Do you ever feel the urge to go back to your old ways?
mc I don’t have any urges for any of that shit. When I see people do coke, I turn it down. I’m completely disgusted and I’m scared to death of it. I think if I did that shit I’d have a heart attack. It’s a weird thing. I don’t drink that much anymore. I’ll still have a few drinks here and there and tie one on every once in a while, but you’re talking once a month, and I can actually sit and have a glass of wine and call it a day, where in the old days that was unheard of: I’d wake up drinking Jack Daniel’s, hit the tequila by noon, and end it with vodka, for a long number of years. I’m in a good position right now. I’m really happy: I have the best family in the world, the best wife, the best fans, best friends. I could not be more grateful and happy right now. Things are really good.
You didn’t play on The Last Sucker. Did you guys have another
falling out?
mc No, I left that time on good terms. We weren’t fighting at all. We just weren’t working enough, and I have a family and I have to work. I got a job for Gibson guitars because I wanted to learn about guitar making, plus I was getting ready to have a kid and I needed insurance; it was just a good move. I do clinics for Gibson all over the world now, which is great because I get paid for playing guitar, which is what I love to do.
It’s ironic that as great a frontman as Al is, he insists he hates being onstage and doesn’t like to tour.
mc That’s where the real serious drinking comes into play. It takes that to get him through it. I’m the opposite. I love the stage. We disagree on that all the time. I’ll tour in a van, I don’t care. I want to die on the stage. I love the studio, I love it to death, but man, I love being on the stage, playing loud and being an idiot.
When you moved back to El Paso and started working with Al again
on Buck Satan and Relapse, were you concerned about his health?
mc Totally. He was clean for a little while after he suffered the ulcers, but he and I are a lot alike in this situation; we’re just not meant to be completely clean. I can’t do it, man; I’m miserable. There’s nothing wrong with having a few drinks or taking a joint every once in a while. But when you have ulcers and you’re drinking heavily that’s something else. I remember the weekend when I walked in and he was drinking, and I said, “Oh fuck, man. Dude, what are you doing? You can’t do that.” He said, “I’m just going to take it lightly,” and I’m looking at him like, “Man, listen, I love you like a brother. I don’t want to see you die. But look, I’m not going to sit here and lecture you, either, man, because you’re a grown man. I’m just going to say this one time: Please be careful, and if you need my help, I’m here.” He got really bad after that, and of course, stopped again for a while, and he’s that kind of person; he can do that, he can stop. But he got really bad, when we did Buck Satan, to the point at which I was losing sleep worrying about him. How we even got the Buck Satan record done is amazing. But I have to tell you, that was the funnest time I ever had with him in the studio. We were not only creating great stuff; we were laughing and making each other laugh the whole time. To me that’s the key to longevity with a band.
He says that after this next Ministry record, From Beer to Eternity, he wants to do a blues album with you and another Buck Satan record. He figures that will all take about five years, after which he feels he will have fulfilled his role on this planet and he’ll be ready to leave the planet. He just wants that five years.
mc He’s told me that so many times, I just say, “Okay, alright.” I ain’t gonna let that happen as long as I’m alive. I know we’re going to keep making some great music, and things are really, really good right now. I see him getting better. And we’ll keep making music together for years to come.
them an album when I was so sick that I could barely stand up.
chapter 15
Houses of the Molé
A Bush in the Hand . . .
