-------( BURIED ALIVE )-------
"Coffins are perfect for tables." They're flat topped, whereas caskets have a round top. You could never put a straight sheet of glass over a casket. It would just slide off and break," he says. This pernicious purveyor of prurience purchased his coffin for a mere $200 from an underground organization known as the LA Hearse Society. The artifact came from a mausoleum in Europe, and was originally used to ship a deceased body overseas before it was transferred to a more elaborate show casket. How appropriate.
Along with bandmates "cEVIN Key" and "Dwayne Rudolf Goettel", "Ogre" has dealt in the trade of demise and decay for close to a decade. And it ain't a part-time job. It's a full-time obsession, an all consuming passion. A subject he's researched thoroughly and intimately. Almost too intimately.
Over the past couple of years, Ogre has stumbled through life like a zombie thanks to a drug habit that neared $s,ooo per month. He's come close to feeling death's cold, damp embrace too many times to count. Convulsions, heart fibrillations, Hepatitis A. He's tasted it all, and, until very recently, has always come back for more. Ogre has been clean now for six months, and claims to feel more alive than ever, but he still bears the many scars of addiction: his arms are lined with track marks, his eyes are sunken and hollow, and his memories are jagged and scattered like shards of glass on a parched blacktop. Seated poolside at an LA hotel, Ogre runs his fingers through his many short, thin, black braids, while he glues together pieces of his shattered past.
Curiously, he remains drawn to the morbid & macabre even after nearly experiencing death first hand. It's an intrigue he'll no doubt take to his grave. He was going to guide me on a tour of the underbelly of LA, a quick drive through Compton, a stroll through the various graveyards but he had to wait for the delivery men to arrive with his coffin. "C'est la mort." Maybe Ogre's brush with death has only fueled his interest in his own mortality. Stephen King once said he wrote horror stories as a method of preparing for his inevitable demise.
Ogre seems to operate on much the same level. He truly enjoys discussing "B" grade horror films, AIDS, police brutality, animal testing, and one of his more personal fascinations--serial killers. "It's not so much a fascination, but If you're so stupid that you're really not aware of it... If you close your eyes to it, you're doing yourself and the world a great disservice. I would want my children to be in touch with that side of reality. I mean, I don't particularly see serial killings as something I jack off to, but I definitely find them really interesting. The fascination comes in when you try to understand where these people are coming from. To get inside their heads. Right now I can't fathom it. But I'm sure killing for them becomes some sort of urge that can't be fulfilled any other way. But how somebody gets to that stage, I have no idea," he says.
Jeffrey Dahmer, one of the more exotic mass-murderers in recent years, kept nearly everyone in North America running to the morning paper for months to see if any more details had been uncovered about his graphic slayings. It's really a morbid fascination. But then, we're living In a morbid society. "It's truly become a spectator sport far greater than anything I could conceive or come up with onstage in the sense that these people are really getting their little bit out of life. Those killers are taking the greatest steps in making themselves known in a sick way. No less than Hitler on a smaller scale. Many Hitlers, many orange juices," Ogre says laughing at his abstruse analogy.
"There's this whole phenomenon happening with people who just want to be noticed. They want some excitement in a world where nothing is really exciting anymore. So they become killers. It's a great way to have a party send off," he says.
Anyone whose life lacks excitement should drop the carving knife and give Skinny Puppy a whirl. Ever since they burst from the earth in 1983, Skinny Puppy have provided a total sensory bloodbath in song, stage, and cinema. They even helped to define industrial dance music with their beat-heavy 1986 release Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse.
The band's new, finest, and questionably final album (now that their contract with Nettwerk has expired) Last Rights is their most visceral yet-a terrifying best of blight and sound. Blood-chilling and schizophrenic, the disc grinds havoc with the nervous system, writhing through a syncopated nightmare scenario of gnarled samples, bastard beats, and gothic industrial keyboards. It serves as a typically horrific sound track for the band's latest tour. Skinny Puppy are infamous for their sanguinary, stomach-chuming stage presentations.
Last year's Too Dark Park tour provided the most extraordinary shock value since the French Grand Guignol. During the show, Ogre eviscerated himself, tore his heart out, hung from the rafters, & transformed into a hideous "Ten-foot-tall" monster on futuristic mechanical stilts. All the while, films depicting grisly war atrocities, animal testing, and simulated carnage splashed across several oversized projection screens. On this year's tour Ogre plans to incorporate interactive video and virtual-reality visuals into an equally affecting over-the-top gore-fest. Simulating grisly atrocities on stage is a way for Ogre to cope with his demons. Just feed them some raw meat, and maybe they'll abstain from raising their ugly heads for a little while. "What I do live is the extension of myself that I don't want to be. It's totally scary.
