Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  After meeting Jourgensen at a party in 1988, the two formed the twisted and subversive side project Lard. Working at Trax Studios with various members of Ministry, the collaboration created four satiric yet inflammatory offerings, the 1989 EP The Power of Lard, the 1990 album The Last Temptation of Reid (named after Chicago Trax! Studio owner Reid Hyams, the butt of countless pranks and insults), the 1997 album Pure Chewing Satisfaction, and the 2000 EP 70’s Rock Must Die. Although Biafra traveled with Ministry in 1990 and performed at several shows, Lard have never toured.

  Biafra was a strong supporter of Ralph Nader’s presidential campaigns and remains a vocal political advocate. He is currently the frontman for Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, with whom he has released two records, 2009’s The Audacity of Hype and 2013’s White People and the Damage Done as well as the 2011 EP Enhanced Methods of Questioning.

  When did you first hear Ministry?

  jello biafra Every time I went to Chicago I’d look up Jim and Dannie and go to the new Wax Trax! store. I was visiting them, and they told me they were starting to work with a band called Ministry. I was introduced to Al in passing and saw him on more than one occasion going up and down the stairs where Jim and Dannie lived. He was always friendly. And then I was hanging with Wax Trax! co-owner Mike Smythe in After Hours and he played me a test pressing of a seven-inch Ministry single they never released that pre-dated all the other stuff they put out. He knew I liked Joy Division and Bauhaus and the kind of postpunk that had teeth and went in many different directions at once. I immediately realized this was a really, really good record, but they said they weren’t going to release it, so they made me a tape of it. One song was called “Overkill,” which I really liked. The B-side was “I’m Falling.” I thought it was top-of-the-line atmospheric postpunk. And even though Ministry signed to Arista and released a pure pop album, I always knew that if Al ever decided to rock, he would be really, really good. When he got off Arista, Wax Trax! gave me the “(Every Day Is) Halloween” single, and I thought, “Well, this isn’t normally my thing, but this is really well done.” The songwriting is really good and the hooks are great.

  It seems like the two of you would have made strange bedfellows at the time. When did you realize you could bond musically with Al?

  jb When I heard the Pailhead twelve-inch “I Will Refuse” I was blown through the wall. It was like Big Black with dance floor production. I don’t know how many copies of that I wore out in a two-month period. When Revolting Cocks came to town after putting out You Goddamned Son of a Bitch I met Al at a party and we hung out. He told me he was over electronic music and was telling everybody to throw away their keyboards and buy Marshall stacks. He still had short hair and a fisherman hat at the time. Then I thought we had the perfect middle ground to work together when an electronic rock artist I really like named Christian Lunch had an unreleased album that needed a better mix. I said, “Hey, let’s have Al redo it.” So I went to Chicago and was baptized regarding how they did things over there. I was used to punk rock mixes, where you’d work for an hour or two and the mix was done. I went and watched Al at work on this record, and six or seven hours later they were still working on the snare drum. I freaked out about that because I didn’t understand their mindset. I also had never seen so much white powder in one place in my life. Finally that was stalling out, and Christian admitted he had not done a proper tape transfer in the masters he sent to Al. So I said, “Look, we’ve only got so many days left. Why don’t we make something ourselves?” Al lit up like a Christmas tree and said, “Yeah, that was kinda what I wanted to do all along! What should we call it?” I said, “Why don’t we call it Lard?” Al fell on the floor of his living room laughing, and Lard was born. The beauty of the name is that you can put those big bold Lard letters next to a picture of just about anything and it completely changes the meaning of the photo. It makes it absurd, especially within the context of the music.

