After Cube’s performance, we headed into the wrestling tent and talked to yet another man who defied stereotypes regarding Juggalos. He was a steelworker by day and a wrestler by night.
He was also an unrepentant Juggalo with the tattoos to prove it. He seemed more interested in Cadence than in me, but when she went to the bathroom he offered a surprisingly sophisticated critique of the Juggalo ethos. He began by saying that Insane Clown Posse is a metaphysical anomaly within the music industry because unlike the Grateful Dead, its central ethos isn’t about worshipping the source of the music; it’s bigger than that. It’s not just a way of thinking, it’s an ideology devoid of the specifics that, in his mind at least, get in the way of the purity of a simple idea like “Be good to others” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
“ICP is totally fake,” he said. “And they’re totally upfront with that. All these other rappers, they’re pretending they’re whatever their personas are supposed to be, but ICP, they come right out and tell you it’s all an act.” He’d been a Juggalo from day one and now he had a dream opportunity to wrestle for Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. Like Sexy Jesus, he was incongruously straightedge in a scene ruled by drugs and alcohol.
In front of the Seminar Tent that Friday night, we struck up a conversation with a beefy, handsome young man with a wrestler’s badge. He struck an oddly familiar figure, but it wasn’t until we started talking to him that we realized that the nice Jewish boy from Wicker Park had wrestled at the Gathering of the Juggalos the year before as Officer Colt Cabana, the arch nemesis of Weedman and all smokers everywhere. He was there that night not to wrestle but to perform stand-up comedy along with a talented comedian buddy named Marty DeRosa. Like so many of the people I’d encountered, he defied stereotypes about fans of Insane Clown Posse: He was smart, well educated, and hosted a podcast called Art of Wrestling. Yet he was so down with the clown, he joked during his routine, that he’d actually gone down on a clown.
Cabana was opening for the evening’s big headliner, Brian Posehn. Posehn was a writer and performer on Mr. Show before establishing himself as the thinking man’s pot comic. He’s a towering aggregation of nerd obsessions—comic books, video games, heavy metal, Mr. Show, comedy—in sentient form.
Then this very successful pot comic did something profoundly risky. He stopped smoking pot for the sake of his daughter, his own mental health, his dignity, and his self-esteem. Then he agreed to perform at the Gathering of the Juggalos. I can only imagine they pulled the proverbial money truck into his backyard, because heaven knows there are few places less conducive to maintaining hard-won sobriety than the Gathering of the Juggalos.
Like everyone else, Posehn had heard the worst about Juggalos: They were violent. They were stupid. They threw shit. Literally. They attacked and killed people. They were a gang. So he was prepared for the worst.
Seemingly alone among the performers I saw, Posehn found a way to engage with the audience without pandering to them. “People talk a lot of shit about you guys but I’ve had nothing but a good time,” he told the crowd with disarming sincerity. He actually seemed to mean it.
Of course, this was the Gathering. Temptation was everywhere. Eager-looking young men wearing bongs around their necks like necklaces skittered up to the stage to offer Posehn hits. He politely declined. His protests grew increasingly indignant until a young man waved a giant bag of psilocybin in Posehn’s general direction and Posehn finally erupted with indignation and said something I will remember until the day I die: “Dude. I am a grown-ass man. I’m not going to fucking do mushrooms with you.”
The role of “host” at the Gathering was largely ceremonial. Hosts weren’t called upon to do much more than keep the energy and volume level high, but even that seemed to be wearing on Charlie Sheen, a late addition to the Gathering of the Juggalos lineup and the event’s biggest wild card. Sheen’s appearance at the Gathering of the Juggalos possessed a strange element of finality. Sheen once occupied a privileged place within the center of American pop culture. He was Oliver Stone’s golden boy, a beautiful man kind enough to let a goodly percentage of the American male populace live vicariously through his coke-fueled sexual misadventures. Now he’d taken his crazy act as far as it could possibly go. The homecoming king was now prostrating himself before the weird kids who sniffed glue and listened to freak music. It was a bit of an odd fit.
