Paul D’Amour is now bandmates with Al Jourgensen in Ministry, but back in the day, as the original bassist of Tool, he had a “post-apocalyptic psychedelic experience” after being inadvertently drugged by the industrial pioneer.
In 2019, when D’Amour joined Ministry, Jourgensen told Revolver about the incident. The frontman recalled the story of how he used to live with famed psychedelic-drug advocate Timothy Leary, who gave him liquid LSD to bring on tour. During Lollapalooza in 1992, Jourgensen would put a couple drops into his Bushmills whiskey to bring onstage with him. He recalled walking off the stage one day and handing the bottle to D’Amour and Maynard James Keenan, forgetting he had put LSD in it.
As Jourgensen put it, “They drank it and they were tripping balls for, like, two or three days. They didn’t know what was going on and they were freaking out.” He also said that they eventually ended up thanking him because it “really got Tool going into being a psychedelic band.”
Heavy Consequence caught up with D’Amour at the recent Louder Than Life festival in Louisville, and we just had to hear his side of the story. As he remembers it in the video interview above, it was just him and not Keenan who drank from the LSD-laced bottle of whiskey.
“Our manager at the time, Ted Gardner, was one of the producers of Lollapalooza,” recalled D’Amour. “So, he invited us, and [I said], ‘I’m a huge Ministry fan,’ so we ended up hanging out and partying with the Ministry camp. [Jourgensen] handed me a bottle of Bushmills, and goes, ‘Here you go, kid, knock it back.”
He continued, “Little did I know there was like medical-grade, Timothy Leary-level LSD in the [bottle]. So, the show was very interesting for me. The skies turned purple … the kids were lighting shit on fire. It was an amazing post-apocalyptical psychedelic experience.”
Elsewhere in our conversation, D’Amour told us about his current working relationship with Jourgensen on the road and in the studio, and shared a few memories of his time in Tool. Watch the full interview in the video above, and catch Ministry at the inaugural Sick New World festival on May 13th in Las Vegas.
Trouble viewing the interview in the player above? Watch on YouTube.