1984. I was in my first year of high school. I’d hit the big
time. And I loved Duran Duran more than anything. I was even waning on Rick
Springfield for John Taylor. (Oh John and your two-toned floppy hair and puffy
shirt and thin, rakly body. You still make me swoon.)
Back then, I listened to the radio the way I watch TV or YouTube today.
Flip, flip, flip until I found something I liked. In those days, that would have been
anything by Duran Duran. Then one day, while flipping around, I came across
the extended version of “Planet Earth” being played on a radio station. Having
newly migrated to the FM dial from the AM dial (yes, this was back when AM
radio still played music), I was amazed to discover a radio station playing a record by Duran Duran that I had never heard before (because, as we all know, 14 year olds know everything and anyone over 30 knows nothing). That was CFNY, back in the days when they were still in Brampton and had just
received their signal boost. Long before they were destroyed by corporate
drivel and “new rock” and “The Edge” or whatever they call themselves now. Back
when music meant something…but I digress, enough to sound like an old codger
who should be shaking my walking stick at kids walking in front of my property. (Because I am past the age of knowing nothing...)
My dial stayed parked on that station for the next ten years. But soon after hearing that Duran Duran 12 inch single, I heard a song on that station that would change my life
forever. And it wasn’t even by Duran Duran.
Well I live with
snakes and lizards and other things that go bump in the night/Cos to me every
day is Halloween/I give it up right and started to fight
What an amazing song! And it spoke to me. It was
about a guy who just wanted to be himself and everyone else was giving him a
hard time about it. A guy who was just different. Not evil. Not heinous. Not a
criminal. But everyone else seemed to treat him that way. And he had some
ridiculously overexaggerated British accent, which meant that he must’ve been
from North America and had an Anglophile complex much like myself.
I kept hearing this song over and over, since CFNY loved to
play it because it probably spoke equally to its audience and its staff. I
mean, Pete & Geets in the morning, Live Earl Jive & Beverly Hills in
the afternoon, Lee Carter from London, and some young upstart named Chris
Sheppard on Saturdays. What a motley crew of characters (and yes I did spell
that correctly).
After a long period of multiple listenings and missing front and back intros, I was able to find out the name of the band who
created this masterpiece. Ministry. Wow. This was the song that fed my emerging
gothicness, leading me down the dark, gloomy path to happiness. I stumbled upon a
“New Discovery” article in one of my teen magazines – I’d like to say it was
Smash! Hits, but I think it may have even been 16 magazine – which had a black
& white picture of Ministry, which they described as a duo of Alain
Jourgensen and Steveo George. I cut out
that picture and stuck it in my locker right next to the large, full colour,
full-page poster of John Taylor (from the same magazine).
I never did pick up a copy of “With Sympathy”, the album
that ‘(Every Day Is) Hallowe’en’ is from, but I did hear their newest single,
“All Day” and immediately searched out a copy of “Twitch” on cassette. I think
I warped it out with my repeated plays on my ghetto blaster and my Walkman. I
even made my friends do a Battle of the Bands (lip sync contest) with me as
Ministry, doing “(Every Day Is) Hallowe’en”. We lost because nobody had heard
of the song or the band before. But we had fun doing it. Well I did. They may
have hated me forever for making them go on stage with me but not as much as
they would hate me the next year when we did Gene Loves Jezebel.
And then, my changing world was thrown into the spin dry cycle of the high efficiency machine of music.
It was my last year of high school. And just before I
graduated, Ministry, the band whom I loved as much as I loved the Sisters of
Mercy or Skinny Puppy, released a song called “Stigmata”. “Stigmata” blended my
musical worlds together in a way that I only dreamed someone could do for me.
Industrial sounds, rock beats, and Alain’s
processed voice coming very close to Ogre’s.
Bliss!
“The Land of Rape and Honey” got me through my final part of
high school and launched me right into university. I had a hell of a time in
first year. It was my first time away from home, my first real boyfriend whom I
didn’t really want to go out with, meeting new friends, and lots and lots of
anger. But Ministry made it all better. That cassette was toast by the end of
first year. And, just in time, Ministry released “The Mind Is A Terrible Thing
To Taste”. Now I’ve never been a thrash
punk fan. I don’t hate it, but I just would rather listen to something else
than Forgotten Rebels or whatever hardcore punk there was at the time. Not my
thing. Plus, well, skinheads. Again, not my thing.
