PRONG Mainman Talks Music Business

Cosmo Lee of Invisible Oranges recently conducted an interview with Tommy Victor (PRONG, MINISTRY, DANZIG). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Invisible Oranges: You've had difficulties with the music industry. What happened?

Tommy: Problems with management come to mind. We had two guys that completely disagreed on everything. That created a lot of problems.

Invisible Oranges: At the label?

Tommy: No, our personal management. For years, I'd get one call from one guy that was like, "Don't do this. Don't do that. Fuck the other guy." We were caught in the middle of that. PRONG was always difficult because so much relied on me — coming up with solos, all the lyrics, all the music. It was too much on me at all times. I'd get complaints from everybody about record sales not being high enough, and pushing to go in a different direction. So there was a lot of confusion with that. I held a lot in for a lot of years. Finally, I exploded. I was, like, "Fuck everybody, I can't deal with it anymore." So when Glenn Danzig called me and said, "Just play with me and get a straight salary, come on tours, learn the songs," I was, like, "Fuck yeah, this is awesome!" Eventually after a couple years of that, I realized that I could still write my own songs, and I wanted to do it again.

Invisible Oranges: Would your luck have been different had you not been on a major label?

Tommy: Yes. I think that we should never have signed to Epic. Especially overseas — their labels were smaller over there, and their priorities were definitely the pop artists. Labels like Roadrunner and the more rock or metal-oriented labels had more ability to get press in the rock magazines, where, at that time, there was a stigma about majors which you don't really have that much anymore. At that time, it was, like, "Oh my god, PRONG is on a major label, fuck them!" So we suffered that. Like Al was saying earlier, there's a concentration on a Top 40 mentality. Even if you're a rock or metal band, they're watching the charts and they're harassing you about how little records you're selling. That's why they're always pushing for "the ballad" or "the cover song." We had that all the time.

Invisible Oranges: When you're doing sideman work, do you ever think, "Man, I wish I could be doing my own stuff"?

Tommy: With Glenn I was more like that because he was so unappreciative. I love Glenn and we had a lot of good times together and he never said anything bad about me to other people. But within the group, I would have liked to have been more collaborative with him. Al [Jourgensen, MINISTRY] takes care of that more. Glenn paid well, [but] Al likes to get other people involved so that they feel like they're part of the whole thing. I'm proud to be playing with MINISTRY. I was proud to be playing in DANZIG, too. It's just that Glenn sort of ruined it a little bit.

Invisible Oranges: Not many people can play the rhythm parts in MINISTRY.

Tommy: You have to have the right hand chops to do it. Guitar players today can do it. From a technical standpoint, guitar players have improved so much in the last ten years with all the technology in order to get your chops together, which we didn't have years ago. I was just picking up a stylus on a piece of vinyl, back and forth. What you could figure out in a week, kids can do in an hour now. Playing with MINISTRY is another thing, too, where you have to know your punk rock and your post-punk and industrial music, whatever that may be. You have to be a little bit more well-rounded than your average metal guy. I have no problem fitting in with it. MINISTRY for me is a piece of cake because I know this style of music. It's heavily rooted in punk rock. Prong essentially started out as a hardcore band. [Later] we added a lot of the noise elements that you find in MINISTRY and KILLING JOKE.

Invisible Oranges: Reading interviews with you from 5 to 10 years ago, I get the sense of a great psychic hurt from the music industry. How is your psyche now?

Tommy: I don't think it's changed that much. There's so much acceptance that has to come into view after all the years involved. When we first signed to a major label, my lawyer was, like, "Now the hard times come. This is going to be a nightmare." He had dealt with enough bands that had come out with one record, two records, and [then gotten] dropped. Sometimes you just have to be grateful that you've survived it all in some way. Like a lot of people point out, a lot of bands later did a similar format as PRONG and became hugely successful. You just have to balance out those emotions. Essentially, everyone's [looking] after themselves, so you have to realize there's not a whole bunch of benefactors out there that want to help you out. You have to hold your own in a lot of ways.

Read the entire interview from Invisible Oranges.