  You recorded The Power of Lard in 1988. What do you remember about the sessions?

  jb We were still feeling each other out and figuring what to do, and I wasn’t totally prepared for making one of my own things so I hadn’t brought a mountain of lyrics or riffs. I had to wing it with whatever popped into my head. I started using one-line lyric slivers I’d never found a home for. I cut ad slogans out of the Chicago Tribune and we mixed them up and went with the William Burroughs cut-up method. We wanted to make it as ridiculous and absurd as possible, which Al was all in favor of. I learned pretty fast that Al wasn’t this grim poet laureate of heroin and hairspray depression. The public may have seen him this way, but anyone exposed to a day or an hour at Wax Trax! knew otherwise. And that vivaciousness, the bombast, the hyperelectric mind and sense of humor has a powerful effect on other people. You get this mental adrenaline rush from being around him, which I think is what draws people back to him even after they go through ups and downs. Things pop into your head that don’t otherwise. Looking back, I think The Power of Lard had lyrical threads about how so many people are controlled by corporate McMedia and other forces because they’re worrying about their weight rather than worrying about their lives or other people’s. I realized with his one-of-a-kind production and engineering skills that you plug any riff into Al’s sound and something amazing would come out. Back then Al had a twenty-four-track board, so to get this giant sound he would record four tracks of guitars, bounce them down to one track. Then he would record four more and bounce those down. He would repeat the process until there were sixteen tracks of guitar together on four tracks. And somehow he produced it so they had teeth instead of glossing each other out and getting all gunky. “Time to Melt” was thirty-two minutes long, and he said by the time he was doing the overdubs and had to do sixteen tracks of that, he felt like he had left his own body and was floating somewhere on the ceiling.

  Was Al lucid when you worked with him?

  jb That’s the weird thing about Al. He has done enough drugs to kill a horse. Every day he wakes in the morning he defies science. But somehow, to this very day, in the end no matter what condition he’s in, he comes up with amazing stuff. On some level his mind is always on and dialed in and he’s always focused somewhere, somehow, or you wouldn’t get what you get, let alone get as much of it. After we recorded The Power of Lard I went back to San Francisco for a while before I returned to do the final mixes. During the final mixes Al was sober. Did anything change as far as how things were done and all the debauchery and carrying on? No. He’s just as much fun sober as he is when he’s wasted. But like a lot of people with substance histories, he doesn’t really know that. I guess when you’ve been a long-term addict and you try to re-enter that creative mindset sober you don’t really know what to do.

  So he relapsed shortly after?

  jb Yeah. We were supposed to start another Lard project before The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste tour. And then Patty [Jourgensen] called me and said, “Al is in the hospital and Lard is canceled. He almost died.” Al told me he could never drink another drop of alcohol again. Within days the tour starts, and there’s a quart of the old Bushmills onstage, and he’s downing one or two of them every night.

  Did Lard ever play live?

  jb There was never a full-on Lard tour. We played some songs during The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste tour, but we could never put a full tour together. We talked about it over the years, but it never quite happened. But when I played with Ministry on The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste tour, it was unlike anything I had ever experienced. There were two drummers, four guitar players, and a big fence that was designed to keep the moshers away. But of course it became its own source of tension and energy for the show and was very effective. I was one of the only performers who used to climb on it, and I had a good time with that.

  How did the creation of The Last Temptation of Reid differ from that of The Power of Lard?

  jb The Power of Lard had
done really well, so the stakes were higher, and we all had a little more emotion invested in the band. There was some tension, but we got an album done that I’m assuming he still likes—I sure do. During the sessions I learned a little more about the lengths Al would go to in order to get the sound he wanted. When you have a band, you usually at least try to get the basic track down when you record. You try to get the guitar and bass together with the drums. But in order to have every single drum sound clean so there was no high hat bleeding into the snare or cymbal crash, the basic track for the session was bass drum and snare only. Sure, there was a bass guitar playing along that would later be retracked, and there were pillows where cymbals were supposed to be so [drummer] Jeff Ward would get all his moves down. But every single cymbal, high-hat, and tom hit were overdubbed separately. Jeff had just bought a very fancy, expensive cherry-red Pearl drum set. The sounds he was getting were amazing. I thought, “Wow, we’re not going to have to do much to this.” But by the time Al did the final mix, every single drum also had samples layered over it. At the same time, a lot of the stuff people think are drum machines are actually live drums.