There's a side of me that comes out sometimes that's a raving fucking lunatic. I love covering myself in blood every night. And I love putting things over my head that I can tear off. No matter how sick and twisted it all is. I totally get into it."
It comes as no surprise then. that Ogre condones morbid obsesions of all kinds. He raises his glass to the housewife that reads the obituaries and crosses out the names of the deceased from the phone book. He applauds the employee who dreams about crushing his boss' skull like an eggshell, or the student who envisions ripping his teacher to bloody bits with a Black and Decker buzz-saw.
"What's wrong with fantasy? That's healthy," he says as he lights up a cigarette. "If it doesn't go beyond that vision to completion of the act, that's fine. I think fantasy, and that whole realm of exploring any sort of artistic creativity should have no limitations as long as (the fantasy) is not carried out." Yet Skinny Puppy's macabre monstrosities aren't merely profane perversions. They're cathartic, therapeutic. Perhaps indulging in the dark helps us appreciate the light.
"Oh definitely," says Ogre. "We don't celebrate all these images of decadence. We just portray them in order to reinforce more positive things. That's what it does for me anyway.
With Skinny Puppy, you feel so much pain and discomfort, that you can get that all out in the music, and then just enjoy the things in life that are meant to be enjoyed." Like stalking little girls at the school playground. Actually, Ogre is a lot more sensitive than he'd have us believe. Simulated slaughter may be okay for relieving tension, but real life brutality is strictly taboo. He feels genuine pain for any living creature forced to endure unnecessary anguish, and he's especially troubled by all the tortuous animal testing that goes on behind locked doors. To him, doctors, lab technicians, policemen, and other members of the establishment that engage in cruelty and power games for a living, are far more insidious than any horror film maker could ever be.
"We were once arrested in Cinncinatti for hacking up a model of a dog onstage. A plainclothed policeman came into our dressing room without showing ID, saw it was a stuffed animal, and then arrested us anyway for disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. For us to be thrown in jail for killing an animal that wasn't even an animal, when those things are happening all around us in laboratories at a far greater rate than we could ever kill puppies onstage is a total paradox.
"I'm not a politician, I'm just coming from a gut instinct about what I feel is really heinous. In our society, we emphasize too much on human rights, and we disregard a lot of animals. Living creatures should be considered one and the same. This whole idea of Christian beliefs that animals are lower than us and just the amount of pain caused to them because of this, is a fucking crime. If we took steps in protecting animal rights, maybe we could start preventing human rights violations as well. I have more empathy for animals than humans anyhow! "You'll never see an animal making a fusion bomb."
Last year, at the peak of self-immolation, Ogre was injecting up cocaine to get high, and heroin to come back down. "I had a needle fixation, I just love using a needle." It's a very sick fixation, he admits, recalling the many days and nights he would still inject, even though his infected arms ran with streams of bloody pus. "I suppose shooting up is the closest way a male will get to being a female.
There's erection. There's insertion. There's ejaculation, and there's orgasm," he says, then laughs tiredly. "No, really. When you're injecting you can't get much higher. It's like, you're on that trip where you want to explore all these things, then you find something that really works. And even if you had a complete aversion to it in the beginning, you do it anyway.
The first time I shot up, I never wanted to do it again. But once a person gets addicted to cocaine, it changes the whole chemistry in your head. Wrong becomes right, and right becomes left.
"At first, shooting up seemed to solve all of Ogre's problems. He'd just inject himself into a narcotic daze, and lay in the corner, happy as a baby in the womb. But once he became addicted, the bliss was replaced with an inconsolable need for more. He became paranoid and deluded, sacrificing friendships and relationships for drugs. He injected so often that, eventually, the cocaine didn't affect him. But that didn't stop him from lying, stealing, and begging for more. Nothing stops a junkie.
"In a weird way, all my paranoia gave me fuel for a lot of the writing I did for the new record. I experienced both visual and auditory hallucinations.
Basically, I woke up one morning, and the world was totally different. It reached that state where I thought I had lost all things that I was before, and it was going to be this way forever. It felt like going back was so far. I actually wanted it to be all over. I did have several convulsions, and I did almost die. I hurt a lot of people who watched me trying to destroy myself, and tried to stop me. But I didn't care."
In his early work, Sigmund Freud writes about two primal motivational forces, Eros & Thanatos. Eros, the life instinct, urges man to be kind and understanding, while Thanatos, the death drive, compels him to forge a path of malevolence & self-destruction. Thanatos may have driven Ogre down an ever-turbulent spiral, but Eros kept him alive.
