anal Intruder!’’ He was a good guy.

  He put us up on the haunted cruise ship, the Queen Mary, which was parked in the Long Beach Harbor, right next to the set. So after this initial “‘Anal Intruder’ episode,” Kathleen Kennedy decided to try to gain our favor by taking us for a private cruise on this ship we were staying on. Ty and I were on ecstasy when they showed
us where people had died in the swimming pool. We were tripping balls, going through all these haunted corridors. Let’s just say it got really weird after that. Ecstasy, rich people, and haunted ships just all seem to go together, and I’ll leave it at that. It was the tail end of a decade of excesses. “A.I.” was the punctuation of the sentence.

  I may have made nice with Steven Spielberg, but I wanted to destroy Winston and that fucking bear. The bear broke down so much that we had to spend an extra week on the set. At least we got paid for it. They’d be shooting a scene, and we’d hear over the loudspeaker system, “The bear is down! The bear is down!” We just went to the commissary and drank. “The bear is up! The bear is up!” Okay, put down our beers and go back up there. We were in full costume and makeup the whole time. “The bear is down!” Everything was about the bear, It was like the tail wagging the dog. Then I heard Stan Winston—he was obviously frustrated—say, “This isn’t right. That’s not the kind of bear Stan Winston would make.” All this third-person talk. Weird.

  A.I. came out in 2001, the same year I almost died from a recluse spider bite. After the movie shoot I went back to Austin where I had a small apartment. It was like going from a glamorous celebrity palace to a college crash pad. Or a crack pad, as it were. But I couldn’t even hold onto that because my band and management were only giving me enough money to barely keep a buzz. They didn’t seem to realize that if I only had a “buzz,” I’d be ornery, frantic, and sicker than a chemo patient. Oh, and I had to live somewhere. Theoretically, I could have kept the apartment and kicked the drugs, but I was a slave to cocaine and heroin. Besides, no one was going to force my hand into doing anything against my will. That’s why interventions don’t work. You’re putting someone in a position in which you’re taking everything away from them unless they stop doing the only thing that makes their life bearable. That’s cruel, inhuman, and fucked up. Any addict will tell you that the only way to get clean is to do it on your own volition. Otherwise it’s like trying to train a cat to bark—it’s not gonna happen. So instead of giving up drugs, I gave up the apartment and started living on my crack dealer’s couch. I sold all my guitars, my cars—everything. I lost my family. Ty was gone. My daughter and wife were living with another guy. All I had was my pickup truck and a backpack full of clothes. And that’s when a spider—a real one this time, not one from an acid hallucination—decided to take me to another level of misery.