Lost Gospels: Long on Sensationalism, Short on Substance
Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen
By Al Jourgensen with Jon Wiederhorn
Da Capo Press, 2013
Imagine, if you will, Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen standing on top of a house, screaming at the top of his lungs, "I AM A JUNKIE GOD!" and then diving headlong into a pool full of heroin. That pretty neatly sums up his authorized biography, Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, written by Jon Wiederhorn. If you're looking for the motherlode of crazy drug and sleazy sex stories, then you need look no further. If, however, you're looking for insight into the creation of the actual music that led to Jourgensen's notoriety, or if you don't have the patience to sit through the reading equivalent of a four-hour Jackass marathon, you'll probably be underwhelmed and possibly more than a little annoyed by this book. Music is almost an afterthought in this narrative because Al has forgotten making about half of it. Instead, he spends most of the book essentially saying, "I'm the biggest badass in Texas! I'm so badass, I can poke fourteen holes in my face at once, puke blood for six years straight, snort a line of coke through the air from across the room, faceplant through a coffee table, then chew through my restraints to eat an EMT's face off. Fuck you! It's my party, and I can hemorrhage from every orifice if I want!" When I was twenty, and first read about Al's larger-than-life, devil-may-care bile-guzzling/golf cart-stealing antics at Lollapalooza, I probably would have thought this kind of crap was much funnier. Now, I just find it pathetic.
Although I empathized with Al early in the book, when he describes his difficult childhood, social anxiety, and loss of his grandmother, he soon squanders that goodwill through his complete disrespect for other people. He speaks highly of Mike Scaccia, Prong guitarist Tommy Victor, and Killing Joke bassist Paul Raven, but has nary a good word for Paul Barker, Chris Connelly, Martin Atkins, or Bill Rieflin, claiming he erased and re-did about eighty percent of their contributions to Ministry's seminal albums. He and his then-wife, Angelina Lukacin, also accuse Barker of embezzlement, but claim they can't talk about the details because of a confidentiality clause in a settlement agreement Al has with Barker. Al sued Barker in Los Angeles Superior Court in 2007, but the case, SCO94122, was thrown out of court the following year. It's important to note here that Al admits to having blown a $750,000 recording budget on heroin, only to deliver one song, 'Jesus Built My Hotrod,' and demand that Sire pay him another $750,000 if it wanted a full album. Front 242's Luc Van Acker tries to defend Al, saying Al would never rip anyone off, but says no one who worked with Al received much money because Al "invest[ed] everything and then double that," by, for example, buying a Fairlight, which, at the time, cost as much as a small house. Van Acker says the group toured four times around the time of the Revolting Cocks' 1986 debut release, Big Sexy Land, but that he made only about $1,000 for the year. Al and Scaccia also lambaste director Doug Freel and Gigantic Pictures over the 2011 Ministry tour documentary, Fix: The Ministry Movie, for portraying Al in a negative light, and not giving Al approval of the film's final cut, but according to Freel, he cut the two scenes Al asked him to remove, and Al stopped returning his calls in 2009, so he couldn't show Al the film's final cut.
To add another layer of hatefulness to the proceedings, the book is rife with misogyny and animal abuse. I know, I know-misogyny in a rock memoir? Stop the presses!-but since this is the first such book I'm reviewing for Brutal Resonance, I'm still going to mention it. What consenting adults do with their bodies is their own business, but it's striking how often the word "debauchery" is used in this book as an umbrella term encompassing sexual activity that's not strictly consensual and non-coercive. Just so we're all on the same page, "debauchery" basically means "excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures," and using such a seemingly innocuous word to describe things like telling girls to have sex with dogs, throwing a nude woman's clothes out a hotel window or flushing them in the toilet, or raping a zoo ostrich conveniently glosses over a lot of very rough edges. (I've seen people on the internet try to argue that bestiality isn't rape, but I've never been persuaded of the validity of that stance.) The ostrich story infuriated me, but it could easily be just another of Al's bullshit stories, along the same lines as his alien abduction fantasies. He even claims aliens stole Angie's fetus. Perhaps accusing Al of misogyny is a bit off-the-mark because he doesn't seem to treat men much better than women, but whereas men might face the indignity of having their ink pens or vegetables shoved up Al's ass, only women are forced to walk around naked in public or locked out of a venue in an alley full of homeless people who try to rape them.