  Lard put out Pure Chewing Satisfaction seven years after The Last Temptation of Reid. Were you and Al communicating during the years you weren’t working together?

  jb About two-thirds of that album was recorded fairly soon after the last one. And then things blew apart for a while because Al and Patty had twisted my arm and persuaded me to do the British release of the Skatenigs album. Al had a huge falling out with some of them. So suddenly I was a bad person because I put the Skatenigs album out. It took a while to get that settled, and then Al was so busy with Ministry that even RevCo spun completely out of orbit. Finally Filth Pig and The Dark Side of the Spoon came out, and we decided to finish Pure Chewing Satisfaction. I was flown out to the opening of the new Chicago Trax!, which is located two blocks from one of the most notoriously violent housing projects in the United States, if not the world. When I first got to the party the first thing I saw was [studio owner] Reid Hyams running up to a cop, saying, “Hey, hey, get me some drugs! I need some drugs for the party!” And I thought, “Okay, some things haven’t changed.” The shenanigans weren’t as wild, although I do remember Al would go into Reid’s office and wipe his ass with all the pencils and pens Reid chewed on and put them back into the container if he was pissed off at Reid right then. I witnessed that more than once.

  But Al wasn’t there very much because a lot of the musical tracks had already been recorded, so we weren’t writing in the studio. I didn’t get to bring my own riffs in, so it was basically Ministry riffs being fed to the dog, but I was a very thankful dog because I really liked the songs and was grateful to have my crack at them. Al showed up for the mixing, but he wanted to be on the vocals and lyrics for “Mangoat” because it was so close to his heart. It’s about a guy named Buster, one of the old partners of Chicago Trax!, who by then was out of the business but who had brought one of the most spectacular misadventures on himself. I didn’t see him much, but once he walked into one of our sessions dressed like a ’70s detective show villain with a babe in each arm, grinning from ear to ear, playing tycoon. But I found out after the fact that Buster was, at times, a cross-dresser. One day he had to go to court because he went to a supermarket and apparently began shoplifting some things, then went into the men’s bathroom, where he was supposedly caught trying to shave hair off his back using canned creamed corn. I don’t know why he didn’t grab some shaving cream instead of creamed corn. But when I was overdubbing the vocals of that one, Al kept saying, “No, no, no. Change this line to that.” It was the only time we collaborated on a lyric. The chorus was Al’s creation. Al claimed he addressed Buster as Mangoat: “Mangoat, too hairy / Must shave / Must warn others!” I never figured out why he wanted the “warn others” line in the song, but he insisted it was an important part of the song.

  Jeff Ward played drums on the Pure Chewing Satisfaction track “I Wanna Be a Drug Sniffing Dog.” By the time the album came out he had passed away. Were you close to him in the interim?

  jb I wasn’t working with Jeff, but it’s kind of a touchy issue. When we started working on The Last Temptation of Reid Jeff drank here and there but knew he had to watch it because his mother had died of alcoholism and his father was on his second liver. Slowly but surely during the sessions Jeff started using heroin. I became the odd man out because I was the one who wasn’t doing drugs. Jeff got worse and worse and worse, and his drug use was cited as one of the reasons he got kicked out of Nine Inch Nails. He had grown up in the outer ’burbs of Chicago and came from a very different culture. His immigrant grandmother from Sicily was still living in the house, and he really wanted to please his father. As the story goes, he had run an eight-grand credit card bill and was afraid to have to face his family over it. So he gassed himself in the garage. As his father later put it to me: “I’d much rather have lost the eight grand than lost my son.” But with the double life that Jeff led, he felt he disgraced himself in the eyes of his family, and he couldn’t face it.