“Are we still whoop-whoop winning?” Sheen asked no one in particular as he anxiously gasped for words and ideas between sets.
Charlie Sheen isn’t a stand-up comedian. He’s not a philosopher. Onstage at Cave-in-Rock, Sheen seemed lost. He seemed like a man in need of an identity. He hit the same buzzwords hard, but they didn’t have the same power or panache.
“Are we winning tonight? Are we whoop-whoop winning tonight? Can I get a whoop-whoop winning? Is the tiger blood flowing tonight? That’s what I’m talking about,” Sheen sputtered nervously as he stalked the stage. When cries of “Whoop! Whoop!” and “Winning!” garnered a modest response at best, Sheen shifted gears slightly and made the kind of winking drug reference your uncle might make in an attempt to seem cool. “Without any further ado, I would like to introduce the next band. I know you’re looking forward to these guys because their name is also a verb. It’s what all of you have been doing all day, right? Blaze-ing it up? Let’s give a big Juggalo welcome to Blaze!”
In Cave-in-Rock, Sheen’s craziness devolved into shtick. Whatever exhilarating authenticity or unpredictability he might once have possessed had alchemized into a tedious aggregation of catchphrases, buzzwords, and manufactured attitude. By the time it hit the Gathering, the ongoing freak show that was Charlie Sheen’s very public career implosion and mental breakdown had overstayed its welcome. The ICP–Charlie Sheen union was as much a marriage of convenience as the ill-fated Tila Tequila–ICP alliance. Y’all know how well those tend to turn out.
THE GOOD REVEREND BREAKS IT DOWN
Deadly Poisons eventually led us in the direction of an unusual figure within the Juggalo community named Reverend Loki, who was helping set up a makeshift performance area known as Area 17. He’d originally taken on the persona as a wrestling gimmick, but over time he’d come to embrace the role of spiritual adviser to the Juggalo nation. In the tent, the reverend discussed his first exposure to ICP.
“This is going to be a strange answer considering the type of music that the group plays,” he said, “but it was a middle school dance. If you take a listen to The Great Milenko, the second track, after the intro, it doesn’t have any cussing in it and it doesn’t really talk about violence. It just talks about this mystical carnival with these spirits and whatnot showing you the truth of what’s really going on with your life. That was crazy! After hearing that, I followed the CD from the DJ to whoever he borrowed it from. I asked if I could borrow it, and he never saw it again.”
It was the beginning of a great love affair. “I found something that fit. I’d always loved metal and I’d always loved rock and at that time Juggalos didn’t really know what it was all about. At that point, the word Juggalo was really just being invented at the time Milenko came out. The feeling the music gave you”—the reverend paused for a moment before continuing—“was magical.”
It was exhilarating being part of something bigger than himself, to be an eleven-year-old who hears a song that doesn’t just connect to a group or a singer but rather to a sprawling, sinister realm whose infinite mysteries were being unpacked slowly, one Joker’s Card at a time.
“It’s great to be part of something bigger than myself and be humble about it and enjoy it with as many people as possible around you. That, to me, is what family is all about: Who says you need to have blood to love?” the reverend asked rhetorically.
“Once you figure out what they’re talking about and once you form an opinion about what Insane Clown Posse’s music means, you really get drawn into it. There’s really no explaining how it draws you in. It just d
oes. It’s a good feeling, though,” he said.
“I feel like my challenge, in this book, is to try to explain the unexplainable, to put into words the feeling that music gives you that is impossible to put into words,” I told him. “I’m probably going to fail. No, scratch that. I’m almost assuredly going to fail, but hopefully I’ll do so honestly.”
