Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (63 page)

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 also, 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-drug 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.

TRENT REZNOR:
I finally realized I had to come to terms about becoming an addict—for a long time, I lied to myself about [it] until I couldn’t lie anymore—’cause I was either going to die or get better.

Before Trent Reznor went on his downward spiral of depression and heroin abuse, he was an anonymous musician with a background in classical piano. Raised in rural Mercer, Pennsylvania, he moved to Cleveland after a year at Allegheny College, and began playing in local bands. He also wrote music at home on his computer. And when he wasn’t writing or jamming, he worked as a janitor and assistant engineer at Right Track Studios, where he recorded the demos that got him signed to TVT Records.

RICHARD PATRICK:
Trent and I were both in weak New Wave alterna-bands in Cleveland; his was the Exotic Birds and mine was the Act. We kept tabs on each other and went to see shows like Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Then we ran into each other again at the Fantasy at a concert by [Al Jourgensen’s side band] Revolting Cocks. Trent goes, “See that guy up there? That’s Al Jourgensen; he’s my fucking idol!” It was really Al Jourgensen’s [1986] album
Twitch
and sound design from Skinny Puppy that were the building blocks for Nine Inch Nails. Trent liked
Twitch
because it was a little more pop-oriented and it used traditional songwriting, but it was still weird and had rough edges and was jagged and scary.

TRENT REZNOR:
If anyone ever asks me about influences, I always say Ministry. I’m not embarrassed by that, but I also don’t want NIN to be the Ministry wannabe band. Al’s been a hero of mine. But I have to admit, before I met him, I thought, “Is he going to fucking throw a bottle at me?”

AL JOURGENSEN:
I love Trent, man. Before he got all famous he was a roadie for Ministry. He was this kid and he rode with us in our bus and we used to fuck with him all the time. We’d throw firecrackers into his bunk and scare the shit out of him. At my studio, we had a rule that you couldn’t fall asleep or you’d get fucked with. So one time when he was passed out I took out a razor and shaved his head. I thought he looked pretty good that way.

RICHARD PATRICK:
Trent came up to me one day and was like, “Hey listen, I finished up this new record. I actually have a record deal.” Now, for kids of our generation, being in an alternative band from Cleveland and getting signed was unheard of. It was probably the most one-sided, most horrible record contract in existence. He signed away his entire publishing, everything. But still, he had a record contract. He goes, “I’m going to go on the road. Wanna be in the touring band?” I had just disbanded the Act, so I was like, “Sure, let’s go for it.”