Al's description of his encounters with Courtney Love at Australia's Big Day Out Festival are especially illuminating. When Courtney ran out of heroin for him to steal, he told her, "'Eh, okay. Let's fuck,'" and then tells Wiederhorn: "I think she did it out of fear. I didn't rape her or anything, but she was so afraid of me and Mikey that she probably figured it was better just to fuck me than to say no." Riiiight. So, just for clarification, Al still insists thirty-plus years after the fact that Clive Davis "raped" him by "forcing" him to record that "sonic abortion" With Sympathy, but denies that a woman having sex with him "out of fear" ought to be considered rape. Yeah, okay. Got it. And for the record, when some half-wit called El Duce tried to rape Al's mom backstage after a show, Al hit him over the head with a beer bottle, but didn't consider that a serious enough offense to actually, you know, kick him off the tour or anything. Perhaps that incident has something to do with why Maggie Jourgensen's voice is conspicuously absent from this narrative. The nicest thing Al can find to say about his mother is that she was "hot Latin pussy...with nice tits and a hot ass." How charming. But anyway, back to Courtney... Al rationalizes: "She's so egocentric and self-centered, and that's why Mikey and I tortured her so much." Now I'm not exactly "on Team Courtney," so to speak, but are we supposed to believe that nothing remotely self-centered went down in the Ministry camp before Courtney showed up and fucked things up for everyone by handing out too many pictures of her kid? Give me a fucking break. So then Evan Dando supposedly got involved, and told Al and Scaccia to leave Courtney alone, and Scaccia punched Dando. Al and Scaccia absconded with the heroin while Courtney tended to Evan, and Al tells Wiederhorn: "Maybe she has some maternal instinct after all, because she went to take care of Evan..." As far as I can ascertain from Lost Gospels, Al's contempt for Courtney stemmed from the fact that she had more money and more drugs than he did, she liked tabloid attention, and she was *gasp* a bad mother. That last part is pretty revealing. Not only does Al admit at the beginning of the book that he was a pretty shitty father himself, but he also holds no ill will towards his grandfather Julio for leaving his wife for a prostitute, causing Al's grandmother Carmen to struggle to raise Al in poverty because she was too proud to accept money from Julio. He also finds it in his heart to forgive Ed Jourgensen, saying it couldn't have been easy for Ed to become an instant father to a six-year-old who didn't speak English, but says "forgiving my mom is still a work in progress. She was always thinking of herself and had a vicious mean streak." Elsewhere, he says that when he was young, his mom was too busy "husband-shopping" to spend time with him. If he ever stops to consider that a sixteen-year-old girl is almost definitely not going to make a good mother, we see no evidence here of that insight. Wiederhorn is so busy trying to one-up Neil Strauss's Motley Crue biography The Dirt that he doesn't bother trying very hard to humanize his subject. You can almost hear him prompting, "Tell me more about all the drugs you did and the chicks you banged!" as he scribbles furiously in his notebook. Do we really need a whole section devoted to what drugs Al was doing during the recording of each album? True story: While doing background research on some of the events described in this book, I actually had an ad for Suboxone pushed at me because someone out there in Internetland decided I must be a junkie, too.
Al's most interesting when he discusses social democracy and his cut-up editing techniques on The Land of Rape and Honey, which reportedly involved rubbing some of the tape segments with coffee, and giving others cigarette burns or urine stains. Unfortunately, only a few pages of the book are devoted to such subjects, and then he goes back to blathering on about drugs, drunk driving, sex, and various forms of animal cruelty. The sections involving Luc Van Acker (excluding the Detroit concert incident), Gibby Haynes, and GWAR are some of the best parts of the book. I particularly enjoyed reading about how GWAR ate Al's pizza, drank his beer, and snorted his coke while he worked on their second album, Scumdogs of the Universe, released in 1990. Al complains, "I got one line, one beer, and no pizza out of the whole fuckin' deal." Another amusing anecdote comes from Luc, who recounts how Al picked up an anorexic girl with green hair and numerous infected piercings one night in Florida. Al woke Luc at four in the morning to ask him to get in bed with the girl. When Luc refused, Al lifted the sheet to show him that the girl had a penis. Luc says, "Many years later, when I told this story to Marilyn Manson, he said he was that guy. I was like, 'No way, no way.' Maybe he wanted to be that guy. I don't know." These kinds of stories are much funnier than Al's tales of people fucking dogs and ostriches or shooting tennis balls at deer. All in all, this book has made me loath to support Al's future endeavors. He's obviously trying very hard to brand himself as a latter-day William Burroughs, but his swagger wore thin a long time ago.
