Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  When you toured in Revolting Cocks you had a penis suit that shot fake sperm into the crowd.

  po That was one of my proudest moments. GWAR was jealous of that penis. They said, “Man, we’ve been trying to do something that shoots jizz into audiences, and yours is better than ours.” They’d have to hook up fire extinguishers and hoses to theirs. Mine was just a can of hair mousse inside a hollowed-out penis belt. That was a real crowd pleaser. At the Riviera there were four thousand people in the crowd, and I sprayed this stuff all over the speakers. The fans thought it was whipped cream, and they were licking it off the speakers. All of a sudden you see this look on their faces like, “Ewwww” once they got the taste of it.

  Any stand-out memories of Al?

  po I picked up Al and Paul Barker in 1989 at this airport in Houston, and when Al comes out he’s carrying a boom box the size of a Cadillac. It takes a full seat itself. We’re driving back to Austin, and when we get there we go to this big party in the basement of Sears that the guys in a band I was managing were throwing. I got out of the car, and I suddenly felt nauseous and puked on the sidewalk. Al came running up behind me, scooped up a handful of my vomit, and shoved it in his mouth. I remember thinking, “Alright, that’s impressive!” I knew for sure at the time we were truly friends. You wouldn’t do that to a stranger.

  Did you have a chance to repay the friendship?

  po I asked Al why Richard 23 left RevCo. He told me Richard received a version of “You Often Forget” and called Al and said he hated it and didn’t approve of the mix. Al went off on the guy, and I’m like, “Well, that motherfucker is going to be in Texas this week with Front 242. I’ll get him back for you.” I got back to Austin, recruited a few of the guys in Skatenigs, and we got these water uzis. We bought a big bottle of One A Day Plus Iron vitamins and started pounding those until our piss was glowing yellow. Then we filled up these uzis with our piss and blasted Front 242 from the front of the crowd. I shot Richard’s microphone while he was singing. He was lip synching a song with his mouth foaming with piss! They stopped the show three times. I called Al afterward and said, “Everything has been taken care of.”

  How did you wind up recording “Beers, Steers + Queers” together?

  po Al and I had been in Houston for about a week eating acid. We got on the plane to Austin, and I puked about three barf bags, then Al started getting sick. When we got there we were both green. He said, “You’re going to write a song called ‘Beers, Steers + Queers’,” and threw me in the studio with Ion—that’s what I called Paul Barker because he was so scientific and straight, kinda like Spock. Everything about me sickened him. For him to have to record a song with me and babysit me for a few days was probably the worst thing he or I could think of. I drank a fifth of whiskey and wrote the lyrics for the song, and then we just recorded it. I’d start and stop, drunk off my ass. I didn’t know what to do. That was my first time ever in a recording studio.

  Beers, Steers + Queers marked the beginning of a whole new style of music for Revolting Cocks. Did you have much input in the band?

  po Not really, outside doing vocals on tour and coming back in 2005 to record a little on Cocked and Loaded. It was definitely a pretty crazy move for Al to bring people like me into his life. I don’t know that I brought much to the table for him other than some good stories.

  Did you and Al ever have a falling out?

  po We had a big stupid feud right before Psalm 69 came out. We had just signed with Megaforce, and Patty, Al’s wife at the time, was going to manage us. She suggested that the other guitar player and I should go up to the studio and try to cheer Al up because he was at the end of his wits with that album. I was in celebration mode and I started writing the lyrics for new Cocks material and was making a tape. Al stormed in and accused me of partying when he was trying to finish the record. He threw a bunch of equipment at me, so I got out of the studio and went back to Texas.

  What did he throw?

  po Microphones, turntables—anything he could grab. I wasn’t going to fight him. I regret that we did not talk for nine years after that. But, me being from Texas and not being on his payroll, I wasn’t going to be like everyone else that always crawled back to him. I didn’t have that kind of relationship with him. I felt like I was truly his friend. And I feel like at that time Al really didn’t know many true friends. Most of them he had known were people who were going to be working for him or were already working for him. They had different agendas. He had a lot of people using him or kissing up to him for a place on the payroll. That wasn’t me at all, and because I took that stand, maybe he took it even harder.

