FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| MUSIC Love at first sight, tales of running to Los Angeles to escape drug addiction - as opposed to the more usual run away from L.A. to escape drugs - and finding out that the person who once used a too nauseatingly lifelike looking dog cadaver as part of his stage set now has not one, not two, but, count 'em, four dogs. Well, what else would you expect to pop up in the story of a person named Ogre who used to play in a band called Skinny Puppy? And it's not surprising that Ogre gets a little philosophical as he talks of dog parks and serendipity all in the same sentence, because, as the Grateful Dead pointed out, what a long strange trip it's been. With the release of ReMix Dys Temper, a collection of Puppy's best tracks remixed by such diverse listeners as the Deftones, Nine Inch Nails's Chris Vrenna, and British electronica duo Autechre, Ogre doesn't flinch as he thinks back on the band's darkest days from the safety of the Santa Monica sunshine. "It's a timely matter, really, almost an epiphany in putting out this album," he says. "The thing I've learned in my life is you will find your own odd way of dealing with your own path. But it is your path and it is for you to deal with. You may get scarred by a bad experience, but you'll realize in retrospect that it's opened you up to new experiences and turned into a catalyst for good stuff to happen. During my time with Skinny Puppy, bad things had to happen for a reason." One of the worst things for Ogre was his addiction to hard drugs, but even that opened the doors for reflection and growth. "I moved to California in 1992 to get away from bad influences in Vancouver and to get healthy. I was forced into change when I developed hepatitis in Sweden, and I had to come to terms with the reasons I had got the disease, with what had happened in the previous 10 years. Then I made big changes." California was uncoincidently the place where Ogre's new partner was living, a partner whose life became entwined with his in a slightly less-than-fairy-tale version of love at first sight. "We'd had this tryst in New Orleans, a week or two, and we were totally in love. Of course, we were both involved in relationships with other people at the time. I made the worst decision of my life by going back to someone when I was trying to work out a few problems with addiction. "Then, when I met her again, it was by a total longshot. I had been in love with her 10 years ago, it was on the Pigface tour, and there I was unshaven for weeks, looking like hell and in a place I never am at a concert, right outside the front door. I'm at the front of the bus and she walks by and if it had been another minute we would have missed each other." So as Ogre and his love take their daily stroll with their canine contingent in a dog park up the canyons, he can look forward to the band that he left in June of 1995 picking up the tab for yet a few more bags of kibble. "Dwayne (Goettel - one of Puppy's electronics geniuses) overdosed and died days after I left. I started recording for Warner's, but it seemed like dealing with a bag of dirty laundry left over from the band. I started questioning the validity of doing anything with music again. But the one good thing the drugs did for me was to alienate me from potentially hurtful stuff. Too many deals go wrong, too many people act just horribly, even if they're your best friends, and you learn that it's just the drugs, don't take it personally. That lesson transferred to other things." Thus, Ogre found the strength to bring his talents to the remix sessions and not take the past too personally. And as he worked with the many other music lovers who participated in the remixing, he began to remember why he had been in music to begin with. "The reason I became a drug addict was not about masking feelings, but about taking things in. I learned to be totally extroverted, embracing things, taking music, sexually - everything - to the hilt. I don't need the drugs anymore, but I still can take it to the hilt. So now I'm ready to try doing that on an album of my own." |