Hi all -
“Long time listener, first time caller” here. I was looking for a general “introductions” thread, and was too lazy to find one, so this’ll have to do.
I’ve enjoyed the Prongs site for some time now, and just thought I’d step out of obscurity into the spotlight of, uh…somewhat lesser obscurity to say hi to everyone. I’m an author / sound artist / educator (what Genesis P. Orridge would have called a “cultural engineer”) and, in a roundabout way, I actually owe a lot of this life development to my early exposure to good old jackhammer-to-the-skull industrial rock. As silly as it may sound, applying that music’s spirit of constructive anarchism took me well beyond music - in its own little way it set off a chain of events that saw me relocating to Asia and then Europe, getting into serious research in the arts and sciences, and more besides.
My first exposure to Ministry came when I was in the Chicago suburbs in the 5th grade. The radio station “93 XRT” had a powerful enough transmitter that I could pick it up, and - on a late-nite show called “Club X” or something like that - I would be treated to the then-new sounds of WaxTrax and allied artists. I remember being so bewildered, excited, or both, that I’d often call up friends on the phone and tell them to tune their radio dials to 93.1 so we could listen together in awe to Thrill Kill Kult, LORAH-era Ministry (soon to reap the dubious rewards of “Stigmata” being featured in Miami Vice) or Skinny Puppy. One day the hip older brother of my best friend returned to our sleepy burg from a trip to the WaxTrax store, and decided on a whim that he didn’t actually want the cache of cassettes he picked up there…so we divided up this loot amongst ourselves, and everything was downhill from there.
At the time I had no idea about Jourgensen’s habit of disowning whatever work had preceded his newest stuff, and so I had this very inspiring vision of a shape-shifting artist who just acted according to his own whims, didn’t care what anyone thought, and was STILL successful in spite of it (even when reading features on Ministry in Chicago newspapers at the time, I don’t recall reading much about his bilious hatred for “With Sympathy”.) This simple misunderstanding inspired me to dip my toes into a variety of different cultures, while examining each for essential qualities of intensity and free thinking.
By the time I was in high school I was being bounced across the U.S., generally yearning to get back to Chicago eventually and become a part of the scene that I’d cut my teeth on. When Martin Atkins relocated his Invisible label there in the early 1990s, I struck up some correspondence with them (either calling their offices long-distance or hand-writing letters during detention periods at school) and became one of the early ‘reps’ for his label. There were about 16 of us nationwide in the beginning, a number that would expand into the hundreds once Al Gore invented the Internet and communication lines became more accessible.
When I moved back to Chicago for college, I interned at Invisible’s top-secret location next to the housing projects on the near South side. I had the honor of running errands to the so-called “scary store” nearby, and the post office - every once in a while I mailed out what I was sure had to be 6- or 7-digit royalty checks. I still contend that I avoided getting mugged during that time merely because I looked like an unapproachable freak even by subcultural standards…being a cyber-psychedelic werewolf in an awful combo of dayglo and military surplus may have cost me some dates, but hey, maybe worked as an urban defense mechanism too. Activities within the Invisible compound itself weren’t any less risky - I think I was nearly asphyxiated once when Martin wanted some red fuzz attached to mail-order catalogs with spray adhesive for Valentine’s Day (his quote: “now THAT’S indostrial…big fuzzy red 'earts!”) When it came to regional roadie duties, Pigface / Ministry / Kiss road crew boss ‘Jolly Roger’ also thought I’d be a good candidate to load drum risers, and other items that weighed much more than I did, into the gear truck - I guess this was some “rite of passage” thing, since ‘Jolly’ weighed about 300 pounds more than me.
I left Invisible before they really began their descent into Hot Topic-ness in earnest, and started selling off pieces of chainlink fence from the '89-'90 Ministry tour. During my time there I was proud to lend a helping hand to the careers of great individuals whose work I still enjoy, like Mick Harris, Michael Gira and Mark Spybey. It was also eye opening to witness certain folks at work (e.g. Ogre) and to discover that they were completely un-pretentious and not drunk on their own celebrity. While I always feel a little weird adding Invisible to my curriculum vitae, I can think of much more embarrassing ‘youthful indiscretions’ that one might have to explain away in adulthood.
So to shorten this already too lengthy intro: that first furtive listen to Ministry in my childhood was, well, like the ‘epiphany’ Al Jourgensen claimed to have after first seeing the Ramones. A whole realm of creative possibility seemed to open up in which mutation and chaos were desirable instead of “evil,” and in which (to blatantly rip from Crass) there was no authority but yourself. Though diminishing returns on my enjoyment of all that stuff were inevitable, I emphasize again that it was the gateway drug that led me down a dozen different avenues of cultural enlightenment.
I was honestly planning to do a book on this subject at some point, but I think Chris Connelly’s memoir will be pretty hard to top. “Ask me anything”, as they say
[cool]