After I got clean, Angie and I moved to Los Angeles for about a year. I still had two years of alimony left to pay my first wife and no income stream. We were living in a house in Venice Beach, and everything is crazy expensive there. Danny Wirtz bailed me out again and lent us some money, which saved our ass; of course, I paid him back as soon as I had the cash. But that didn’t happen right away because I was locked in with Sanctuary for one more record, and they weren’t providing artist support or giving us much of a recording budget. The truth is that I think they lost faith in Ministry after Animositisomina, and I can’t really blame them. But at the same time, it’s partially their fault if that record didn’t live up to their expectations. They were pressuring me to get Before we started working on our last record for Sanctuary Angie convinced me to see a doctor in LA who could rebuild my jaw and screw new teeth in. It’s was a slow, barbaric process in which they drilled through the bone of my jaw over and over. Right along the cheekbone line there are just screws, one after another. And then they sized my mouth and created these teeth that they screwed in so tightly that it felt like my jaw was going to snap off. I’d leave these appointments dizzy and delirious. My keyboard player, Darrell James, picked me up from the dentist once after a six-hour procedure that was supposed to take four. He was waiting in the parking lot, and finally I came out with the help of some aides because I was so fucked up on laughing gas and Demerol and whatever else they pumped into me. There was blood pouring out of my mouth, all the way down the front of my shirt—it was just coated in blood—and my nose was swollen. I looked like I had gone nine rounds with Lennox Lewis. Darrell took one look at me and started throwing up.
I would almost definitely be dead if I hadn’t gone in to have my teeth fixed. During one of the procedures the dentist found a pea-sized tumor in my nasal cavity, and when they drilled around the back of my jaw they found some nasty cancerous growth in there too. I lucked out that they caught it early and were able to remove it; it hadn’t metastasized yet. That’s what my grandmother died of—a tumor in the exact same spot that grew out of control. But fuck, those dental treatments were painful, and they went on for six years. That’s how long it took to rebuild my face. I think that’s longer than it took scientists to build the Six Million Dollar Man, and it was almost as expensive.
Between the dental treatments and the cost of living in Los Angeles, Angie and I were going broke. Then I got a call from my first manager, Peter Katsis, who went on to be a big shot at the Firm. Peter was working with Limp Bizkit, and Fred Durst wanted to do some shit that sounded like Ministry. Peter said, “Can you do a mix for Fred?” For him, it was all about the vocals. He wanted to scream like me. I told Peter, “Sure, I can help Fred out. But I want $10,000 in unmarked $20 bills.” He agreed.
I got all my Eventide effects and all the patches I use to distort my voice and took it all to the studio in Hollywood where Fred was working. His people brought in a briefcase of cash, and Angie counted while I waited in the lobby. Finally Angie gave me the “all-clear” sign. The money was all there. By that time I had chugged three bottles of wine and was drunker than fuck because I didn’t want to do this thing in the first place. But when you need money, it actually does talk. Fred was being ridiculous, an egomaniac, acting like I was his assistant. He said, “I want the vocals to sound like ‘Thieves.’” So I put on the “Thieves” patch. It’s an actual button that says “Thieves”—that’s what I use live. Fred went into the booth, they cued the music, he started to scream, and he sounded like shit. He knew it too. So he came back to me and said, “Yo, man, I said I wanted to sound like ‘Thieves.’ This sounds like a static-filled radio.” I told him, “Look man, that’s the patch I use. You can see it says ‘Thieves.’ Maybe you need a different approach.”
I said, “Why don’t you get the right vibe by putting on my cowboy hat.” He did that. It still sounded terrible. I was trying my hardest not to burst out laughing at this idiot. I said, “Let’s take it another step. Put on
the hat, get naked, get crazy, and maybe you’ll be able to channel your inner Al Jourgensen.”
He did. His tiny little pecker was poking out and he was screaming like an idiot. I didn’t care. I was already paid, so I was cool. I could tell that he was getting really frustrated. Finally, he got all up in my grill and said, “It’s your patches. They’re not right.” And I said, “Look, dude. What does it say right there? That is the song you want and that is what I use, so fuck you.” Then he got all freaked out and said he had to go. He said, “I have a date with someone very special tonight.” That was back when he was in all the tabloids for hooking up with Britney Spears. So he wasted his $10,000 and went to be with Britney—or so he said. He was texting a bunch while he was there, so maybe it was true. But after he left I was stuck there with this engineer named Elvis Baskette. I said, “Well, what do we do now? Do I go home?” And he said, “Nah, let’s lay down some guitar tracks.” I pulled out my slide and did the most demonic shit—completely discordant, totally out of character with Limp Bizkit’s music—and Elvis and I put it on every track, laughing our heads off. They never used a note.
