Updated 1 year ago
Capturing the Madness of the Ultimate Nightmare Visionaries
Editors note: This is a fantastic article that is out of print and nowhere to be found on the Internet. I found it in my Brooklyn storage. Now it sees the light of day!
by Kurt B. Reighley
Photo by Siobhan O’Keefe
REFLEX Issue 24, page 28-30
Genuine horror has never been a lucrative commodity. Splatter movies and gothic fiction may turn profits, but works of art drawn from the darkest recesses of the tortured human psyche usually meet with more condemnation than praise. Since their inception in 1983, Vancouver outfit Skinny Puppy have mined the terrifying realities of the world around us and relined them with their own nightmare visions, producing some of the most disturbing music (and theater) of the past decade.
Puppy’s resume reads like a topographical map of the Rockies—a staggering series of peaks and valleys. Signed to Canadian indie Nettwerk in 1984, the trio secured a distribution deal with Capitol in ’86 with the ground-breaking album Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse. That same year, original member William Schroeder left, leaving singer/lyricist Nivek Ogre and multi-instrumentalist cEVIN Key to continue with new keyboardist Dwayne Rudolph Goettel. With the new lineup and major-label support, Skinny Puppy continued to stretch and grow, reaching a far larger audience than was previously conceivable for such extreme music.
Yet as their fan base grew, so did the obstacles. Business problems and creative friction led to internal turmoil. 1989’s Rabies, coproduced by Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, sounded unfocused and confused. Rumors of an impending breakup began to circulate, and the members split off into various camps: Ogre toured with Ministry and contributed to Pigface, while cEVIN (who’d already recorded with Legendary Pink Dot Edward Ka-Spel under the moniker Tear Garden) created Hilt. But, miraculously, Skinny Puppy returned in bracing form the next year with Too Dark Park, an apocalyptic vision of an environment on the brink. The ensuing tour cataloged all the group’s concerns into an overwhelming visual/aural assault—a triptych including violence and vivisection, vegetarianism, and ecology.
Given the density of messages buried in TDP and its companion tour, the clarity of vision exhibited on Puppy’s latest album comes as a shock to the system. Last Rights is a complex work of musical chiaroscuro cut with sharp lines of black and white, with an attention to shading and texture often absent from their earlier work. Cuts like “Love in Vein” and “Killing Game” resonate with Ogre’s razor-sharp vocals, while closer “Download” proves surprisingly lush. Given Puppy’s tumultuous past and the difficult proceedings of the new release, it comes as no surprise that Ogre has plenty to say about the state of Skinny Puppy. What is surprising is Ogre’s low-key demeanor and articulate manner, posing a marked contrast to his recorded screams and simulated onstage deaths.
“[Last Rights] comprises a lot of things, from 1983 to the present,” he says. “I entered this realm I didn’t know was in my mind, and musically, there’s some really strong stuff. I’m really proud of ‘Killing Game’ in particular. That track is the apex of my work—both lyrically and in the way it’s sung.” Yet, like any great work of art, Last Rights contains a tragic flaw. “Left Handshake,” featuring text by LSD guru Timothy Leary, had to be deleted from the record. Goettel and Key had made arrangements with Leary to use the text when they met him last year at a ‘Frisco Cybercon, but objections from Leary’s publisher necessitated its last-minute removal.
“Killing Game” and “Love in Vein” are only two of many cuts featuring play-on-words titles. “I’ve kind of coined [the album] a ‘Document of Delusion,– confesses Ogre, “’cause there was a period of my life where I was seeing a lot of funny things and realizing that your neurotransmitters can definitely dysfunction and mix messages.”
Doubtless, Ogre’s excessive prior drug use was largely responsible for these delusions. During interviews for TDP, he mentioned heroin use, but the extent of his addiction continued to worsen: “I had a serious drug problem that got way out of control within me, and I just lost my mind, basically. My level of faith in myself was rapidly going in this hole. That had a lot of reflection in how people would deal with us, because I’m sure a lot thought I was gonna die … and I almost did die a number of times during the last year.”
Ogre managed to get off heroin, largely due to the support of Martin Atkins and the Pigface crew, only to develop “a serious problem with shooting cocaine. That’s the quickest way to kill yourself in the world.” Four weeks into a European tour with Pigface, Ogre developed hepatitis (Type A, fortunately), forcing him to remain in Sweden to recover. He decided the time had arrived to clean up, and slowly but surely he’s reached his goal.
“It’s been almost five months, and I’ve never felt this good before. It’s the first time in 10 years. You get little highs off just waking up and playing with your cats and stuff. I’m confident about doing more and better things.” Realizing that poor eating habits were unfavorably altering his moods and encouraging his drug consumption, Ogre has since returned to a well-balanced vegetarian diet, and is even exercising in preparation for Puppy’s upcoming tour, though he promises he’s “not trying to get buff or anything.”
