GLENN DANZIG Says Modern Doctors Are 'Full Of S**t'

Sam McPheeters of Vice Magazine recently conducted an interview with Glenn Danzig. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Vice Magazine: I've read that you're going to slow down on touring some because you don't want to deal with the downtime that comes on the road.

Danzig: After the 2005 Blackest of the Black tour, I stopped touring. Then I said, "Well, I'll do local shows, because I don't have to sit on a bus for fucking three days between shows, doing nothing." I'm a workaholic, and so I've always got to be doing stuff. When you're on the bus, you can't do shit. You're not at home, you don't have all your shit.

Vice Magazine: But I guess you then got tired of not touring…

Danzig: I love playing live, so I started out again with a couple local shows. Then we put together a West Coast run and I flew home after every two or three shows. And then we tried this thing where we flew out to the East Coast, did four shows, I flew home, and then we started a West Coast run that went out to Denver for two and a half weeks, and every two or three days I flew home. It worked out OK, so in 2008 we did a Blackest run where I flew home every few days. That didn't bug me, so we'll try a full tour this time. I'm going to try the flying-home thing and see how it works.

Vice Magazine: That implies that you had decades of not doing that, of being on tour and dealing with the constraints of tour time. I've known so many touring musicians who surrendered to the downtime, who would let their natural rhythms go to hell and sleep until three, not exercise, not read, not do any of the things they'd do at home...

Danzig: I try to work out, but a lot of hotels don't have gyms anymore, so I always try to find a local gym where there's not a ton of 'roid-heads, 'cause I can't stand them. It's tough. I read a lot, so that helps.

Vice Magazine: Do you ever have problems with your energy levels?

Danzig: No.

Vice Magazine: What's your secret?

Danzig: I don't know. I don't eat shit food. I don't do drugs. I don't know what else to tell you.

Vice Magazine: I'm 40. I don't do any of those things. I eat salad for lunch. And I wake up almost every day feeling like a wet bag of sand.

Danzig: Salad is terrible if you put creamy crap on it.

Vice Magazine: It's low-fat creamy crap!

Danzig: There's no such thing.

Vice Magazine: So you have nothing to share, nothing to impart to those of us who are rapidly turning into jiggly piles of goo? It seems like it happens quick.

Danzig: Uh, do you work out at all?

Vice Magazine: Not every day.

Danzig: You don't need to do it every day. Diet is really important and I think vitamins are really important also. Maybe you want to go to a nutritionist and find out what your body is lacking and what it's not lacking. And I don't mean a fucking quack, chemo, murdering doctor. I mean a nutritionist, who evaluates your blood and tells you what you're deficient in and what you're not deficient in.

Vice Magazine: Those are all good things to know, but they're no surprise. You don't have any one thing that…

Danzig: If I can help it, I don't go to modern doctors.

Vice Magazine: How come?

Danzig: They're full of shit.

Vice Magazine: Across the board? All of Western medicine?

Danzig: Pretty much. If you had cancer would you get chemo? You'd be dead in a week.

Vice Magazine: I wouldn't be dead in a week!

Danzig: Bet you. [laughs]

Vice Magazine: What would you bet me? Let's make this interesting.

Danzig: I wouldn't bet you anything, because in a week, even if you live, you're not going to live that much longer! Chemo radiation will kill you, and it's not the way to heal your body from cancer. You need to make your body stronger. Your body has natural things that fight off diseases. Cancer is just cells deteriorating more rapidly than your body can heal and fight it. So you have to find out what that imbalance is. Doctors are too busy writing scrips that they get kickbacks on and charging you hundreds of thousands of dollars for chemo.

Read the entire interview from Vice Magazine