Without a steady income, we spent that $10,000 pretty quickly. Angie and I decided we couldn’t stay in Venice Beach, as much as we wanted to. So we saved money by moving out to Studio Tornillo, which is where I had such a hellish time recording Animositiomina—and now we were living there. Remember back-assward? There was an extra house on the Sonic Ranch property a half-mile from the main compound that wasn’t being used. We fixed up the place and lived there for almost two years for $500 a month. We were so isolated that it started feeling like The Shining: “All work, no play makes Al a dull boy!” Mikey was living there with us too, and we had our dogs with us. We’d sit around and get drunk all the time and throw our bottles as far as we could into the desert street to hear them smash. We’d have these contests: the one whose bottle broke last lost and had to drink.
Tornillo’s a weird place. If you stare up at the sky for a full evening, I guarantee you there will be a display of lights in the sky that you can’t explain. The aliens love flying over there and checking us out. That whole area from New Mexico to El Paso is swarming with these guys. I don’t know if I believe in David Icke’s conspiracy theories about aliens running the government because, first of all, if there were higher life forms in politics, they’d be doing a far better job than the clowns in office. But I know aliens exist. I’ve had a few run-ins with them, and Angie can vouch for me.
When we were in Sonic Ranch one of the gray fuckers came into our bedroom. He crept in and started running around in circles. He woke me up, and I started screaming at him. He was wearing this shiny uniform and had a big, bulbous head. He was agile as a monkey. He must have leapt out a window, because the next thing we knew he was on the roof. I heard his feet scampering and then he took off. The really strange thing is that Angie was pregnant at the time with my child. She was in her first trimester. And after that meeting with Gray, there was no more pregnancy. She didn’t miscarry—it was just gone. I don’t know if they somehow stole the fetus or what, but she never woke up even as I was screaming at this thing.
Having a baby at the time would have been extremely difficult for both of us. She was busy rebuilding the Ministry brand and handling all the business matters. And I was drinking so much that I could never have taken care of an infant. Fuck, I was practically a child myself, and having a bunch of fucked up musicians around all the time certainly wasn’t conducive to quality parenting. Besides, Angie is kind of a mom by default, mothering and babysitting all these fucked up musicians with childhood issues. She’s really nurturing and loves doing that. Plus, she has dogs, cats, birds, and we have a poisonous lionfish and a giant blowfish in this big tank. But I know she sometimes regrets that she lost that baby and never got the chance to be a mom.
As I said, she still had Ministry, Revolting Cocks, and whoever else wandered into our compound to take care of, and we were a handful. We’d get bored in our guest house in Tornillo and go out to the main compound to cause trouble there. Eventually the owner kicked us out because he said we were scaring the shit out of his clients. He called us a “pack of wolves,” which I thought was pretty flattering. We rented a place on the west side, which was still cheap, and we still worked on Houses of the Molé at Sonic Ranch. It was the first record we did without Barker since The Land of Rape and Honey. That was a little weird. He had become such a parasitic part of my existence that not having him there was unsettling. Mikey and I looked at each other in the beginning and said, “Okay, what do we do now?” Because besides playing bass and doing some programming—both of which he was mediocre at—Barker also handled the desk work and the scheduling. So suddenly I had to pull all the strings and I was like a fish out of water at that. After seventeen years working with someone, even though I didn’t like him, we had developed a system, and it was really hard to suddenly go in and do an album on my own. It was almost like a solo record in that respect, except it was Ministry. I drank a hell of a lot and hoped that liquid courage would help me figure shit out. Angie helped us focus the songs, and we all threw in and made it work. And thank God I had Mikey there. He bashed out riff and riff. We added some crazy noises, hammering electronic beats, and quasi-political samples, and eventually it took shape. In the end it came out great. Like The Land of Rape and Honey, it was challenging and stressful to create but satisfying in the end.
