Jourgensen V. Ogre | Or, A Great Story About Blood

Here is a story of why the internet is totally great.

The other day I referenced this story I heard as a teenager about Al Jourgensen (the front-man for a band called Ministry) and Nivek Ogre (the front-man of Skinny Puppy).

The story was that Jourgensen would perform and do crazy stuff like cut himself and bleed all over, and that Ogre would fake cut himself and fake bleed all over the place. In both cases the crowd would go nuts when the blood (real or fake) would flow.

The story I told went like this, "Jourgensen was cutting himself for real, but then he would go into a dressing room and see all this fake blood from when Ogre played that same place a few weeks earlier. People would go up to Jourgensen and say 'This guy from Skinny Puppy was here last week, and he can bleed so much more than you!'"

When this happened Jourgensesn was mad because he knew what Ogre was doing was fake.

Meanwhile, Ogre would play all these places that Ministry had played before he did, and hee would see all this real dried blood all over the place. Then after the show people could go up to Ogre and say something like "Man, have you ever seen Ministry play? That Al Gourgensen due is cutting himself for real. Your performance was good... but man, what Jourgensen did was way more intense."

The way I tell the story, Jourgensen is like, "Fuck this cutting myself for real shit! The Skinny Puppy dude does it for fake and people love it." And Ogre is like, "I've got to get more hard-core about my performance, be more like this Jourgensen guy in Ministry."

The point of the story being, Jourgensen and Ogre switched to one another's style of performance. Jourgensen started to use fake blood like Ogre, and Ogre started to cut himself for real like Jourgensen.  

After I told this story I wanted to find out if it was true. (Or, perhaps more accurately, how true or false the story was.) So, the this morning I did a search to find out if I could find any reference to this annacdote, and I found this interview.

JR:  Is it true that before you guys met each other, neither knew much about the other's band?
NO:  I think there was a kind of a competition in a way.  While we were following each other around, Al was cutting himself for real, and I was faking it; and then I started cutting myself for real, and Al started faking it --
AJ:  There was one tour in particular when we both toured the South at different times, but about three days behind each other.  We used to get real pissed off at Skinny Puppy because at whatever dressing room we'd go in, there was fake blood all over the place.  And we'd show up three days later, and all the kids would come up to us and say, "Hey man, you ever heard of Skinny Puppy?"  And it never occurred to me that they were getting the same thing on the other end -- they'd go into these dressing rooms and there'd be real blood all over the place, and they'd have people coming up to them saying "You ever heard of Ministry?"  So for a while, we were actually kind of sick of each other.  

So the story is real, but it did not go down the way I thought --what I learned from reading the interview quoted above is, while the story I told was "based on a true story" the true story was different.

...

I kind of like my version of the story, the version where Jourgensen and Ogre switch, better than the real stroy.

Oh well.