When I was living with Carmen I had my first of several run-ins with the “Grays.” If you’re into UFOs and extraterrestrials, you know the Grays are these little fuckers from another planet who come down to Earth every once in a while and check it out. They’ve been keeping an eye on me from an early age. I didn’t get the name Alien Jourgensen for nothing. When I was five, three of these guys paid me a visit. I grew up steeped in Catholicism, and it was the day before Christmas, so I thought they were the Three Wise Men. I was sleeping in the living room, and I woke up to this sound, and there they were. I was watching them and they were watching me, and before they went away they left this green triangle on my neck. They didn’t draw it or anything; it just appeared. My grandmother saw it and asked me what it was. I told her it was given to me by the Three Wise Men. She took me to a doctor and he couldn’t figure out what it was, but it went away in two weeks, so we never discussed it again.
Although we started out in America pretty poor, we gradually got more money—thanks to my uncles Jorge and Julio. My Uncle Jorge was a crazy motherfucker, actually—they both were. For a while Uncle Jorge concentrated on music and jammed with the ’70s psychedelic band Spirit, but he ended up doing really well in sales for a major corporation. He was always there. But my other uncle, Julio, was my favorite. He’s a good guy. Like me, Uncle Julio likes to drink and hates George Bush, but he’s funny as hell. He used to come into my dressing room in Ft. Lauderdale whenever Ministry played there and go, “I am Julio! I am from Cuba! Fuck George Bush!” And then he’d drink all the beer.
I loved growing up with my grandmother, uncles, and an aunt, who was also named Carmen, and was kinda frumpy and cognitively deficient. They never forced me to learn English and I didn’t have to lift a finger for anything. I never saw my mother because she was busy husband shopping, but I didn’t care. Then my mom married Ed Jourgensen when I was six, and literally the day after my birthday the entire fabric of my life was taken away and I had to learn how to adapt to these new, hostile conditions. Ed was an aspiring NASCAR driver, and my mom made it clear that he could have her, but I was part of the package and he’d have to get a stable job to support us. Basically he traded in his life’s dream in exchange for some hot Latin pussy, which was exotic, especially back in the ’60s. My mom was a Cuban Charo Latina Chiquita with nice tits and a hot ass. And my dad was kind of a nerd, so he said, “Alright, I’ll give up cars and take the pussy!” Deal!
In the process he got thrown into being an instant dad. He had no time to prepare for it. You have to develop parenting skills, and he had none. On top of that he was pissed that I didn’t speak English, he had to support me, and I was totally ungrateful and upset that I wasn’t with my grandmother anymore. I can see why he’d be unhappy, but I was a six-year-old kid, and I went from happy times to nightmare city in sixty seconds. My mom always sided with my dad, and they both thought I needed discipline, so they slapped me around a lot. I’ve forgiven my dad for taking his broken dreams and frustration out on me. But forgiving my mom is still a work in progress. She was always thinking of herself and had a vicious mean streak. One day when I was five I was supposed to take my dinner plate from the table and put it in the sink, and for some reason I didn’t do it, so she hit me with the handle of a broomstick and broke my fucking fingers. She didn’t have to do that! I have my own daughter, and I’ve never laid a hand on her through her entire life. I’ll admit I was a shitty, absent, drug-abusing, alcoholic father, but I never hit her. They hit me all the time. I had chores to do every day, and if I missed one, WHACK!