  When did you see him again?

  po When he moved back to Texas I decided to go over there and talk to him. When Al and I saw each other on our own terms, we couldn’t have been happier. It was like nothing had ever happened.

  It’s amazing that despite all his years of addictions and problems with alcohol, he has released more than twenty-five albums.

  po The bottom line is that he’s one of the most talented motherfuckers that has ever walked this earth. He can pick up any instrument and play it fairly well. You’re talking about someone who hears a song from the moment he decides to start writing it. And he hears it from beginning to end—not the melodies or arrangement but the whole polished things with all the production values in it. He hears things in such a big-picture way. Very few people understand the way he works. He hears everything as a producer, songwriter, artist, and performer. He’s thinking about all aspects of a song as he’s writing it, which is phenomenal.

  chapter 9

  Psalm 69

  The Downward Spiral and the Perils of Fame

  Given my track record, it stands to reason that Ministry’s 1992 album Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs is widely regarded as Ministry’s breakthrough. I hardly recall making it. What I do remember is opaqued through damaged lenses and plays back like slow-motion replays of combat footage on scratched film. The whole thing was fucked. Sire wanted a big hit. They had tasted success with The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste and were ready for Ministry’s version of Thriller. There were gluttons and sycophants everywhere as well as a team of publicists and radio promo people waiting to sell whatever we concocted to the masses like sets of Ginsu knives. It was a strange time. “Alternative” was the norm. Shit that ten years earlier would have been laughed at was being trumpeted as the next big thing. And all these bands were all going platinum—Nirvana, Tool, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins. Everyone thought it was Ministry’s turn. It was, and everyone was ready for it except us.

  In the early ’90s money was pouring out of the faucets of every record company’s bathrooms. It was so obscene; you could practically wipe your ass with $20 bills. Recording budgets were astronomical, so when Ministry were in Chicago Trax! and we were supposed to be working on the follow-up to The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, the drug money for me and Mikey was coming in the mail almost weekly. And our dealers were coming around just as often. We were spending $1,000 a day to support three junkies: me, Patty, and Mikey. All the money went right into our arms and up our noses. I was shooting up, smoking crack, drinking Bushmills laced with acid. And this was a cycle I’d repeat ten times a day, at least. We were complete nihilists, but we didn’t care because we had money. It didn’t dawn on us that we had to make a record. Besides, I was the producer, so we didn’t have to pay some hack a huge salary, and we were still at Trax Studio, which was dirt cheap, so the money went a long way—especially since the advance for Psalm 69 was $750,000. Sire gave us three-quarters of a million dollars to make this breakthrough record, and we’d get crazy high and record hours of white noise—just walls of static that sounded like a radio stuck between stations—which is kind of what I had become.

  What I was doing wasn’t art anymore. It wasn’t fun—it was procedure. And the same with the drugs. It was maint
enance, and like any habit, it turned into ritual—shoot, snort, shoot, snort, shoot, snort, shoot, snort. Repeat. I wasn’t enjoying what I used to love, so I decided to rebel harder than ever and push the limits to their utmost extremes. Mikey and I were shooting speedballs, blending smack and coke in the same syringe so you don’t nod off and you don’t get wired. If you get the mix right, you feel calm and free. But it’s a deadly combination, one that killed Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak as well as John Belushi, Chris Farley, and Mitch Hedberg. What can I say? Even when I had given up and wanted to die, I was a survivor.

