This shit went on for five weeks, all through Europe. As I’ve said before, I’m a pro and I never cancel a show if I can help it, so I was suffering through the day, hobbling on stage, and performing the concerts from muscle memory. I was so sick that I have little recollection of the shows. I know Wacken, Germany, was great even though I could barely walk without squirting on myself, and the show in Oslo, Norway, was pretty good. Basically, the guys I was touring with are so skilled and tight that they can keep a stadium rocking regardless of my condition. Not to downplay my other guitarist Sin Quirin, but Mikey Scaccia played so well on the Relapse tour and was in such a good mood. He was so happy to be onstage rocking around the world—it’s what he lived for—and he kept the show together when I had trouble standing up straight. I’ve toured without him before, but after doing those shows I can’t imagine how. He was the perfect guitarist for Ministry—so skilled and charismatic, and his solos were so spot on, poignant, and precise but never self-indulgent like almost every other metal guitarist. His sense of humor always kept me laughing even when I wanted to curl up into a ball and shit myself until all my organs were lying in a pool on the ground, which almost
happened.
Sixteen shows into the European tour we arrived in Paris. We pulled up to the venue Le Bataclan, and there was a café next door where there were lots of Ministry fans. They wanted to buy me drinks, and even though I wasn’t feeling well I had one glass of wine and two beers. Everyone thinks I must have been smashed when I played the show, but no, I only had three drinks. I posed for some photos, signed autographs, and hung out with the fans for a little bit. But I just wasn’t myself, so I went back to the bus and passed out, which I never do the day of a show. I was there in my bunk right up to when we had to get ready for the show. Angie woke me up a half-hour before the concert, and I was so dehydrated I was barely conscious. Angie guided me backstage to my dressing room like a zombie from The Walking Dead on a chain. I was pale gray, and my eyes were rolling back in my head. She tried everything to get me to snap out of my haze.
She said that Barker and Connelly were in the audience. She thought that would get a rise out of me and I’d say, “Fuck those assholes!” But no, I was gone. Spent. I went out there and gave the crowd my best for eight songs, but my body just gave out on “Waiting.” I was hanging onto my mic stand like a suit on a hanger, hoping to make it through. There was no ventilation in the place; it was about 140 degrees on stage, no air. I had no liquids in my system at all outside of this one glass of wine and two bottles of beer. Using the mic stand for support, I went over and told JB, my keyboard player, “I just don’t think I can do this anymore.”
The next thing I know, I’m waking up in some room at a Paris hospital. I don’t remember any of this, but apparently Angie pulled me off stage, got me into an ambulance, and rushed me to a hospital in Paris. The staff there said, “You’re just a drunk American rock star. Go out in the parking lot and sleep it off.” That was my diagnosis and treatment. Now I understand why Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix both died in Paris. They probably went to the same hospital. I only remember one thing about being there: I was sitting in this room on a metal table, freezing my ass off. There was no doctor in sight, so I went outside to have a cigarette. I asked, “Hey, avez-vous a cigarette? Fume? I want to go outside and smoke.” I asked a bunch of people that, and then I went outside, and there was Angie, my tour manager, and the bus driver, and they were looking at me like, “What are you doing out here?” I said, “I’m having a smoke.” That’s all I remember from the whole night. Angie went back in and pleaded for the doctors to treat me. She said, “You don’t understand—he’s not drunk. Something’s wrong.” I thought, “Wow, what a great health system. Kind of reminds me of America. I feel right at home.” But it’s still embarrassing to this day, that a cockroach like me could have one glass of wine and two beers and have a total system breakdown. My organs were shutting down—kidneys, liver—and Paris didn’t care enough to give a shit. Once again I could have died.
Angie took me back to the bus, and we went to Switzerland, where I checked into a real hospital. They immediately started treating me. They gave me a glucose bag and antibiotics; they treated the dysentery. They couldn’t figure out where or how I got it, but they were able to control it, so I was able to finish the tour after canceling just one show, the Rock En Stock Festival in Étaples-sur-Mer, France, on July 29. I didn’t even want to miss that one. As a rule, I don’t cancel shows, but I cut myself some slack just because I’m getting older.