6/10
Apr 21 2015
By Al Jourgensen with Jon Wiederhorn
Da Capo Press, 2013
Imagine, if you will, Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen standing on top of a house, screaming at the top of his lungs, "I AM A JUNKIE GOD!" and then diving headlong into a pool full of heroin. That pretty neatly sums up his authorized biography, Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, written by Jon Wiederhorn. If you're looking for the motherlode of crazy drug and sleazy sex stories, then you need look no further. If, however, you're looking for insight into the creation of the actual music that led to Jourgensen's notoriety, or if you don't have the patience to sit through the reading equivalent of a four-hour Jackass marathon, you'll probably be underwhelmed and possibly more than a little annoyed by this book. Music is almost an afterthought in this narrative because Al has forgotten making about half of it. Instead, he spends most of the book essentially saying, "I'm the biggest badass in Texas! I'm so badass, I can poke fourteen holes in my face at once, puke blood for six years straight, snort a line of coke through the air from across the room, faceplant through a coffee table, then chew through my restraints to eat an EMT's face off. Fuck you! It's my party, and I can hemorrhage from every orifice if I want!" When I was twenty, and first read about Al's larger-than-life, devil-may-care bile-guzzling/golf cart-stealing antics at Lollapalooza, I probably would have thought this kind of crap was much funnier. Now, I just find it pathetic.
Although I empathized with Al early in the book, when he describes his difficult childhood, social anxiety, and loss of his grandmother, he soon squanders that goodwill through his complete disrespect for other people. He speaks highly of Mike Scaccia, Prong guitarist Tommy Victor, and Killing Joke bassist Paul Raven, but has nary a good word for Paul Barker, Chris Connelly, Martin Atkins, or Bill Rieflin, claiming he erased and re-did about eighty percent of their contributions to Ministry's seminal albums. He and his then-wife, Angelina Lukacin, also accuse Barker of embezzlement, but claim they can't talk about the details because of a confidentiality clause in a settlement agreement Al has with Barker. Al sued Barker in Los Angeles Superior Court in 2007, but the case, SCO94122, was thrown out of court the following year. It's important to note here that Al admits to having blown a $750,000 recording budget on heroin, only to deliver one song, 'Jesus Built My Hotrod,' and demand that Sire pay him another $750,000 if it wanted a full album. Front 242's Luc Van Acker tries to defend Al, saying Al would never rip anyone off, but says no one who worked with Al received much money because Al "invest[ed] everything and then double that," by, for example, buying a Fairlight, which, at the time, cost as much as a small house. Van Acker says the group toured four times around the time of the Revolting Cocks' 1986 debut release, Big Sexy Land, but that he made only about $1,000 for the year. Al and Scaccia also lambaste director Doug Freel and Gigantic Pictures over the 2011 Ministry tour documentary, Fix: The Ministry Movie, for portraying Al in a negative light, and not giving Al approval of the film's final cut, but according to Freel, he cut the two scenes Al asked him to remove, and Al stopped returning his calls in 2009, so he couldn't show Al the film's final cut.
To add another layer of hatefulness to the proceedings, the book is rife with misogyny and animal abuse. I know, I know-misogyny in a rock memoir? Stop the presses!-but since this is the first such book I'm reviewing for Brutal Resonance, I'm still going to mention it. What consenting adults do with their bodies is their own business, but it's striking how often the word "debauchery" is used in this book as an umbrella term encompassing sexual activity that's not strictly consensual and non-coercive. Just so we're all on the same page, "debauchery" basically means "excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures," and using such a seemingly innocuous word to describe things like telling girls to have sex with dogs, throwing a nude woman's clothes out a hotel window or flushing them in the toilet, or raping a zoo ostrich conveniently glosses over a lot of very rough edges. (I've seen people on the internet try to argue that bestiality isn't rape, but I've never been persuaded of the validity of that stance.) The ostrich story infuriated me, but it could easily be just another of Al's bullshit stories, along the same lines as his alien abduction fantasies. He even claims aliens stole Angie's fetus. Perhaps accusing Al of misogyny is a bit off-the-mark because he doesn't seem to treat men much better than women, but whereas men might face the indignity of having their ink pens or vegetables shoved up Al's ass, only women are forced to walk around naked in public or locked out of a venue in an alley full of homeless people who try to rape them.