School wasn’t much better. I went to a Catholic school, and all the teachers thought I was retarded because I didn’t speak or understand English. And they thought I was evil because I was left-handed. The nuns would smack my left hand with the sharp side of a ruler every time I tried to use it. I’d have swollen knuckles, and my fingers would be cut and bleeding. In a way it worked out well because it made me ambidextrous, which was good when I played baseball—I could switch hit. At the time, though, I didn’t see it that way of course, and I finally snapped. One day this group of kids was teasing me. They wouldn’t let me play with the Tonka trucks and they treated me like I was retarded because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Out of sheer frustration I picked up a plastic chair, raised it above my head, and threw it through a window. The glass exploded with a satisfying crash, and these brat kids scattered like roaches. One of the nuns immediately grabbed my arm, yanked it hard enough to almost dislocate my shoulder, and dragged me to the head nun. They called my grandma and I got kicked out of kindergarten. That went over real well at home. My mom was unhappy because I had to be home schooled for a while, and that cramped her style. She couldn’t just ignore me. And my dad, being from German and Norwegian descent, instituted martial law. If I didn’t follow the rules, he made me go into the corner of a room and raise my hands. He would sit there reading a book or watching TV, and every so often he’d look over to make sure I still had my hands in the air. I’d be there for hours until my arms started to ache. I’d be shaking, panting, and sweating from the pain until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I’d put my arms down.
Home schooling was pretty good for me. I learned English and basic math, and pretty soon I was above my age level in reading. But even though I picked things up quickly, I took as long as I could to do the homework because after I was done with my lessons I had to sweep the floor and do laundry or dishes or whatever the wicked witch and my dad prepared to punish me with that day. It was pretty brutal, but in the end it taught me discipline, which is why I have so many records out and how I’ve been able to stay focused on tour no matter how many drugs I was on. The Buddhists say we choose our parents.
When I finished my homework, chores, and suffered whatever humiliation was on the agenda for the day, I was allowed to watch TV. Mostly it was game shows or sports. My dad and I actually sat down and watched White Sox and Blackhawks games together. And when we were on the same page, he was an okay guy. I always knew sports would be an important part of my life, especially hockey. I loved the competitiveness, the action, the violence. In 1966, when I was eight, the Hawks were a juggernaut led by some of the greatest players in the sport: Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Phil Esposito. They had a bruiser of a defenseman named Ed Van Impe, who was the king of the cheap shots. The next year Philadelphia picked him up and he became part of the legendary Broad Street Bullies, who won two Stanley Cups. But in 1966 he led the Hawks in penalty minutes with 111 and intimidated other players just by raising his stick. That year the team finished first place in their division but lost to the fucking Detroit Red Wings in the semifinals.
When I was nine years old my dad took me to an autograph signing at Grossinger Pontiac. Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, and Jerry Korab were there, and Korab started hitting on my mom right in front of my dad. That was a point of contention for quite a while.
Nothing made me feel that sense of power and pride of professional hockey until September 1967 when I was watching the Ed Sullivan Show and a band came on that blew me away. They had this raw, primal energy I had never seen before, even in sports, and they were way more transgressive and dangerous than Elvis or the Beatles.
The guitarist had this total “fuck you” attitude, the drummer played like a cool, calm machine, and the singer danced in this weird way, almost like a marionette. Although the singer wasn’t particularly good looking, all the girls were screaming. The band was the Rolling Stones. They were performing “Paint It Black” from Aftermath, and they embodied everything the nuns at school had warned me about. It was practically Satanic, and I was hooked. I immediately went out and got this Stones T-shirt with the tongue logo. Other kids in the neighborhood wore Monkees shirts or Beatles shirts and made fun of me for backing a loser band. I was like, “Fuck you, they’re awesome. The Monkees and Beatles are losers.” I got into my first real fist fight over that, which started a long trend. I usually got my ass kicked
, but I got my punches in. That’s pretty much the way my fighting career went for the next thirty years.
I started listening to more rock music. Before they called it “classic rock,” the radio was playing the Kinks, the Who—all this great stuff from the British Invasion—and even though I didn’t have any friends, when the riffs were buzzing and the drums were pounding I felt like a part of something, a member of a community of like-minded misfits I had yet to meet. I heard Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn and that made me feel like I was high even before I knew what that meant. Then I heard Led Zeppelin, and that was as mind-blowing to me as the Rolling Stones. By far Ministry’s biggest influences are Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top. If you could cross-breed them, you’d hear the roots of post-Twitch Ministry, only without all the distorted screaming.
