Brian “Head” Welch’s

“Save Me from Myself”

book review by Dake Aachen

“God is so cool”, actual line from the book.

Everybody who is or has been into heavy music knows that Brian Welch is former guitarist of Korn and has recently published autobiography, the main topic of which is, “How I [Brian “Head” Welch] found God, quit Korn, kicked drugs, and lived to tell the story”. Making fun of Head today and his conversion sets every even non-sophisticated (let alone the heavy intellectual pretenders, who read Dostoevsky or Kundera) reader’s teeth on edge, much like lashing out at George W. Bush Jr., Fred Durst or Michael Jackson leaves one with a dry mouth. So, we are not going to do this, instead we’ll give you a couple of plain facts — assuming that you already know the gist of the book, which is built (sadly enough on the real life, otherwise this would have just been a piece of terrible and cheap fiction) after the pattern of what seems to be almost every rock star’s life — troubled childhood, loneliness, discontent, love and talent for music, drugs and orgies; but Head’s life takes a “surprising” turn of conversion and believing in God (which is so “trippy” as it was put in the book) — and put it numbers: the word “Jesus” is mentioned 62 times in the autobiography, and the word “God” — 375 times, which sums it all up.

Head admits that he has “never written anything in my life, unless you count the school research papers I did to keep my teachers and parents off my back”, so this explains the whole god-is-so-cool-and-trippy style of the book. What it fails to explain, however, is that why only people like Head and the likes seem prone to conversion.

How come we always hear stories of people like this particular author or that WWE Lex Luger guy, who also went heavy on drugs and then turned to Jaysus and finally started feeling good, and placid, and accomplished? Ah, simple minds, but what about other people who’d been of greater benefit for the mankind? People like Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher, who contributed to quite a number of topics that range from evolution to human psychology and had the habit of taking a certain dose of morphine, never increasing the dose, never going crazy about it; or Wilkie Collins, who wrote brilliant novels while addicted to laudanum; or Charles Baudelaire, who used laudanum, smoked opium and did so much alcohol that he suffered a massive stroke and got paralyzed; or Paul Verlaine, who gave in to absinthe; or Thomas de Quincey and his book “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater”; or Paracelsus, who in the 16th century contributed to philosophy, medicine, toxicology, psychotherapy, and combined high doses of alcohol with hard working; there are others as well. — How come none of these people resorted to the escapism of Christianity, but kept working and innovating, pushing the boundaries until they died?

Or if you’d like to have a couple of examples from the music industry at hand, here they are:

— Al Jourgensen of Ministry went crazy on drugs and as result had his toe removed, because a contaminated needle dropped in his boot and infected the foot; he still was able to quit heroin by sheer power of his will (or because he just go sick of it);

— John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers did so much heroin (also cocaine, alcohol and other drugs) that got a lethal oral infection and had all of his teeth removed to survive; still did not resort to the old Jaysus story.

Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD and was the first man on the face of the Earth (and presumably in the Universe) to try it, never went as crazy about it as the poorly educated hippies.

So, the basic point is, the more you learn, the more talented you are, the less meaning there is for you in religion, and consequently, the greater your will power and freedom are. You know, have some intellect.

And also, in case you might have forgotten to what particular substance Head is referring to in the “How I... kicked drugs” phrase, it is meth. Now, imagine if you were a presumably clean human being and were trapped by Nazi scientists during the Third Reich as a lab rat, and were forcedly presented with only two options: to go through heroin addiction or through meth addiction for the sake of the scientific research and experiment, — which one would you choose? That’s right, meth. For meth is not as psychological a nightmare as heroin is (let alone the feverish physiological aspect of heroin that meth addiction simply does not have)... So... Head “kicked drugs”, alright, good for him.

The “Save Me from Myself” book was also published as a “clean” edition for kids under the title “Washed by Blood”, which is exactly where it belongs — the nice niche of children’s books.