Mickey rocks: Sex, drugs and Satan at Disney

WARNING

"In order to accurately portray the Disney Company," the authors warn, "we have had to include material that is unsuitable for children and that some adult readers many find offensive."

For more than 70 years, the Walt Disney Company was an almost unquestioned icon of family entertainment. Recently, however, Disney has come under attack from family and religious organizations for a variety of activities by the company and its subsidiaries, including smut-filled rock records and controversial movies.

Has Disney really last its way? Investigative Journalists Peter Schweizermedia fellow at the Hoover Institution and coauthor, with Caspar Weinberger, of The Next War--and Rochelle Schweizermedia consultant with experience in both the radio and TV industries-set out to discover the answer after moving to Florida with their young son. They talked with former employees, looked at internal company documents and pored over law enforcement records. They were shocked to find what they call the tragic story of a great American institution corrupted by greed and perverted by the lust for power-and even more perverse vicesthat puts children at risk.

In Disney: The Mouse Betrayed (Regnery, 1998), the Schweizers tell how, after Michael Eisner became CEO of Disney in 1984, the company was transformed form a folksy studio into a cash machine, where, among many other scandals, executies allowed their theme parks to have an injury rate twice the national average while they covered up rampant pedophile and sexual abuse problems. In the chapter from Disney: The Mouse Betrayed excerpted below, the Schweizers discuss one amazing Disney company, Hollywood Records, which produces some of the raunchiest, violent, pro-suicide and pro-Satan music in the industry.

When Ricky Vodka arrived at Disney's commissary, he was hungover and in a nasty mood. The lead guitarist for the hardcharging, punk-rock band Humble Gods was visiting Disney's Hollywood Records, located in the old Disney "imagineering" division. "In this building," says one Hollywood Records executive, "they built the first Disneyland-the teacups, the whole thing." But these days it houses a division dedicated to heavy-metal and punk-rock bands that sing about suicide, Satan, and sex with the Virgin Mary.

Hollywood Records has signed Humble Gods to a contract, the band's first with a major record label. Amidst streets named for Disney characters and walls decorated with posters of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, trash/punk bands seem totally out of placeat least they used to. At the new Disney, they seem to fit right in.

"To put it bluntly," says Hollywood Records in its promotional material, "Humble Gods are not for the faint of heart.

As a barometer of each gig, success is measured in terms of sweat, hurtling bodies, and collisions-per-song."

Guitarist Doug Carrion concurs. "We're a pretty confrontational band. It's not some lovey-dovey fun thing."

This isn't merely promotional hype. Ricky Vodka counts among his friends the late serial murderer John Gacy, who killed at least 33 boys and young men, and buried most of them under his home near Chicago.

Ricky found that intriguing and one day decided to write the mass murderer, who was on death row. They began an active correspondence in late 1991, and, over the course of several dozen letters and phone calls, the two became friends. In May 1994, seven days prior to Gacy's execution by lethal injection, they finally met at Stateville Prison in Joliet, III.

"What Gacy did was horrible," says Vodka rather matter-of-factly. "But I wanted to meet him so I could form my own opinion about what a serial killer is actually like. I expected to meet a monster, and instead I met a chubby man who was capable of being very charming and funny; kind of like your dad's buddy who tells corny, dirty jokes."

Humble Gods drummer Lou Gaez has his own stories to tell. One of them involved a federal offense. In the fall of 1996, while boarding a plane to a performance, Gaez found himself "kind of pissed off" by the way a stewardess handled the bag that contained his camcorder. So he claimed it might be a bomb and had to be forcibly removed from the plane by airport security.

The group formed in the summer of 1994 and was named by member Brad X after he read a poem about the apocalypse. Doug Carrion (whose mom played a bit part in the science fiction film Soylent Green) is the band's visionary. "It seems like one of us gets injured at every gig," Doug laughs. "I've always liked bands that fly by the seat of their pants, where, at any moment, the stage could collapse, and guitars could snap, and everything could blow up."

Sometimes it goes beyond injury. Bassist Jason Thirsk took his own life during the recording of "No Heroes," Humble Gods' first album for Hollywood Records.

Punk reviewers note that Humble Gods' songs are "fierce, fast and cutting. They're filled with all the usual punk angst and distaste for authority." One Humble God's song, "Lied and Cheated," goes like this: