Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  JAZ COLEMAN: The Ministry thing was based on this idea that it’s cool to be sick. They used shock for shock’s sake. You’d have Ministry videos with people jumping out of buildings and scenes from Faces of Death.

  AL JOURGENSEN: What people don’t get is the macabre shit is absolute parody. I make fun of people who have a fascination with the macabre. When we were on Lollapalooza, [Pearl Jam front man] Eddie Vedder said to me, “Look at the Pearl Jam dressing room.” I did and there were all these clean-looking boys and girls. Then he said, “Now look at your dressing room, Al.” There was a one-legged lesbian with a patch over her eye, and she’s asking me who I’m gonna vote for. All I can say is, “Are you a girl?” Then she hits me and walks out. We get some real fucking strange-os, but it’s all right; it just means we have to carry more weapons. That’s the only difference between us and Pearl Jam. We’re more heavily armed.

  One of Ministry’s biggest rivals was White Zombie, who, like Ministry, defied the rules of industrial metal long before it helped define them. When White Zombie launched in 1985, it was an offbeat, psychedelic noise-rock band. Over time, however, Zombie evolved into a carnivalesque arena metal band equally influenced by Sabbath, the Ramones, Alice Cooper, and B-movie horror films.

  SEAN YSEULT (ex–White Zombie): Me and Rob Zombie met at Parsons School of Design in New York City, and our first drummer went to Parsons. Rob and I were both oddballs, so I think we were drawn to each other. We started the band within a month of meeting, and basically lived together for seven years. We both had dyed black hair; he had a stenciled Misfits leather jacket and I had a bunch of animal bones tied onto a necklace.

  ROB ZOMBIE: At the time, there were two scenes going on. There was the New York shit like Foetus and Sonic Youth, and that was the scene we were stuck in. And then there was all the good hardcore that came out of DC, like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Scream. We took those two scenes we were influenced by and formed White Zombie.

  SEAN YSEULT: When our first [full-length] record Soul-Crusher came out in 1987, people called us art-noise/dirge/psycho rock. We liked Sabbath and Black Flag, but we were also into Butthole Surfers and the Birthday Party, and we were trying to mix a lot of those things together. People didn’t really get it. We would play this really heavy music in clubs in the East Village, and all these hipsters just stared at us and scratched their heads.

  ROB ZOMBIE: Even before we found our sound, I knew that going to a show had to be worth leaving your house for. In the eighties, there were so many years of bad shows. A band would make a million-dollar video that looked insane, and then you would go see them live and they didn’t do jack shit. My big thing was to give people something for their money.

  SEAN YSEULT: Back when we played at CBGB, we used to rig our own pyro. It was totally illegal and very Spinal Tap. Either we’d pack too much gunpowder and everyone in the front row would get singed, or we’d use too little and just get this non-impressive fizzle. We were buying all this stuff at these industrial stores on Canal Street—all these cop lights and rope lights. We’d put them all over the stage and wrap them around the amps—anything we could do to be a little more outrageous and obnoxious.

  ROB ZOMBIE: People would hear our music and see the show and go, “My God, you guys must do so much dope.” I was like, “Why, because we like flashing lights and our pants are dirty?” I’ve always had so much stuff in my head that I wanted to get done that doing drugs didn’t interest me. That whole lifestyle always seemed stupid and contrived. Heroin became popular in LA, and everyone was trying to pretend they were Iggy Pop or Lou Reed. It’s one thing if you’re the first guy to do it and you don’t know what’s going on. But if you’re just copying what you think is the rock star lifestyle that someone else invented, that’s just pathetic.

  SEAN YSEULT: We didn’t drink, and we certainly never did drugs. We were really straightlaced, which you might not expect from the music and the imagery we used.

  ROB ZOMBIE: People used to tell me my goals weren’t possible, and I always had that stubborn streak where I’d try to do the exact things that people told me I couldn’t do. Every review of White Zombie in the beginning said, “This is the worst band ever. They should quit. They suck.” That was so great. It motivated me to keep going.

  SEAN YSEULT: Around the time of [the 1989 album] Make Them Die Slowly, we started going in a more metal direction. And we started getting asked to play [Brooklyn metal club] L’Amour by bands like Cro-Mags and Biohazard. These were crossover punk bands that were going kind of metal, and we were really surprised they liked us. I thought they’d want to beat us up, but they gave us the thumbs up and their crowds knew that, so they liked us also. It didn’t seem like a place we would survive, between metal heads and skinheads, but everyone dug it, and it was a lot better than playing for East Village crowds.

  ROB ZOMBIE: Everything got larger than life because I would go, “Okay, I’m bored. What would make me not bored? I know! Let’s do a show where there are 60-foot flames and giant robots and go-go girls. Why can’t I do that? No one else is doing it. I guess I’ll have to do it.” The thing with the theatrics is it will never be a trend because it takes too much work for most people. I could have made ten times the money that I’ve made if I had no show because it costs a fucking fortune and it all comes out of your pocket. I do it because I love it. That’s the world inside my head that I have created on a stage. It just costs more than the world inside my head.