People consider it a comeback record for Ministry, which is amazing. I mean, that’s what it was, but we had no confidence in ourselves during those sessions. I’d pass out in the middle of the night drunk off my ass, wondering where the man behind the curtain went. The great wizard had left the building. As usual, we wrote the songs as we went along, but this time it was particularly challenging because I knew nothing was happening when I wasn’t working. Even if I erased most of what Barker ever recorded in Ministry, at least I knew there was a safety net whenever I got stuck or just plain passed out—by the time I came to, there was always more stuff written. Knowing that something was going on while I was nodded off on heroin was comforting. This was new territory. I was clean and on my own. Mikey was a great guitar player but didn’t know how to mix, so I knew all of that was on my shoulders. That was scary, but thank God Mikey was there with me because he supported me when I was down or insecure.
We got John Monte, who had played bass in Mind Funk and M.O.D. He’s a great musician and did a good job. The music was definitely faster and more pissed off, less sluggish than anything we had done since Psalm 69. Some people think we were trying to get back into the songwriting style Ministry played before we slowed down and got all depressed with Filth Pig. But that’s not the case; we were flying by the seat of our pants. This is just what came out.
Because I wasn’t doing drugs anymore and was only drinking, I didn’t want to make a twelve-step album or moan about the life of a junkie. I was no longer spending most of my day trying to hook up, so I had a lot of extra time to read the paper, watch the news, and pay attention to what was going on in the world. George W. Bush had already been in office since 2001, and I was pretty skeptical about his motivations. He entered the office without a clue. He had no agenda. His foreign policy was nonexistent, and it seemed like he couldn’t make a domestic decision without calling up his daddy, George Bush Sr., and his brother Jeb to ask their advice. He seemed to be way over his head.
I knew him as the governor of Texas, where he served from 1995 to 2000, while I was living there, and he had turned the place into a police state. They ticketed everyone for everything and raised a ton of money to blow on the state’s backward conservative politics. I didn’t like him and didn’t trust him. Then the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 hit, just eight months into Bush’s presidential term, and he suddenly seemed to have a focused agenda. He saw himself as John Wayne and wanted to ride the Injuns out of town. Only there were no Injuns; there were well-funded terrorist cells sp
read out throughout the Middle East. Instead of going to the core and risking our ability to get hassle-free oil from Saudi Arabia, he declared Afghanistan the new Evil Empire. Then, instead of going after Osama Bin Laden, who had orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, he went after Iraq because Saddam Hussein was an easier target. He lied, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and sent in the military. And he took a big hack at our civil liberties by initiating the Patriot Act. That’s just a nutshell summary of why I decided to exercise my civil liberties and take aim against this fucker.
Houses of the Molé was a spinoff from the Led Zepplin album Houses of the Holy, of course, just like Dark Side of the Spoon was a reference to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Even when I’m screaming along with thrash-metal guitars, classic rock is never far from my heart. It’s what I grew up on and that’s why I’ll never get tired of Cheap Trick, Lynyrd Skynyrd, or ZZ Top. Almost all the songs on Houses of the Molé started with the letter W to hammer in my point that I didn’t like the guy. Outside of Bush bashing, I took some personal shots of my own. By the time I was writing lyrics I felt pretty vindicated that Mikey and I could do a Ministry record on our own, so in the song “Walrus” I used a backward recording—Beatles-style—“Walrus” being a reference to their classic “I Am the Walrus.” But my Paul comment wasn’t about McCartney; it was about Barker: “Paul is no longer with us,” repeated again and again. Koo-koo-ka-choo, motherfucker!
As much as I liked his playing, I knew we couldn’t have bassist John Monte on tour with us for Houses of the Molé. One week before rehearsals Monte freaked out, left his needles out, and OD’d. Then his girlfriend got arrested for shoplifting at a mall. At the time, we had a guitar player who had worked with Primus’s Les Claypool, Brian Kehoe. When he saw what went down with Monte, he split—just got up and walked out. I don’t know what he expected—“Sailing the Seas of Cheese?” This is Ministry, for fuck’s sake.
Ministry Page 33