I made it through the rest of the tour by taking Imodium and a cocktail of other medication, and the only things I could eat were rice, bananas, and apples. The last shows in Moscow and St. Petersburg were really good. I felt a lot better and knowing I’d be off the road in a few days and back at home with my dogs, my living room couch, and other creature comforts got me through the last few shows. I’m really a creature of habit, and whenever I’ve gone outside my comfort zone, that’s when I experience this Jekyll-Hyde transformation. In my Hyde state some illuminating and horrible things have happened. I’ve gone off the deep end in an effort to numb myself back into stability. Stranger still, I’ve made some of my greatest discoveries, had some of my most life-changing experiences, and acted like the nihilistic rock star I never wanted to be. I should have finished college, got my master’s, and taught English literature or political science. Instead, I pursued the left-hand path, danced with the devil, and lost a lot of friends. I guess we make our choices in life and endure the consequences.
When I got back into the safety of El Paso, Angie made me go to the doctor for a complete checkup. He said I still had a fucked-up knee—like he needed a PhD to figure that out—as well as assorted infected cuts and pancreatitis. I figured it was time to stop drinking again and start a vegan diet to accumulate some more health points. I pulled that off for a few weeks, and then I started getting restless and bored. I listened to a lot of dub reggae artists like King Tubby, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and the On-U Sound System that I’ve been into over the years. Since I had already done all kinds of metal and sample-driven stuff with Ministry, I thought it would be cool to make a reggae record Ministry-style. I also decided to finish a pop album I started working on in 2009. So in 2010 I released Alien Christmas, an EP of three songs in that vein, which no one even talked about, so I figured it was time to do more. I don’t need to make money on this stuff; I just wanted to create and progress as a producer and artist.
Don’t get me wrong—I don’t want to write commercial pop songs. But if people perceive them as commercial, I guess that’s fine. There’s lots of things I still like musically besides metal, country, and reggae. I love classic rock, and I’ve even still got a soft spot for some of the shit I listened to in the eighties, so jangly pop songs aren’t out of my reach. Neither is dub reggae. A few years ago I got a call from this guy who was handling music for the show NCIS. I had never seen the show, but he was making a big deal about Abby’s reunion. He told me, “She’s doing a big thing and it’s a big deal, and we want you to do a song for it.”
I asked him what kind of music he wanted for it, and he said, “We just want you to be Al. What would Al do? Just be Al. Give me Al.”
So I got off the phone and said, “Hey, Angie, this guy just got off the phone and offered me a bunch of money to do music for this TV show. Do you know about this show?” She’s like, “NCIS? That’s huge!” I said, “Well, I dunno, but I’ll go out to the studio and write them a song.”
Sin Quirin, the guitarist I’ve worked with a lot in Ministry since 2006, was visiting me from LA, so I rolled up a fatty and we did this heavy, dubby song in about four hours. I sent it to the guy at NCIS the next day, and he was shocked. I told him I was really excited about it and couldn’t wait for him to hear it.
He called me back about four hours later and said, “This is horrific! This is a nightmare! We can’t use this. I wanted you to be Al!”<
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I told him that’s what I was doing and this is what I was feeling. See, he didn’t want me to be myself; he wanted me to be a caricature of myself. I told him I was really proud of the song I sent him, and he said, “I don’t want that. I want something like ‘Stigmata.’ You know…Ministry.”
I asked him why he didn’t just license “Stigmata” and save us all some grief, and he said he wanted a “new Stigmata.”
I was pissed, so I decided to fuck with the guy. Sin and I went back in the studio the next day and I wrote “Stigmata Part 2” for NCIS. It was a joke. It was the same song with one slight chord variation. Instead of holding and bending the third chord in the main riff, I played it in two strums. I added the same kind of beat and electronic percussion behind it. And I sent him that to piss him off.
He called me back ten minutes after he got his MP3 and said, “Al, you’re a genius! I love you, man. This is exactly what we needed!”
I couldn’t believe it. There was literally one note that was different, and he couldn’t figure out I was just plagiarizing myself to annoy him. I could have done it in my sleep. I thought to myself, “You really want this? Fuck you.”