  I called the members of Ministry who weren’t junkies—Barker and

  Connelly—“the Book Club” because they’d act all intellectual and crinkle their noses at me and Mikey as if we were pieces of dog shit on the sidewalk. While I was wasting away and creating nothing, they all became nervous, because if the junkies didn’t produce, they didn’t eat. One day we were in the lounge of the bus and they were acting all pretentious. I challenged them to name one hundred books they’d read in their lives, and between the three of them they couldn’t fucking do it. I was a junkie, a nihilist, and a menace to society, but I was never ignorant or inarticulate. I’ve always loved to read. I’ve read hundreds of books, unlike these asshole pseudo-intellectuals.

  Because everyone around us was freaking out, Mikey and I started plugging in our instruments, programming beats, and rolling tape—trying to get something, anything down. But everything we did sounded like something else or put us to sleep, even with the speedballs. We may have been wastes of human flesh, but we still had our fucking integrity, and I wasn’t about to slap the name Ministry on something that wasn’t deserving of the title. That’s why bands do side projects, and the shit we were coming up with wasn’t as good as the worst Pailhead or Revolting Cocks song. But as long as I had the drugs, I kept

  at it.

  One day Lollapalooza came to town. It was the inaugural year of the festival, with Jane’s Addiction, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Ice-T and Body Count, Fishbone, Butthole Surfers, Rage Against the Machine, Rollins Band, and a few other groups. When the festival came to Chicago I wanted to see Trent Reznor, because despite the shit I put him through, we were still friends. At the time he and his band were sharing a tour bus with Henry Rollins and his crew. So I went up to the bus to hang with Trent, and Rollins looked at me and said, “Get out of here, you piece of shit. I hate junkies.” Now I know Henry Rollins is supposed to be this he-man who lifts weights, takes off his shirt, and shows his muscles, but I didn’t know if the guy could fight or not, and frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t even think about what I was doing; I just took a giant swing at him, and then a bunch of guys split us up. He didn’t even get a shot in, and he never came after me or bothered me again. Although from what I’ve heard, he spent many a spoken-word show totally trashing me, so right back at ya, Henry. You are an asshole!

  While I was backstage I hung out with Gibby Haynes, who always cracks me up because he’s so out of his mind. Some musicians act crazy onstage and then get off and might as well be English professors—some of them actually are. But Gibby’s a genuine freak, which is why I love the guy. He’s the real deal. So I invited Gibby to come to Chicago Trax! after the show and maybe work on a song with us. He agreed, so I decided we’d try working with this riff I had written that I couldn’t figure out any vocals for. I thought maybe it needs a fresh perspective.

  Gibby came in absolutely shitfaced. He couldn’t even walk. I looked at him, laughed, and said, “Hey man. Well, let’s see what you’ve got.” We set him up with a stool, gave him a microphone and a fifth of Jack, and played the track. But we didn’t exactly get lightning in a bottle. Gibby started babbling some incoherent nonsense, knocked over the whiskey, and fell off the stool. We propped him back up again and heard, “Bing, bang, dingy, dong, wah, wah, ling, a bong…” CRASH! Back on the floor. We went on like that for take after take, getting nothing but gibberish with a few discernible words, like “baby,” “gun, “trailer park,” “around,” and “Why? Why? Why?!” Finally Gibby passed out. He was gone. And that was it. But I knew there was something there. If only I could extract the magic, it would be like pulling a diamond ring out of a septic tank.

  I edited the song on my two-track at home. I spliced so much tape to make his gobbledy-gook sound like words; I swear to God, even in my fucked-up state, I had the rock-steady hands to conduct delicate brain surgery. Cut-tape, cut-tape, cut-tape—all night long. Three weeks later it started sounding pretty good. I added these samples about drag racing, put in these crazy backward tape noises, racecar sounds, a redneck thrash beat, and this off-kilter riff. Mikey did these wild blues solos, then I added the nonsense spoken-word intro to go along with Gibby’s moronic lyrics: “Soon I discovered that this rock thing was true / Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil / Jesus was an architect, previous to his career as a prophet / All of a sudden I found myself in love with the world / So there was only one thing that I could do was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.” To this day journalists ask me what the intro and lyrics are about, and I honestly have no fucking clue. We were just winging it.

