How Al Jourgensen helped William S. Burroughs catch raccoons with methadone
Ministry leader Al Jourgensen has lived a wilder life than most. From pioneering industrial music to making many enemies in the music industry with his antics, musically and personally, the Havana-born innovator has trodden a path many would pale at the thought of embarking on. This adventure has provided an array of fascinating anecdotes, including a methadone-filled racoon hunt with Beat author William S. Burroughs.
Notably, Jourgensen and Ministry worked with Burroughs on their influential 1993 single ‘Just One Fix’, a song which conveys the frontman’s heroin addiction at the time and fittingly features the author, another prominent user. Burroughs features in both the song’s audio and video, with one version of the track including him saying, “Bringing it all down”, which he recorded in the studio with Ministry.
To shoot the scenes of the video with Burroughs, Jourgensen and a friend travelled to his house in Lawrence, Kansas. After knocking on his door, his first question was whether the pair had heroin, but after telling the 70-year-old that they only had enough for themselves, he slammed the door in their face. Not taking no for an answer, the duo drove to Kansas City to score and returned with the goods he wanted. Accordingly, the storied writer granted them passage into his weird world.
What occurred was one of the most surreal experiences of Jourgensen’s already unbelievable life. It included watching Burroughs miraculously find a vein at 70 and shoot up with large 1950s needles and opening a letter from President Bill Clinton inviting him to speak at the White House. However, the author did not know who Clinton was and did not care.
This heroin-fuelled trip into the isolated existence of the Naked Lunch creator provides much insight for fans. Jourgensen recalled to Metal Hammer in 2017: “That guy didn’t live like a human living. He had no idea about who was President, or who was in Congress, or what was going on in the news or sports – he just lived as Bill Burroughs. He had no relationship with society as we know it because he wasn’t interested. That made a big impact on me.”
The strangest juncture was yet to come for the Ministry leader and his friend. According to him, the only thing Burroughs cared about was his petunia garden. Instead of wasting his time on who the incumbent President was and other seemingly pointless matters, Burroughs was seriously irked about the raccoons eating his beloved flower beds. Speaking to Songfacts in 2012, Jourgensen quipped darkly: “He tried to shoot the raccoons, but they were too fast. Obviously, not the William Tell story of his life in Mexico.”
It would be Jourgensen who helped the elderly Burroughs catch the pesky mammals once and for all. Strangely, the methadone that the author had lying around due to being on an addiction programme knocked them out and allowed him to finish them off with his gun point blank. This assistance was enough to forge a friendship between both men that lasted until the Beat legend died in 1997.
Jourgensen told the publication: “I knew he was on the methadone programme, so I said, ‘Why don’t you put out some methadone wafers and slow the raccoons down?’ And he told me, ‘You’re an astute young man.’ So we immediately got along. He came in the video shoot the next day, all happy. He came in early, which is rare for Bill Burroughs, man. He came in early, and he was all happy, and he was like, ‘I finally got one of those bastards, thanks to your advice.’ Apparently, they’d eaten the methadone; they slowed down enough for Bill to shoot them. [Laughing] So he was totally happy, and we became friends over the years until he died. And now I love that guy, man.”
Listen to ‘Just One Fix’ below.