“That’s the hard part. You look around here and you see people of all different ethnicities, of all different races. People from everywhere. You’ve seen the kids, the toddlers. What unites us is what ICP has taught us about loving each other. To me, what a lot of what ICP’s music is all about is getting rid of rapists and child molesters and racists. That’s the underlying message to their music. Stop this racism. We all bleed the same color. We all fit in because we’re not racists. We want to stop this and change society, but we get a bad reputation because of the type of music it is and the subject matter they talk about. The interviews the clowns have done in the past, on TV and on radio, they only listen to them on a very surface level. It’s all very superficial, where they’re not listening for any kind of message.”
When I brought up Bill O’Reilly and Martin Bashir, the reverend referenced ICP putting the unedited footage of the interview they did with Bashir online. “They’re sitting there with their own camera guy because they know that they’re going to chop it up and edit it any way they want. If you watch it, ICP makes them look like a total moron.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I asked the good reverend about the Juggalos being a gang.
“We don’t fly colors. All the hatchet is is a symbol for a record label. It’s like our cross. It just means that you’re down with the same shit that I am. I’ve been talking about this for a while, but I would like to sit down with the head of the FBI gang division and have a group of ninjas talk to them like I’m talking to you now to determine which category which should fit into. I wish they would actually talk to us instead of listening to interviews on the news and forming an opinion based on that. We’re not a gang. Yeah, some people try to take it to an extreme and like to think they’re a gang. It’s not like there’s any set leader or hierarchy. It’s just a band and fans. That’s what it boils down to.”
Cadence asked if there weren’t Juggalos who got off on the idea of Juggalos as a gang.
“Yes. There’s a lot of them. From city to city and town to town you’ll see kids who think they’re a badass gang because they rep the hatchet. It’s ridiculous, but I guess it just makes them feel a little bigger about themselves. I don’t know why they think it’s okay to take this and turn it into a gang.”
Cadence asked if he thought that maybe kids would rather have people be afraid of them than laugh at them.
A heavyset gentleman named James then sat down and asked if he could join the conversation. We acquiesced and James answered, “Of course. That’s human nature. Ten percent of the population ruins one hundred percent of the reputation. That goes for black people. White people. Juggalos. That’s worldwide. People can say that about anybody. It’s human nature to see something different and want to protect yourself. If a man has on camouflage and a gun, he’s a hunter. If he’s got a Hatchetman tattoo and a gun, then he’s a gang member. Perception is reality.”
James helped run the club with the good reverend. The two men enjoyed a Gathering-exclusive but very healthy friendship: They only saw each other four days a year, but that was enough. Though nearly a decade divided them in age, they shared a rooting interest in the soul of Juggalo nation.
“With the Juggalos, I don’t know if there’s God, but I do believe that there’s something out there, and that’s what we call the Carnival,” said the reverend.
James then continued the reverend’s thought: “In the beginning, when I first started out as a Juggalo—I’ll be thirty-six this month—there wasn’t all this merch in the nineties. There wasn’t the Gathering, with all this superawesome shit. But let’s be honest. It’s a business. I have very solid opinions about the business. I’m not disillusioned with it whatsoever. I take the approach that it is an entertainment business, these guys are fricking phenomenal at it. They created their own musical archetype, and it works. There aren’t a lot of people who can pull it off. Obviously, the Grateful Dead has pulled it off. There have been people before them. People want to relate them to Hitler or negative archetypes instead of Grateful Dead or Phish or Lollapalooza or all of that shit.”
The reverend added, “We’ve gone beyond [Insane Clown Posse]. We don’t need them anymore, so to say. We still listen to the music, but as far as being a Juggalo myself, I’ve grown beyond what they have to preach. They’re grooming other talents to be the next ICP.”
James then picked up the ball. “Boondox is a perfect example of the business aspect of ICP,” he said, “because at the beginning there were a lot of Southerners that were, ‘Fuck ICP. If I see a Juggalo, I’m a-kill him.’ Don’t get me wrong. It is fun, but it is a business. The fact that it began as a niche market to begin with, and now there are internal niches, is something that’s exceptionally fascinating to me.”
A young man then strolled by with what appeared to be homemade nunchucks.