But Ministry’s music was different. I could hear that it
wasn’t supposed to be hardcore punk. It wasn’t exactly thrash, and it wasn’t
exactly metal as we had come to know it in the 80s. Minstry WAS Industrial – samples, sounds,
voice processors – punks and rockers didn’t use that shit. Al did (he was now just Al, dropping the faux French name. In retrospect, it would have been equally exotic and evocative had he just called himself Alejandro in the first place) and he
was the master of it.
So right about here I guess is a good place to start to talk
about Uncle Al’s book, The Lost Gospels
According to Al Jourgensen. And how do I feel that the most influential
music in my life, the music that saved me from a life of golf course monotony by fuelling my inner creative angels and demons, was written in a chemical-induced haze? Well that’s par for
the course. But I will tell you that I have not even tried any of the drugs
that Uncle Al used to make these musical masterpieces. I’ve never been offered
a needle drug, and when I was offered cocaine, it was in the most ridiculous
circumstance that would only happen in a film, and I simply refused because, as
you can probably tell from this book review so far, I’m not a cliché.
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way: did I like the
book? If you haven’t been able to tell (and we’re only ¼ way down the album
list), to me, Uncle Al can do no wrong musically. The book confirmed just how fucked up a guy he was as I always suspected, but Al's stories made me get why he
was so fucked up. And as for all those people, Al included, who felt that the
only way to listen to Ministry was while hopped up on shit, let me tell you –
it isn’t. I’m no prude or puritan just because I never chose to try hard drugs.
But Ministry’s music spoke and continues to speak to me to this day. Something
in my little dark soul which has no confidence, which can’t believe when people
say nice things about me, which hates to deal with the bullshit of mankind, and
which houses my innermost anger that has no other real outlet for expression
needs Ministry music to soothe its savage nature. I don’t need drugs to escape
from this – I need Uncle Al to help me embrace this part of myself and make
sense of it all. So in this bizarre way, Ministry’s music helps me to really
love myself. So big thanks to Uncle Al for that.
But back to the book. It's the book for every Ministry fan or admirer of the amount of chemicals Al was reputed to have consumed in his life (as irresponsibly illustrated in that collection of home video footage released last year by Paul Barker called Fix) who wants to know the real story, and the answer to the question “how is that guy still alive?” Al lets us know in a series of anecdotes told in the style of the guy sitting across the table from you with a beer in his hand, telling you exactly how he came to be sitting at that very seat when you walked into his bar. Al is still alive because he hasn’t said everything he needs to say on this planet yet.
Reading about his relationship with Mike Scaccia tore me apart inside. Two guys go through almost the same stuff, in equal amounts, and were isolated from the rest of the band – the band that Al founded – by a bunch of trolls just trying to make money off of them. And then just when things turn around and the good guys win, Mikey dies doing what he loves most.
What did it reveal to me? Other than
Uncle Al is a lot more like me than I realized (which would explain the musical
tie thing), Al himself says something that has become my mantra: you cannot help someone who does not want
to help themselves. Maybe that cry is suicide, but that has a tendency to
backfire if in your heart of hearts you change your mind at the last second.
But Uncle Al found his rock bottom, and it took pissing, puking, and shitting blood all at the same time to get there. Al struggled and clawed his way back up to the
top. Using beer. But given everything else he’s gone through, beer’s not so
bad. It may actually put some weight on his bony figure.
The other thing I realised is that I own every single
Ministry album. Even the ones Al doesn’t remember making. Or the ones that Al
hated. I own them all. The only other act that is true for is David Bowie.
I almost didn’t want to finish the book, because now that I
am, I feel like I’m at a loss. For two weeks, I had Uncle Al telling me e
best bedtime stories ever about his adventures on drugs, on the road, on Tour.
The stories were filled with laughter, sorrow, romance, and sometimes just evil
incarnate. But I never got a sense that Al had any regrets.
There are so many great things about this book, but one thing I appreciated and admired was the balance between the Al stories and the Jon Wiederhorn interviews. The
interviews are inserted as close to the anecdotes involving the interviewee as
possible within the chapters of the book.
And Wiederhorn has printed all of the subject’s answers, whether good or
bad, agreeing or disagreeing with Al as to what happened on a given night.
Does it have a happy ending? Al is still here giving us
great music and great stories. But Al has also lost some of his best friends.
The book doesn’t really give us an ending. And as a Ministry fan, I am grateful
for that. 