Unfortunately, Ogre’s drug problem was only one of several conflicts hindering Skinny Puppy in recent years. “We lost a lot of ground just in the business sense, because we’d never really cared about that,” admits Ogre. “It caused a lot of turmoil between us. Unfortunately, that’s just the way business is, and you have to feel secure about the deals you’re making and the things you’ve gotten yourself into.”
While the band acknowledges problems with business ineptitude and lack of management, Ogre doesn’t place any fault with Capitol. He insists Puppy always brought in recordings that complied with the label’s budget guidelines, and were rewarded with support and wide distribution. “The whole idea with a major label is they get the records out to the kids without them having to go to a major city and an independent store. Anything beyond that is gravy.” And Ogre appreciates Capitol’s longstanding faith in Skinny Puppy: “The reason we were taken on in the first place was almost as an experiment for how to market music like this.” While the band is currently exploring offers from other labels (their deal with Nettwerk concludes with Last Rights), remaining with Capitol is a distinct possibility. “They’ve gone with us long enough that if we start cooperating and working together, we could reach a lot more people.”
With various external factors compounding the pressure, internal tensions within the band exacted a great toll. Ogre was especially concerned that the band seemed to be approaching a commercial sound. “I’ve always hoped to keep the project on the edge of falling off the cliff,” he explains. “After eight records, it’s gonna pay off—it’s going to draw from that integrity of maintaining the cliffhanger sort of feel. This beautiful cacophony should remain what it is—a very unique style.” Affairs reached a low point with Rabies: “It was about tumbling into that pit, and not being very articulate about the things you’re saying. There’s a lot of tracks that are really messed up, and there’s some good tracks, too. It, in effect, got us back on track, because we were all dissatisfied with the way the record turned out.”
While their unhappiness with Rabies drew them closer, the individual members’ work with other bands gave them a chance to blow off artistic steam. “There’s been a lot of pressure taken off with other things we’re all doing on the side,” confides Ogre. “When I go out with Pigface, it helps me because I can sing a lot more, and that’s reflected on the records. They’re two so different projects in the sense that, whereas with Skinny Puppy it’s very serious, with Pigface there’s a lot more bouncing ideas off different people you meet once or twice a year. The whole idea of [Pigface] is about breaking people’s conceptions of what the band is at a particular time.”
Misconceptions constantly confound Ogre’s work in Puppy as well. “We’ve been labeled a lot in the past, for trying to promote violence and sexually psychotic behavior, or [for being] satanic.” But the biggest misconception of all? “That we celebrate all the blood and gore, but it’s not true. We don’t celebrate violence—we just use it as a way of transmitting information. If people hear that Jeffrey Dahmer stalked some of his victims at our show, it’s not because we enticed him to do so.”
Ogre isn’t kidding when he mentions the Milwaukee mass murderer, who apparently mentioned Skinny Puppy in his taped confessions. But while Nivek finds this fact “very disturbing,” previous experience has prepared him for this breed of unpleasantness. “You can see that a person like that could misread things. There’s always going to be misreading.”
During the TDP tour, Ogre received a call from Premiere, who’d heard Puppy were using snuff films in their shows. Presented in a highly staged concert setting, some failed to realize the footage only simulated execution. By juxtaposing something so realistic with the almost comic bits and blatant histrionics, Ogre reinforces one of the band’s basic tenets: “The whole idea is to show people that there’s a very strong difference between something that’s simulated and has a cathartic effect on people, and something that’s real. If you see me get shot onstage, it’s kind of a rush to you, like ‘Wow, that was really visually effective!’ but if you see somebody get shot for real, going into palpitations and flatline, there’s a real difference [in] how you feel.
“I’m dealing with this subject matter, and hopefully the more mature I get, I’ll be able to transmit that data in a way that’s interpreted by a lot more people in the right way, as opposed to the wrong context. I’ve confused it in the past myself. We all go through ‘Am I bad or am I good?’ It’s a constant battle in all of us.”
Last Rights isn’t a set of messages carved in stone—just a powerful forum of ideas. “What I want to keep in this project,” summarizes Ogre, “is that we don’t become like little fascists—telling kids what to blow up and what to cause entropy upon. All of the lyrical and musical images have a diverse effect on people. That’s what art should always be—it touches different people differently, and within that, there’s that train of consciousness that travels between us all. Then people can talk about it and come to their own conclusions. That’s far more relevant in music now than just coming out and saying ‘This is wrong.’ Chances are, on a lot of issues, how do we know what is wrong? We’re being fed this disinformation. The whole idea with Skinny Puppy is: ‘People, make up your own mind about it!’ If you hate it, that’s good, and if you like it, that’s okay, too.
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