  In the late eighties, two more industrial acts surfaced that won over metal audiences: Birmingham, England’s sluggish, corrosive Godflesh and New York City’s faster, spite-laden Prong. While both were hugely inspired by Killing Joke, the former played crushing, repetitive riffs accompanied by a pummeling drum machine, while the latter went through a hardcore phase before perfecting a mid-paced, staccato thrash sound propelled by serrated riffs and sing-along choruses. While Prong arrived on the scene first, Godflesh was more deeply rooted in industrial music. In 1982, before Godflesh was even a thought, front man Justin Broadrick was tinkering with tape loops in his makeshift project Final, which resembled some of industrial music’s forefathers.

  TOMMY VICTOR: We started as a hardcore band [in 1986] with noise and metal influences. I liked Killing Joke, Black Flag, Big Black, Die Kreuzen. We just added that into a hardcore framework and then metalized ourselves after the fact. I was working [as a soundman] at the Sunday hardcore matinees at CBGB. I put together a show with Prong, Warzone, and White Zombie when we were trying to solidify a signing with Epic, and nobody [at the show] got along and there was a lot of fighting. . . . It seems like there was always a lot of violence at Prong shows.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK (Godflesh, ex–Napalm Death, ex–Head of David, Jesu): I was eighteen and living in a flat with Benny [G.C.] Green, the bass player for Fall of Because. As soon as I was kicked out of Head of David, I said to him, “I’m playing drums for Fall of Because anyway, and I’ve already got a bunch of songs I’ve written for Head of David. Why don’t we buy a drum machine? You play bass and I’ll sing and go back to guitar.” So Benny borrowed money from his mum to buy the machine, I programmed the drums I would have played for these riffs anyway, and that’s how we got the first set of Godflesh songs.

  RICHARD PATRICK (Filter, ex–Nine Inch Nails): The day I met Godflesh I was with Ministry and I was so drunk I ended up puking tequila everywhere. But Godflesh are the reason I knew I could use a drum machine in Filter and it would work. I heard their [1989] record Streetcleaner and I said, “This is what we should do!” It’s obviously programmed, but the beauty of it is you can do anything. We had seventeen tracks of cymbals being played in [Filter’s 1995 hit] “Hey Man, Nice Shot.”

  JUSTIN BROADRICK: When we started the band, we were doing magic mushrooms and Benny was reading a lot of Aldous Huxley. We had just seen the film Altered States, which we watched on acid and got totally obsessive about. Hence, the picture we took from it, which is the front cover of Streetcleaner. We took peyote als
o, which was almost physically transforming. We were obsessive about attaining really extreme hallucinogenic states at that time. Benny read that peyote was referred to as “God’s flesh.” We were like, “God’s flesh, what a wicked name for what we’re doing.”

  TOMMY VICTOR: There was a period of five years where I don’t even remember what was going on. The alcohol consumption was incredible, and we were a really angry bunch. When we went out with Pantera, these fun-loving, crazy, wild Texans, we felt so different from them because we were from the Lower East Side and we felt like nobody liked us and we were miserable all the time. It was a totally different vibe than the “Gimme high five!” metal thing that Pantera had. We felt isolated, and as we went along we hated everybody.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK: We became quite obsessive about psychedelic death trips and creating music that conveyed that death-trip angle ’cause the trips we shared watching movies like Apocalypse Now with our faces four inches from the screen were so heavy. We were just like, “Bring it on!” We really enjoyed how much larger than life these things appeared, and I think that became the influence for making music that felt larger than life.

  TOMMY VICTOR: In London, we stayed at the Hilton. It was right by a cricket field. [Ex-drummer] Ted [Parsons] destroyed the place. He was pulling lamps off walls, completely out of his mind. We had a little area of five rooms that we ruined, and it quickly spread from there. We threw garbage cans around the balcony and smashed the glass doors. By the end, we had destroyed a good half a floor of the hotel. We didn’t have cell phones at the time, so we had to disappear because we were afraid to be seen anywhere near the hotel while the cops were looking for us. I walked around London for two days because we had no place to stay. That was when I realized we had to change our destructive ways.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK: At first, people did not get Godflesh at all. We wanted to mix real industrial music—like Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse, SPK, and Test Department—with intensely tuned-down guitar and bass and create a dirgey, rock-based cacophony. The situation became more confusing after we signed with [extreme metal label] Earache Records. The label had just started to establish itself with Napalm Death and Carcass, and then they presented Godflesh to a death metal audience that was looking for further metal extremes. It was amazing how outraged a lot of people were by what we were doing.

  TOMMY VICTOR: Our crowds were as angry as we were. Every time we played, the mic kept getting smashed in my face [by the crowd], and over time my front two teeth started deteriorating. I’d be spitting blood and trying to sing and play. Eventually I had to get my teeth filed down to make them even.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK: We toured in late 1988 supporting Napalm Death, and jaws hit the ground when we started playing. People would dive onstage and yell, “You suck! Where’s the drummer?” The same audiences that were berating us at that point came to every Godflesh show two years later to beat the shit out of each other.

