Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (62 page)

The first industrial band to be openly accepted by metal audiences was Chicago’s Ministry. Ironically, the group began as a dance band, and their first record, 1983’s
With Sympathy
, was lightweight synth pop with syrupy vocals. It would be another three years before Ministry evolved into the most carcinogenic industrial band with the guitarless but unnerving
Twitch
. The keyboard-only mandate didn’t last long, and by 1988’s
The Land of Rape and Honey
Ministry had added caustic metal riff samples to the electronic mix, creating the template for groups like early Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, and Static-X.

AL JOURGENSEN (Ministry, Revolting Cocks):
I started playing guitar in the seventies, and I did it to get laid, but I wasn’t that great of a guitar player. I was into MC5, Nugent—anything loud. Then somebody taught me a little bit of synth and I figured, “Well, I can actually play this better than I can play guitar.” Then I got into Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire and realized I wasn’t as good as them on synth and I wasn’t as good as the metal bands on guitar—but I could do both. So it was a case of [being a] jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I roped the two together out of necessity.

JAZ COLEMAN:
I remember Al [Jourgensen] coming to our Boston Channel gig in 1980 dressed like he was in Duran Duran. Of course, he ended up later marrying my ex-girlfriend. There’s nothing like flattery, is there? He married her and they both became junkies. Happily ever after [
laughs
]. I love Al. He is the cuddliest, nicest person you could meet. It’s just that people die around him.

AL JOURGENSEN:
Really? C’mon. I was never involved in anyone’s death. [Killing Joke bassist] Raven died after he played with us, but he was working with Treponem Pal in Geneva, Switzerland. And I was devastated.

ROB ZOMBIE (ex-White Zombie):
When I was in White Zombie, people were always saying to me, “Oh, man you gotta see Ministry. They’re the most insane thing.” I was like, “Wait, weren’t they that disco band?” I didn’t get how they could suddenly be really heavy.

AL JOURGENSEN:
I started as a metal and industrial dude before anyone knew what the fuck industrial
was. I
didn’t even know what it was. Then I signed to Arista, and they made me become Milli Vanilli, like a pop artist. So I sued them, got off their label, and hooked up with Wax Trax!, and I started doing my own music. A lot of the stuff that Arista rejected [for
With Sympathy
] wound up on
Twitch
and [1988’s]
The Land of Rape and Honey
. I was doing that in 1980, but they said, “No, we don’t want
that
,” even though
that’s
what I was playing live in clubs. Arista said, “You need to get a nice little haircut and wear suits and be British.” So it wasn’t a real big switch for me to go heavy. The unnatural progression was doing that Arista album.

PAUL BARKER (ex-Ministry):
In the early eighties a lot of people were just making straight electronic music. We brought out guitars because we weren’t interested in being enslaved by our machines. We grew up loving rock, and Al was a really good guitarist. So we’re like, “What are we doing? Why are we trying to make just noise records?”

AL JOURGENSEN:
What I did notice about the difference between our electronic and metal stuff is the kind of chicks I would attract. When I was doing the synth stuff I got fat chicks with runny makeup. When I was doing metal I had skinny chicks with puffed up hair. When I put both together I kind of got a midway chick with runny makeup and puffy hair.

KEVIN OGILVIE (“NIVEK OGRE”) (Skinny Puppy):
At first there was a kind of a competition between us and Ministry. We were following each other around. Al was cutting himself for real [with a razor blade], and I was faking it. Then I started cutting myself for real, and Al started faking it. We asked Al to produce our [1989] album
Rabies
, and that’s the first time our two worlds merged and we had a lot of these metal guitar sounds. Then when I was touring with Ministry, our crowds converged. Touring with Ministry was definitely like boot camp. In Salt Lake City, Al beaned somebody with a bottle by accident. Afterwards, I came back to the hotel in a cab with a bag of weed in my pocket to the tune of six police cars with their high beams on, and everybody was out of the bus with their hands up. But it all ended up fine. There were apologies made and a T-shirt given and all was fine.

AL JOURGENSEN:
Chaos followed me everywhere. When I was in Tennessee during Lollapalooza ’93, I bought this gigantic pyrotechnic from some toothless guy behind a truck stop. [Butthole Surfers front man] Gibby [Haynes] was with us and lighting off m80s in the back of the bus. I decided to one-up him. I lit the firework thing, which was like a bazooka that’s larger than a man’s arm. It was a professional pyrotechnic that you’re supposed to light on boats, away from people, and it’s supposed to make a pirate ship in the sky. So the fuse is lit and everyone was freaking out, but I was just joking and I went, “All right, enough’s enough.” I tried to put it out and I didn’t realize it was an underwater fuse. The only way you can put that out is to cut it, and we didn’t have scissors. So we passed it around back and forth to each other, freaking out. Then the thing went off. There were all these pellets that shot out down the length of the bus, and everything it touched started a different color fire. Just the recoil of this thing going off sent me flying back four feet through the air into the back lounge. People are diving out of the way of the sparks and the bus driver pulls over and says, “Get off my bus. I’m calling the police.” He called the cops. We had put the fire out by this point, but there’s still so much colored smoke coming out of the bus it looked like
Apocalypse Now
. The cops pull up and they looked at the bus driver, and he’s going, “Throw them in jail. They blew up my bus.” This Texas state trooper was chewing tobacco. He spits, looks at the bus driver and goes, “Well, what do you expect? This ain’t Mozart, it’s rock and roll. Now get these boys back on the bus and get off my highway.”

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.