  Were you ever worried about Al’s substance abuse?

  jb I always have been. The first time Al told me he was afraid he was about to die was 1989 when we were doing The Last Temptation of Reid. Over dinner at the Startop restaurant he said, “We need to do a Lard tour soon before all my teeth fall out and all this shit happens to me and I’m gone.” That broke my heart. I’d gotten to know the guy and love the guy, and you don’t want to see this happen to anybody. Knowing there was that demon inside of him, tugging at him all the time and telling him, “You ain’t got long to live” was very sad. Obviously it hasn’t been far from the surface ever since, but somehow he has persevered. For a while he attributed his longevity to heroin itself because William Burroughs convinced him it had these healing properties. Who knows? Maybe it does, because Al is still here. But the last time I saw him before he got together with Angie he was still smoking crack. We were in Austin, and he was out of his head talking like a crazy person. I thought, “My God, I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.” A while later he resurfaced, and he and Angie got married. He was off everything except wine. He had his teeth redone and was living in LA and invited me over for Christmas. It was a very different kind of scene than I was used to. Angie was formally setting a table, and Al was having to adjust to all of this because he’d never lived like this before.

  chapter 8

  Truly Revolting

  The Sordid Story of El Duce, Penis Piercings,

  and the Hazing of Trent Reznor

  When The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste was done and dusted it was time to ramp up and record another Revolting Cocks record. By then the band had lost its European vibe and was becoming more American. Luc Van Acker came over for only a few weeks, and Richard 23 was out, so we hooked up with this crazy fuck named Phildo Owen. I met him on a Ministry tour in Austin. He was the DJ at the show, and he was also in a hardcore band called Skatenigs. The guy’s 89 percent certifiably insane, so we got along really well, and one drunken night he somehow became the vocalist for Revolting Cocks during the Beers, Steers + Queers era, between 1989 and 1991. He did the vocals for the title track and came on the road with us. The shows were nuts, but the studio sessions were really quiet compared to shit like The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, which was debauchery times ten. And I think that’s because we worked in shifts.

  Mikey, Jeff Ward, and I worked on music for three days straight, shooting up drugs to stay awake and yelling about stuff. And then we called Barker, Chris Connelly, and Martin Atkins and said, “Okay, I think we’re done. It’s time for you guys to take over.” We’d crash and they’d come in and work for a day or two. And then I’d come back in and erase at least 50 percent of whatever they had done and we’d start over again with the wrecking crew. I didn’t have to deal with anyone I didn’t wanna work with, and because I had final say on everything, Beers, Steers + Queers
came out pretty much how I wanted it. It was actually a very pleasant album to make.

  We talked the Skatenigs into opening for Revolting Cocks on that tour, which is just about as bad a career decision as I have ever made—no offense to Phil. It was their first venture into the toad pond of the record business, and they realized they didn’t have a chance on a bill opening for us and The Mentors. So they just came out, set up a barbecue grill, put on hats and aprons, and barbecued beef parts while their music was playing in the background. They’d cook up all the parts you would never eat—cocks, livers, kidneys—and when the meat parts were scalding hot they would fling them at the crowd. There were definitely some second-degree burns that went down during that tour, but that was Skatenigs—trying to curry favor with the kids in the mosh pits by inflicting them with burns from the body parts of cooked hooved animals.

  I was trying to save money by acting as the tour manager, and I chose the wrong tour to take on that role. There were more than a dozen arrests—a lot of shoplifting and violent assaults—I was chasing after everyone, trying to get them out of trouble. The Mentors, and Revolting Cocks, performances weren’t rock shows; they were a dysfunctional demonstration of the entire social fabric of the world. And the reason for that, above and beyond all the other decadence and debauchery, is because we had El Duce, the 350-pound singer of The Mentors on board. Here’s how I met El Duce (a.k.a. Eldon Hoke): Ministry was doing a show in 1989 in San Francisco at the Waldorf. We were in the backstage area, and I went to the bathroom and found this fucking guy there, naked from the waist down, lying in a pack of Dorito chips and vomit. I went into the urinal and said to him, “Hey, who the fuck are you?” And he said, “I’m El Duce!” like he’s Mick Jagger or something so I should already know him. He was trying to pull his pants back on, but they were on backward and inside out. He was really struggling, so I helped him out. I asked, “What are you doing here in the backstage area?” I didn’t know who he was; I had never heard of The Mentors. Then he started telling me, “I went to high school with your drummer, Bill Rieflin. I said, “Really? Cool.”