  Most industrial bands—with the exception of Killing Joke and White Zombie—partied pretty hard; some took raging to dangerous extremes. Cocaine, speed, and psychedelics were abundant, and for many, heroin was more than a recreational activity: it became a deadly maintenance drug.

  AL JOURGENSEN: When you make the kind of music we make, drugs can drag you into the music. I don’t think it’s the other way around. I used to get wasted to the point where I didn’t even know I was on this planet. I didn’t even know if my soul was in my body—and I came up with some of the best riffs. The drugs and the music went hand in hand because it let me levitate and get out of the mundane. When I was eighteen to twenty-one, I had long hair and I was into Skynyrd. So if I did a band, I’d be Skynyrd, but if I did drugs, I’d be something else. It was a good thing—at first.

  KEVIN OGILVIE: I definitely had a needle fixation. I’d inject cocaine to get hyped and then I’d do heroin to come back down. I suppose shooting up is the closest way a male will get to being a female. There’s erection, insertion, ejaculation, and orgasm. When you’re injecting, you can’t get much higher. Once a person gets addicted to cocaine, it changes the whole chemistry in your head. Wrong becomes right, and right becomes left. In a weird way, all my paranoia gave me fuel for a lot of writing and art.

  TRENT REZNOR [1994 interview]: I’m not out to promote drug use, but I think the right drugs used with the right amount of intelligence can be a very important tool in self-awareness and learning about your own mind. I don’t ever sit down and write lyrics when I’m high, and when I’ve tried, it’s nonsense. It seems like a great thing at the moment, then you realize later it’s gibberish. But I think there’s a real importance in the experience. The first time I hallucinated with mushrooms, I was changed for the better in the sense that I realized that all these things I’d been trained to believe in don’t make any sense. I found a connection between nature and my mind and everyone else’s mind, and everything being under one umbrella in some very obscure and nonliteral way.

  AL JOURGENSEN: At the start, the drugs bring out this incredible creativity. They let you free and let your mind wander to discover all these incredible things. That’s the open door. But then the door slams shut. The drugs take over and the creativity goes away. And pretty soon you’re thinking more about the drugs than the music. That door that was once open to you is locked and you don’t have the key anymore. The drugs take over and then you’re not “something else” anymore, you’re just this babbling idiot.

  TRENT REZNOR [2005 interview]: When The Downward Spiral tour ended I went straight into doing Antichrist [Superstar] with [Marilyn] Manson, and I realized I get fucked up a lot. Pretty much every day. But I was functioning. I didn’t realize at the time, but that was the beginning of a pretty intense struggle. I was drinking, but a few drinks in me, if someone suggested getting some cocaine it would seem like a fantastic idea. It still seemed like a great idea twenty-four hours later, picking through the grains of the carpet looking for more. After a while I realized I wasn’t in control. The price wasn’t just feeling bad the next day; I was starting to hate myself.

  KEVIN OGILVIE: When I was heavily into heroin, I went into convulsions several times and I did almost die. But even when I had a death wish, there was a very strong base desire to survive. I was once in an apartment building with a friend and I was shooting up in her bathroom. Suddenly, for no reason, I became sure that she was trying to poison me. I went out and lit a pair of my pants on fire and left them on a lamp in one of her rooms. I had the closet door rigged with a wire coming out from the lamp and wrapped around the door, so if anybody came through this door, I thought I could plug in the lamp and electrocute them. I was fucking whacked! I grabbed a pair of pliers and ran around each floor of the building snipping as many electrical wires as I could find. I must have snipped one too many, because the fire alarms and the sprinklers went off and they had to evacuate the whole building.

  AL JOURGENSEN: One time, [Skatenigs front man] Phildo [Owen] had a party and I OD’ed on heroin. He starts giving me mouth-to-mouth because I have no pulse. I’m ashen, gray-white. I’m not breathing. He’s beating on my chest. I had been out for five minutes and somehow he got me alive again. The first thing I did when I woke up is I punched him out for being a homo and trying to make out with me while I was passed out. Two years later he OD’ed and I had to do the same shit to him—only he didn’t wake up swinging.

  TRENT REZNOR: By the end, when I was high all the time, I couldn’t think, and I didn’t want to think. [My attitude was,] “If I can’t think, and I can’t write, well, I might as well just get fucked up, because what else am I gonna do?”

  AL JOURGENSEN: I was on and off drugs, and I got off them for the last time when I realized I was making music in the studio that wasn’t really challenging anymore. I couldn’t come up with a song to save my life. I was completely broke because I had spent all of my money on drugs. Then I woke up on some crack dealer’s couch pawning my last guitar for drugs. But in the long run, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’m not pro-dr
ug or anti-drug. I’m pro-human spirit. You do what you need to do to get by.

  KEVIN OGILVIE: In 1991, on the first day of the Pigface tour . . . [drummer] Martin Atkins and [guitarist] Mary Raven helped me go cold turkey. I would be sick and throwing up and I’d sleep all day and perform at night, then collapse in cold sweats after the shows. I finally got clean, but for the longest time I still had dreams about scoring and shooting up.