"Even when Thanatos was there in the sphere of my mind, and right merged with left, there was a very strong base desire to survive, even though I truly wanted to give in to it. I remember I was once in an apartment building with a very good friend of mine, and I was shooting up in her bathroom. Suddenly, for no reason, I became sure that she was trying to poison me. "So 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 into 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 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, " he says grinning sheepishly."
While Skinny Puppy were recording Last Rights, there were times when Ogre had to be literally dragged in and out of the studio. He'd pass out at the mike shortly after laying down vocal tracks, and wake up in a cab or lying in a pool of his vomit by the side of the road.
"The really frustrating thing for everybody, was that I was destroying myself, but yet everything was going down fine on tape. The results we got were incredible. So nobody could say I was wrecking the band."
That may be true, but at the time, the rest of the band feared Ogre's hedonistic path wasn't strictly self-destructive.
"If Ogre went down, we went down with him," cEVIN Key tells me later. "It would have meant the death of everything we'd set out to achieve. It got to the point where I didn't even want to see him. I didn't want to talk to him. I didn't want to be in the same room as him. I hated him for what he was doing to himself and to us."
Ogre finally decided to kick drugs on the first day of the Pig face tour. Various members of the band and crew helped him go cold turkey, and after days of battling withdrawal by sleeping all day, performing at night, and then collapsing in cold sweats after the shows, Ogre managed to quit. But misery loves more misery.
Soon after he was clean, Ogre acquired Hepatitis A in Europe from a tainted pizza, and had to be flown back to the US and hospitalized. After he was released, he moved to LA to be with his girlfriend, who has kept him off cocaine for the last six months. But he still has vivid dreams about scoring and injecting it. For Ogre, the chaotic atmosphere of Last Rights documents his descent into drug-induced madness.
The record begins normally enough, with the semi-industrial mainstream rasps of "Love In Vein" & "The Killing Game," but quickly descends into a chaotic flurry of dysfunctional beats and demented samples. "By the time you get to 'Download,' it's almost like an "E K G" machine on flatline," Ogre says. But for Goettel and Key, who write all of Skinny Puppy's music, the record is just another attempt to exercise their warped creativity. They were out, not to document any physical or psychological process, but to be as original and anti-commercial as possible.
"It was really an experiment with non-conventional notations and non-conventional music which we let just sort of create itself through its own energy. We let it control us, really. It was so spontaneous and improvisational. There was no preconceived concept to meet," says Key.
The members of Skinny Puppy are all on different wavelengths. Maybe that's why their music is so agonizingly potent. The irrefutable tension created when three disturbed minds battle for supremacy in an audio arena sculpted of pain and abuse tends to yield stunning results. Just check out the Beatles' White Album for proof.
When they're not on tour or in the studio, the band members keep their distance. While Ogre was going through rehabilitation, Goettel and Key were going on with their lives. They haven't even seen Ogre since they finished recording Last Rights last year. After all, Skinny Puppy aren't about love and companionship. They're about injury and animosity, when it's time to begin working on a record, Goettel and Key convene to bang out whatever's on their minds. Ogre doesn't get to hear their work until it is complete. His job is to coordinate the grisly stage show and write the ghastly, soul-bearing lyrics that get thrown overtop the ravenous music. The final product is generally as disconcerting as it is devastating. One song on Last Rights was written by Key as a gothic love song. But after Ogre got his hands on it, it was soiled and raped into the savage "Killing Game."
"For it to be turned around and lyrically used that way is really weird," admits Key. "I'm not dis-pleased with it. As a matter of fact I don't think I've ever been dissatisfied with what Ogre has done to a song. I just want to stress that it's not what I originally had in mind. We all have totally different ideas of what the band is all about." Ogre and Goettel agree that the fate of Skinny Puppy will be decided after their tour. Ogre says there are a "wealth of ideas that have yet to be explored," but that the many complications of getting another record deal and putting on the type of high-tech visual performance to surpass the current one, may not be worth the time, effort, and money.
Only Key is willing to state definitively that there is still bite left in this dog. "Personally, I feel that we will do another album as a new beginning. But Last Rights is definitely the last chapter to the Nettwerk affiliation as well as Ogre's existence the way he has been the last decade," he says. "Even though I haven't seen Ogre in over a year, I've talked to him a number of times. It seems like there's a real energy again, and that everything's back on track," he continues. "Over the last five or six years I'd ask him a question, and he wouldn't even hear me. But now he sounds sharper than ever. I'm glad to be on this level, and if everything works out I see a brand new llfe to us and many more records".............
"Urban Fracture"
-December 2001-
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