I got my first guitar from my grandfather, the coolest man in the world. It was a classical guitar, and he taught me some basic chords. At first it was hard for me to position my fingers on the strings and push down hard enough to make the notes ring out, so I gave up on guitar for a while and decided to play drums instead. By that time my dad made it clear that I wouldn’t have any spending money unless I worked for it. So when I was twelve I got a job at Arlington Race Track in Chicago shoveling horse shit for, like, a dollar an hour. I had to get up at 5 a.m. and take a bus to the stables, which were next to a major track, so it was easy to get there. Waking up 5 a.m. was another story. Later in life there’d be tons of times I’d stay up past that time working, partying, or feeling the breath escaping my body and struggling for my life. But that was the first time I had to be up at the crack of dawn. It was my first job and I hated it. The only thing good thing about that was I got see Secretariat and he was the coolest racehorse ever. He was an American thoroughbred, and in 1973 he took the Triple Crown by winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes. He was the first horse in twenty-five years to set records in all three races. I actually got to go into his stall and shovel his shit, and he seemed to understand that I was doing him a favor. His shit didn’t even make me gag. But not the other horses; they smelled bad, their shit reeked, and they didn’t like me. They would kick the crap out of me every day. I had to try to dodge their hooves while I was shoveling, and this made the job harder because I’d jump out of the way and, literally, the shit would fly. So I’d have to shovel it again. To this day I fucking hate horses. I would rather get attacked by a lion or a tiger than kicked by another horse.
When I had enough money I went to the local music store and bought a cheap drum kit for about fifty bucks. The kick drum pedal barely worked, and the one cymbal, a crash cymbal, sounded like really loud television static. I didn’t know how to play it, but I beat the shit out of it while I listened to the Stones and whatever songs were on rock radio. That was really the first instrument I played for hours at a time. Two months after I got the thing, I came home one day and there was no drum kit. In its place was a Martin acoustic guitar. It turned out the noise of the drum was bugging the shit out of my parents, so they traded it in for the guitar—like pulled a switch-a-roo on me. So I took the Martin, which was worth a lot more money than my drum kit, and I traded it for a cheap electric and a shitty little amp—they pulled my plug, I pulled their plug. I learned power chords and some simple scales and licks. Then a couple months later I came home from school, and there’s another acoustic guitar and all my shit’s gone! My dad and I had this silent running war. I went to a pawn shop and traded the acoustic for a bass and a little amp. And then they got fed up with that and the verbal threats began, and I stuck to acoustic for a while.
Back then I was pretty chubby because I didn’t exercise. So my dad said, “You’re gonna have to do some sports.” I chose baseball and immediately started losing weight because we did all these exercises and running as part of practice. It turned out baseball was a pretty good match for me. At first the coach thought I was this little lazy piece of shit kid, so he put me out in right field, which is the scummiest position because the ball hardly ever gets knocked out there. But one day the ball rocketed past the first basemen and bounced out to me and I fielded it. There was a kid on first base, and he was trying to go from first to home, so I whipped the ball past the cutoff man and threw the kid out at the plate. That’s when the coach knew I was legit. They started paying more attention to me, and I started focusing more and learned how to field the ball and hit.
Once my dad realized I had some potential he started coaching my Little League team, which sucked. He held me to a higher standard than everyone else. If I’d get two hits in a game, he’d say, “You should have had four.” He was very demanding, and I hated that, but I have to admit it made me a better player. Outside of school all my time in fifth grade was spent playing baseball. It didn’t make me popular or anything. I tried to fit in, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be cool when I tried to act cool; it wasn’t until years later that I learned that you can only be cool if it’s not an act. But back then I got bullied a lot. I started fighting back—not with too much success at first, but at least I made it known that if you bullied me, you were going to get a fight. And eventually, as I went along in school, I got bullied less and less.