Al's description of his encounters with Courtney Love at Australia's Big Day Out Festival are especially illuminating. When Courtney ran out of heroin for him to steal, he told her, "'Eh, okay. Let's fuck,'" and then tells Wiederhorn: "I think she did it out of fear. I didn't rape her or anything, but she was so afraid of me and Mikey that she probably figured it was better just to fuck me than to say no." Riiiight. So, just for clarification, Al still insists thirty-plus years after the fact that Clive Davis "raped" him by "forcing" him to record that "sonic abortion" With Sympathy, but denies that a woman having sex with him "out of fear" ought to be considered rape. Yeah, okay. Got it. And for the record, when some half-wit called El Duce tried to rape Al's mom backstage after a show, Al hit him over the head with a beer bottle, but didn't consider that a serious enough offense to actually, you know, kick him off the tour or anything. Perhaps that incident has something to do with why Maggie Jourgensen's voice is conspicuously absent from this narrative. The nicest thing Al can find to say about his mother is that she was "hot Latin pussy...with nice tits and a hot ass." How charming. But anyway, back to Courtney... Al rationalizes: "She's so egocentric and self-centered, and that's why Mikey and I tortured her so much." Now I'm not exactly "on Team Courtney," so to speak, but are we supposed to believe that nothing remotely self-centered went down in the Ministry camp before Courtney showed up and fucked things up for everyone by handing out too many pictures of her kid? Give me a fucking break. So then Evan Dando supposedly got involved, and told Al and Scaccia to leave Courtney alone, and Scaccia punched Dando. Al and Scaccia absconded with the heroin while Courtney tended to Evan, and Al tells Wiederhorn: "Maybe she has some maternal instinct after all, because she went to take care of Evan..." As far as I can ascertain from Lost Gospels, Al's contempt for Courtney stemmed from the fact that she had more money and more drugs than he did, she liked tabloid attention, and she was *gasp* a bad mother. That last part is pretty revealing. Not only does Al admit at the beginning of the book that he was a pretty shitty father himself, but he also holds no ill will towards his grandfather Julio for leaving his wife for a prostitute, causing Al's grandmother Carmen to struggle to raise Al in poverty because she was too proud to accept money from Julio. He also finds it in his heart to forgive Ed Jourgensen, saying it couldn't have been easy for Ed to become an instant father to a six-year-old who didn't speak English, but says "forgiving my mom is still a work in progress. She was always thinking of herself and had a vicious mean streak." Elsewhere, he says that when he was young, his mom was too busy "husband-shopping" to spend time with him. If he ever stops to consider that a sixteen-year-old girl is almost definitely not going to make a good mother, we see no evidence here of that insight. Wiederhorn is so busy trying to one-up Neil Strauss's Motley Crue biography The Dirt that he doesn't bother trying very hard to humanize his subject. You can almost hear him prompting, "Tell me more about all the drugs you did and the chicks you banged!" as he scribbles furiously in his notebook. Do we really need a whole section devoted to what drugs Al was doing during the recording of each album? True story: While doing background research on some of the events described in this book, I actually had an ad for Suboxone pushed at me because someone out there in Internetland decided I must be a junkie, too.
Al's most interesting when he discusses social democracy and his cut-up editing techniques on The Land of Rape and Honey, which reportedly involved rubbing some of the tape segments with coffee, and giving others cigarette burns or urine stains. Unfortunately, only a few pages of the book are devoted to such subjects, and then he goes back to blathering on about drugs, drunk driving, sex, and various forms of animal cruelty. The sections involving Luc Van Acker (excluding the Detroit concert incident), Gibby Haynes, and GWAR are some of the best parts of the book. I particularly enjoyed reading about how GWAR ate Al's pizza, drank his beer, and snorted his coke while he worked on their second album, Scumdogs of the Universe, released in 1990. Al complains, "I got one line, one beer, and no pizza out of the whole fuckin' deal." Another amusing anecdote comes from Luc, who recounts how Al picked up an anorexic girl with green hair and numerous infected piercings one night in Florida. Al woke Luc at four in the morning to ask him to get in bed with the girl. When Luc refused, Al lifted the sheet to show him that the girl had a penis. Luc says, "Many years later, when I told this story to Marilyn Manson, he said he was that guy. I was like, 'No way, no way.' Maybe he wanted to be that guy. I don't know." These kinds of stories are much funnier than Al's tales of people fucking dogs and ostriches or shooting tennis balls at deer. All in all, this book has made me loath to support Al's future endeavors. He's obviously trying very hard to brand himself as a latter-day William Burroughs, but his swagger wore thin a long time ago.
6/10
Share this review
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Shares
Liquid Divine - Autophobia is available at POPONAUT from 13,95€