The guy was such an idiot. He was practically cumming in his pants. He said, “Oh, I wanted something like ‘Stigmata,’ and you sent me something cooler than ‘Stigmata!’”
No, it was the same thing as “Stigmata.” I regurgitated back what he said he wanted in protest and hated it. And he, of course, loved it. These are the types of dildos who run the entertainment industry. They’re going to try to corrupt anything with substance and replace it with something safe and familiar. They want to take over our minds and kill creativity. These people suck. They’re inherently evil and they demand mediocrity, not substance. I’ve played their game and know how it works now. I and other musicians with some clout have got to coordinate our shit to fuck these people over because they are going to lead to the demise of our society and culture. They’re like book burners or prohibitionists. They want to ease us into complacency and then brainwash us with shows like NCIS and songs like “Gangnam Style.” They are hideous and dangerous, and they control Hollywood, the TV networks, and the music business. And of course, greed motivates everything they do, because if everyone around them is stumbling around like a bunch of brain-dead creatures, they can keep feeding us this shit, which destroys our individuality and creativity while they shovel up the piles of cash that we throw at them, and that appears to be the price of mass-lobotomization.
In September I was feeling a lot better and didn’t have to eat mushy bananas every meal anymore, which was exciting on its own. Beer also became a regular part of my diet again. The doctors nixed my beloved red wine, which I had been downing since I started Relapse, because they decided the acid from the fermentation process was too corrosive to my stomach. But nothing could keep me away from beer—and as much of it as I wanted. Granted, having stomach problems and pounding beers probably isn’t the smartest thing in the world, but given that I’m no longer doing heroin, cocaine, crack, methadone, LSD, ecstasy, or speed, I figured that being able to limit myself to a single vice—beer—isn’t really an act of self-immolation. It’s not even a compromise; it’s more like a simple maintenance regimen. The trick with beer is to try to control your farts so you don’t chase everyone out of the room like an old dog as well as to maintain your balance after you’ve dug into your second six-pack. Maybe I should walk around with a cool-ass, skull-tipped, diamond-encrusted cane and whack people in the ankles like William Burroughs. It definitely would have kept me out of trouble on October 9, 2012, my fifty-fourth birthday.
I like good beers like Shiner Bock, which is a dark beer made in Texas, but I can also drink the cheap stuff. Last year I discovered Bud Light Platinum, which is half the calories, twice the alcohol. I was cruising through Platinums at my birthday party, and I got up too quickly from the couch and face planted myself into a glass table. Once again Angie called 911, and back I went to the emergency room. I didn’t want to go. I’d shattered my nose, and there were shards of glass in my face, but I was really pissed. I yelled, “It’s my birthday. Fuck you! It’s my party and I’ll bleed if I want to.” Meanwhile, blood was pouring out of my nostrils, all over my shirt and the floor. The ambulance came, and I was still pretty annoyed. So the paramedics strapped me at the neck, arms, shoulders, elbows, knees, and ankles like I was a serial killer. On the way there I tried to reason with the guy in there, saying, “It’s my fucking birthday. Will you please let me out?”
He said, “No. You need to go see a doctor.” So I craned my head as far as I could and started chewing my neck brace. By the time we got to the hospital I had actually chewed through it. Once I had my upper body stable, I tried chewing through the wrist straps, but we got to the hospital too quickly. They were amazed that I had come close to freeing myself, which even restrained psychos can’t seem to do. The EMTs in the ambulance were laughing. They named me Hannibal Lecter.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to go there anyway. Yeah, my nose was broken—again. Big deal. They wanted to stitch up my face, but I wouldn’t let them. I said, “Fuck you. I’ll stitch myself up when I get home.” I’m a really good stitcher; I’ve stitched myself up before after I’ve cut myself onstage, and I’ve stitched up other people. When it comes to open flesh wounds, I’m a pro. But this time I was too tired. So I put a big gauze bandage on my face and walked around moping for a couple days.
