Ministry's "With Sympathy" as Breakup Album

by editor Michele Catalano

I’ve written before about the summer of 1983, known as The Greatest Summer of My Life. Most of that had to do with the sheer amount of good music that came out that year. New wave was really ramping up, and with that, I had found the sound and style that would define me for years. 

I was 21 that year and freshly, stupidly engaged to a guy who was the son of my father’s business partner. We met at their restaurant, fell in love working the bar, and decided we should spend the rest of our lives together. Charlie was a beefy, boisterous corrections officer at Riker’s Island. That should have been a warning bell to me, but I was young, naive, and addicted to love. Sure, he had a temper. Sure he was overbearing, possessive, and demanding. But he cared about me! He loved me. He gave me the promise of marriage, kids, a house, the stability I so longed for as if my life until that point had been hard or unstable. I would tame him. I would calm him. I would fix him.

I spent a lot of time in 1983 at various new wave nightclubs, much to the chagrin of Charlie. He didn’t like me going out without him, but the new wave scene was very much not his thing, and he stayed home and brooded while I danced and sweated the night away in a club called Spit. He hated the outfits I wore to the clubs, he hated my friends, he resented the 4 a.m. fun I had with them at the diner after the club. And he hated the music. This was a guy who thought Eddie Rabbit was the height of culture. 

At some point I became obsessed with Ministry’s With Sympathy, which had come out that May and joined my regular rotation. Oh, how Charlie hated that record. I’d have it on when he came over, and he’d immediately complain about the “noise” I was making him listen to. One day I was grooving to “Work for Love” while getting ready to go to a movie, and he reached over and pulled the needle off the record, scratching it across the vinyl but not in a creative way. He was mad. He wanted the record off. “I told you I hate this shit. Why do you listen to it when I hate it? You should have more respect for me.” 

I decided there and then that I would call off the wedding. It wasn’t just the music. It was the way he was slowly closing me off from my family. It was the demands he had been making on me since we were engaged (my family is your family now, you can only see your friends once a week, you will quit your job and raise a family immediately), the way he treated me, the terror he put me through (he liked to drive over this scary bridge with his headlights off just to see me cry out of fear), the way he was taking over my life. 

That night, I asked him to go to the movies without me. I told him I didn’t feel good because I wasn’t yet ready for the truth yet. After he left, I played With Sympathy several times before getting dressed and meeting my friends at the club.

With Sympathy was the epitome of new wave for me. It felt a little dark, a little decadent, a little danceable. The perfect combination of things in my eyes. When they’d play “I Wanted to Tell Her” in the club, I’d be the person in the middle of the dance floor, spinning and pogoing and moving my arms in that weird new wave dance fashion. It made me feel fresh and wild, it helped me give in to myself, to let go and be the person I wanted to be, not the person Charlie wanted me to be. 

I started hatching my plan to break up with him but found myself unable to do so. I was scared of him, plain and simple. I knew his temper would come out. I knew he would be upset and mad. I knew he’d be unwilling to let me go. I spent a few months building up my courage but ultimately was thwarted by fear and anxiety. I listened to With Sympathy every night. It had become a record that defined my restlessness, my ambivalence. it was my “fuck you” album, the one I put on because I knew he hated it. The more intense my need to leave Charlie, the more I became entwined with the songs. Every night I’d lie on my bed listening to Al Jourgensen’s voice, listening to the perfectly toned new wave sound of the record, taking it all in. It was my rallying cry. 

The summer of 1983 came and went. I still hadn’t worked up the necessary bravery needed to break up with Charlie, to call off the May wedding. I kept going through the motions. The bridesmaids had dresses. I had a dress. The caterer was booked, the limos procured, the invitations picked out. I was dying inside, doing all this wedding stuff but knowing damn well I didn’t want to go through with it. My life was turmoil, and Ministry brought me comfort every night, as I listened to the album and reminded myself how much I did not want to do this.

In November, I got a full time job at Record World, much to Charlie’s disappointment. I had been working at a stationery store that sold Hello Kitty paraphernalia. He liked that I was in an environment where there was no chance for me to “misbehave.” He liked that I was working with two old ladies and a clientele that consisted of eight-year-old girls and their moms. When I told him I got the job at Record World, he simply said, “I wish you wouldn’t.” But I did because it was the job I always wanted. Charlie viewed working at Record World as defiance. He was mad at me constantly, especially when he realized how much I loved the job.

I still played With Sympathy every single night. I’d sing along to “I Wanted to Tell Her” and think about what I wanted to tell him. I’d listen to “Work For Love” and realize that he never once worked on his side of the relationship. The lyrics on With Sympathy are half nonsense, half “stick this to the wall and see if it holds up,” but any port in the storm will do when you are in the throes of relationship angst. To me, the record was more than the sum of its parts. It was a beacon. It was an artifact of this time. It was a symbol.

I made a lot of friends at Record World, among them the man I would eventually marry and have kids with. We were at a bar one night, watching a hockey game, picking at our bar food, talking in circles. He would always ask me why. Why are you with a guy who doesn’t want to know your friends? Why are you with someone who demands so much of you and gives so little in return? Why are you marrying someone who doesn’t value you as a person? I would stumble over my words, making some sort of excuse for him, for me. The real answer was, I didn’t know. 

That night, when he asked me for the hundredth time what I saw in Charlie, I knew. I knew I had to do the right thing and call the wedding off before it was too late. But how? Where? As quickly as I got my courage, I got cold feet. I was nursing my beer and contemplating everything when I heard a familiar sound in back of the hockey game. The jukebox. It was playing “Work for Love.” I knew it then the way I knew that one plus one equals two. I was going to do it.

I told my parents first. They were a little upset that some of the wedding stuff was nonrefundable, but they were outwardly relieved. I told my sisters, and they were not quite shocked at the revelation. And then I told Charlie. I did it in my house, with my parents in the other room. It was the only way I was going to feel safe about it.

Charlie was not happy. He was, to say the least, upset. Mad. He was mad. He was angry. He was furious. When I took off my ring and handed it to him, he threw it at me. And before he punched my bedroom door, he took my copy of With Sympathy that was on the record player and flung it across the room. In the subsequent days, I would find him sitting in my car when I came out of the deli. He would spend hours sitting in the mall restaurant across from Record World and would call the store occasionally, asking for me. When I’d get on the phone, he’d remind me that he carried a gun. It was a scary time. It was freeing and I was, for the most part, ecstatic to be rid of him and his rigid and sometimes abusive idea of love.   

We were supposed to get married in May 1984. Instead, I spent the day at home, taking the day off work. I spent a little time imaging the things I was supposed to be doing that day: having my hair and makeup done, getting into my wedding dress, drinking in the limo, dancing at the reception. I would do none of those things that day in May. Instead, I would put on With Sympathy and let it wash over me along with a sense of relief.

I still think about Charlie every time I put on this album. I think about what I escaped, and I think about not only what I’ve become since then, but what Ministry became as well. With Sympathy was a one-off album, producing a sound the band would never replicate as they moved into the industrial genre. Charlie was also a one-off; I had tried my hand at something I thought was for me but wasn’t. Ministry’s With Sympathy will always be an artifact of that time for me, a glimpse at what was, and more to the point, what wasn’t. 

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