The first real friend I had was this kid named Scott Whittinghill. We met through Little League at age ten, and as soon as we made eye contact we both knew we were complete future misanthropes and didn’t belong on this mortal coil; we knew we hated everyone, including our parents. We were like blood brothers from the start. We’d hang out after school, and we’d fuck shit up like little anarchists. We’d smash car windshields, vandalize garages, graffiti people’s cars. Looking back I think we were trying to make a statement, and at that age that’s the only kind of statement you can make. You can’t do it politically. You can’t make your voice heard. So you act out and fuck shit up.
But I’m the stupidest criminal in the world. I couldn’t go into a Walgreens without at least getting detained for shoplifting cassettes, baseball cards, or candy. Scott and I used to get in all kinds of trouble for being destructive, but we were curious about other kinds of rebellion as well. In 1968 he and I ran away from home to see the Democratic National Convention. We heard there were riots there, and we wanted to see what the fuss was all about. So we took the train in from our suburban homes and brought sleeping bags. We wanted to spend the night with the protesters in Grant Park. But the cops came and started beating people. There was a whole line of horses and police. I was pepper sprayed—a ten-year-old kid. It felt like acid was corroding my face. My eyes wouldn’t stop tearing, I was gasping, and I had trouble breathing. So we ran and got the train back home. I flooded my face with water before anyone had the chance to yell at me. Our parents grounded us both for that stunt.
I think it was my grandparents’ defiant spirit that made me so resentful of authority. I knew the shit I did was gonna get me in trouble, but I didn’t care. It was like I was saying, “Oh yeah, I’m just a kid. I dare you to do something about it!” I kept doing stupid shit and getting punished. When I was twelve Scott and I would steal cars and take joyrides. It started with my dad’s Oldsmobile 442. That was a sweet car—too sweet not to take for a joyride. I would wait until my parents were asleep, and then I’d tie together sheets and climb out the second-floor window of our house. I’d meet Scott outside, and we would put the car in neutral and push it out of the driveway and up the street a little bit because when you turned on the engine, you could hear it. Our hearts would race when we had the engine going. Then I’d move the seat forward and drive around the block a few times even though I could barely see over the dashboard.
We were really careful about putting the seat back and pulling the car into the exact position where my dad parked it. Even so, he got suspicious after we did it a couple times and he started putting secret markers down where the wheels were. In the morning he’d check and see that the wheels weren’t aligned where they were the night before and he’d b
eat my ass. But that didn’t stop me. We must have taken that car out a hundred times. One night I was driving it around and doing pretty well, but a cop by the side of the road noticed there was, like, this munchkin behind the wheel, so he pulled me over. My throat dropped into my stomach and my heart was beating so fast that it felt like it was putting dents in my rib cage. For a second I thought about gunning it, but instead I just pulled over. The cop couldn’t believe it when he saw how young I was. He drove me back home and knocked on the door. Another strikeout for little Al.
Intervention 1
Ministry Frontman’s Stepfather,
Ed Jourgensen, Illuminates the Past
To hear Al Jourgensen’s stepfather tell it, his son wasn’t born with the mark of the beast on his forehead. And until Jourgensen discovered drugs as a teenager and started rebelling, he was a good kid with a keen sense of humor. He even did his homework and house chores without complaining. The two went to hockey games and football games together, and his stepdad even helped coach Jourgensen’s Little League team. When his son turned fourteen, however, his stepdad got a call from school saying that Jourgensen was using drugs. From that moment on the relationship became increasingly more strained. But even after Jourgensen left the house to go to college, his stepdad kept in touch with him as regularly as he could. Then, after Lollapalooza 1992, their communication deteriorated as Jourgensen slid further and further into addiction, and it came to a halt for more than five years after his stepdad visited him in Austin and saw how unhealthy the rocker had become. It took Al’s wife Angie’s persistence to unite Ministry’s frontman with the man who raised him. Since then the two have maintained a decent father-son relationship, but Ed Jourgensen admits that still he worries he’ll receive a heartbreaking phone call one day from his daughter-in-law.
Ministry Page 5