Finally, on December 1, 2012, Mikey, Sin Quirin, and drummer Aaron Rossi came to 13th Planet, and we buckled down and started working on the follow-up to Relapse. We had all worked with each other before, and the guys knew my co-producer/engineer Sammy D’Ambruoso and my second engineer Aaron Havill. Everyone knew the regimen of the studio. So we rolled up our sleeves and started working. No nerves, no whining. For once everyone was professional. There was a little bit of drinking involved, but other than that there was nothing dramatic about the whole experience. We’d get done with one and say, “Okay, that’s great. Let’s do another one.” And then do that and keep going. We were all getting along, and we were all on the same page. It went almost too smoothly.
In the nineteen days Mikey and Sin were out here we did seventeen or eighteen songs from scratch. That’s never happened before in my thirty years of doing this. I’ve never had so many songs so fast and had them come out so great. And it’s the first time we really jammed out the songs together in…I don’t know how long. In the past someone would come in with a riff or a beat or a bass line, and then we’d build a song up from that. This time we all got in a room and bashed these things out together as a team. Rossi killed it on the drums, and Mikey came up with one idea after another. Sin was no slouch either; when it came to guitars, the two of them seemed to be possessed. I didn’t have to come up with any major ideas until I did the vocals, lyrics, and mixing. I just sat back, drank beer, and played bass the whole time, smiling. There was no stress, which is unheard of for a Ministry album. It was fun—and making a Ministry album has never been fun. There’s been pain, frustration, fury, aggravation, and abuse. There have been laughs from time to time, but I would never describe the process as fun. I always cross my fingers and hope that the ends justify the means most of the time. Compared to all the shit I did when I was strung out, Relapse was great, but next to this it was grueling. From Beer to Eternity defied all the rules in every way.
We were playing from the heart and having a blast because there were no rules. We did it for ourselves and made the music we wanted to hear. We didn’t want to repeat what we had done with Relapse, and we didn’t want to sound like Psalm 69, so we just did our own thing. There was no self-censorship and no desire to create something for the masses. Our attitude was: Let the masses come to us, and if they don’t, fuck ’em. We did the best record we possibly could, and when we were done with the tracking Mikey and I both agreed it’s the best Ministry record, period. That’s all that real
ly mattered.
We played from the gut and didn’t overthink anything. It’s more melodic than Relapse, but at the same time it’s heavier than anything I’ve ever done. It’s really hard to pigeonhole, which is good, because I hate pigeons almost as much as I hate spiders. We all brought our own influences to the table and worked collectively. Mikey really wanted to get away from being “Mr. Thrash,” and this showed off his entire repertoire. Instead of just streams of 32nd and 64th notes, there are slower, bluesier parts, psychedelic passages, and some pure rock groove. One song is called “Mikey’s Middle Finger.” The first half is instrumental. He was really proud of that, and then it gets fast and heavy, but that’s definitely a part of who he was as well. Sin came in with some crushing, slower riffs that he said reminded him of some of Filth Pig, only they were way better. And I was listening to a lot of dub lately, so I added some stuff in the style of King Tubby or Linton Kwesi Johnson.
There’s one song, “Thanx, But No Thanx,” that puts King Tubby and On-U Sound System to shame. It’s like we had finally come full circle. Adrian Sherwood’s gonna be coming to me for tips! We have the fearless Sgt. Major from Rio Grande Blood reciting William Burroughs’s famous “Thanksgiving Prayer” on that song. And it doesn’t sound like a bunch of white boys trying to play reggae. It’s authentic because it’s what I’ve been listening to for the past couple years and what I was feeling. There’s another called, “Your Luck Is Gonna Change,” which is like Diamond Dogs–era David Bowie on steroids. And then there’s one that’s a real punch in the face called, well, “Punch in the Face.” By the time Mikey and Sin left on December 19, all that was left for me to do was record the vocals and add the production bells and whistles. When Mikey walked out of 13th Planet he was giddy. He said, “Yeah, wait till those people hear this! We fuckin’ nailed it!” And he’s right. It’s like a big spraying contest from four determined musicians who all unzipped their flies and pissed all over a bush. This is our bush, and we sprayed it to death.
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