“Are those homemade nunchucks?” I asked, as one does when one is at the Gathering.
“These are not homemade nunchucks. I have been practicing martial arts for about six years. I am a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do. I actually learned how to chuck at the Gathering here.” Apropos of nothing, he shifted gears and said, “I ate two purple stars. Somebody told me that was the best X at the Gathering, so I took it. I found a bottle of water, found those two purple stars. These nunchucks are ruining my night, man. I was charging through the mud, sliding like a fucking ninja, and they were holding me back.” The young man with the nunchucks then saw our press badges. “You motherfuckers in the press depressed my Gathering. I say it that way because this Chaos District was our homeland. It was nothing but a sea of tents and cars. These motherfucking ninjas, they work hard all year to come to the motherfucking Gathering.”
With a palpable edge in his voice, the young man with the nunchucks continued, “If you save your fucking earnings to come to the Gathering and don’t buy shit to hustle at the Gathering, if you save your money to go to the Gathering you should be able to have fu—”
“But there’s something to be said for having a hustle at the Gathering,” interjected James.
“Hustling is our nature,” added the reverend.
The young man with the nunchucks went on to say that he was a turkey farmer who worked on a Jenny-O turkey farm in Minnesota. “It’s minimum wage under horrible conditions. Dead bird carcasses every morning by the twenties and thirties. They weigh fifty pounds apiece because your domestic turkey is not little and they smell like ass and you walk through shit and you get paid nothing for it. I get benefits, though, and I got a girl at home. She couldn’t even come because she had to work.”
The man was describing a singularly shitty job, but he could just as easily have been discussing the existential plight of all Juggalos who have to endure a humiliating gauntlet of pain and humiliation for the fleeting moments afforded by the Gathering every year. A man like that needs a form of release that goes beyond a scotch after dinner or a cozy nighttime read before bed. A man like that also needs to believe there’s something more to the world than dead bird carcasses. He needs hope. He needs escape. He needs something to look forward to. Insane Clown Posse, the community of Juggalos, and the Gathering gave him all of those things.
James then discussed an act of altruism he’d recently performed. “We’re all sitting over here, partying, on the microphone, I’m interviewing people, being kind of silly, playing with people. I was good at making people come over. All I had to say was, ‘What does your sign say?’ Pretty easy. So this twenty-year-old kid had a sign that said, I’M A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN AT MY FIRST GATHERING. So I said, ‘Somebody needs to hook this guy up. Is there anyone who will
fuck this dude right here, right now?’ A chick stood up and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ They went down into that embankment. It was dry. When you hear about somebody losing their virginity, it’s usually a sweet thing. Man, it was like a fucking carjacking over there. She fucking took that thing. In front of a crowd and people on the mic heckling him! And I’m there fucking watching, but my friends were fucking videotaping it. I’m not saying it’s going to end up on the Internet, but it’s totally going to end up on the Internet. She took his virginity like she was taking a car. She was on top, the part that I did see. My thing is I can get everybody laid but me. This girl was talking to me while I was on the microphone.”
A gentleman colloquially named Dick Tricks then wandered over to our club. He sported a shockingly bright red goatee and matching fright wig, but otherwise he was pretty much wandering around naked, performing elaborate tricks of strength involving his penis and nut sack. Without much in the way of prompting, he volunteered to stick a rolled-up bill deep inside his penis. It was a stomach-churning endeavor; very few people wanted their money back, myself included.
The gentleman was as mild-mannered as anyone who volunteers to hang a gallon of water off his genitalia could possibly be. He spoke in a soft, polite Kentucky drawl that belied the kitschy outrageousness of his getup and public predilection for masochistic exhibitionism. He worked, predictably enough, at Spencer’s gifts, where the baseball-sized holes in his earlobes were no doubt considered a charming eccentricity.
“Do you worry about the urological ramifications of what you’re doing?” Cadence asked.
“Big word,” replied Dick Tricks earnestly.
You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music's Most Maligned Tribes Page 19