  Right after I finished editing, Sire got all up in my ass. They hated me to the point of viciousness, even though they had given me all this money. They became hell-bent on my destruction because they didn’t have any mavericks or loose cannons on their label. They wanted controlled pop people. I was a threat to them, so they harassed me a lot. They wanted to know what we had for their $750,000. And it got to the point that I couldn’t stall them anymore. So I sent them “Jesus Built My Hotrod” because that’s all we had. They were pissed. I get this phone call: “We gave you $750,000, and you send this nonsense back to us. What are we supposed to do with this?” They hated it. I was like, “Well, either double down or not, man. Cut us loose now if you want. I don’t care. I have enough dope. I’m a nihilist. I don’t care if I die tomorrow.” So they took the bait and doubled down, which was cool because we actually got the record company to pay us $1.5 million to make a record. But it kind of sucked because it meant we actually had to get to work. Oh yeah—and also recoup.

  Doing that song gave me and Mikey a second wind, though, which was good, and that’s how we came up with all the riffs for songs like “N.W.O.” and “Just One Fix.” While we were “working,” Sire pressed “Jesus Built My Hotrod” into a maxi-single, and the radio department started pimping the song to all the college and commercial radio stations across the country. The thing went supernova. They sold 1.5 million copies of the single alone—to everyone’s surprise. So they left us alone for a little bit to see what we would come up with next.

  Thank god for Mikey, though. He was wasted all the time but was still productive. Most of the time I was just a fucking wreck. And I was getting more and more shit from the Book Club, who felt like this was their big chance to be rock stars on my back. Having a monkey on your back is bad enough; I didn’t need these monkeys climbing all over me and making extra claw marks. The routine was the same as before. Mikey and I would go into the studio and record stuff all night, and then we’d leave. Then the Book Club would come in and add their parts. The next day we’d come in and erase 80 percent of what they’d done and continue what we were doing. It got really tense. And Chicago Trax! had gotten even more depraved, which is why we finally had to shut it down. Maybe I bought into my own hype as the guru of darkness a little bit too much, which never happened again. I was reading Aleister Crowley, and we had the Satanic Bible on all the tables where these people were partying. I never read it; I think Anton LaVey, who wrote the thing and started the Church of Satan, was a big poser. He was all about his own celebrity and came up with a philosophy based on the basic principles of hedonism. The rest he stole from Ayn Rand and Crowley: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” But I felt like we needed the right accoutrements, so we had black and red candles and that stupi
d book with a goat’s head in the pentagram on the cover, and it looked pretty cool.

  Toward the end some of the people in Chicago Trax! started getting sadistic, but it totally wasn’t anything out of my playbook. There was no joy in it anymore. It was almost like a factory of degradation of debauchery. Then somebody died, but not on my watch. It happened in 1992 on my thirty-fourth birthday. A bunch of us were banging heroin at my place. Others who were there just drank. To each his own. My tattoo artist Guy Aitchison was there with his good friend Lorri Jackson, who was a well-regarded local poet. Lorri left with a heroin dealer and OD’d and I got blamed. I had nothing to do with it! She showed up at my place, met this guy, left with him, shot up with him, and died in his house, not mine. But the press attacked me, everyone was giving me the evil eye, and the cops were watching me. The heat was on. So I said, “Fuck this—it’s too cold here anyway. Let’s move to Texas.” I got drummed out of Chicago, and I’ll never forgive the people who treated me like a serial killer after this girl died.

  We decided to finish Psalm 69 at Shade Tree Studios in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. That was Barker’s idea. He booked the place to get me away from all my heroin friends. But he was too stupid to find somewhere that was more than ninety miles away from Chicago, so Mikey and I just wound up driving the ninety miles twice a week to hook up with our dealers, jonesing all the way there and risking getting arrested on the way back. We had a couple close shaves with the law, where we were pulled over and we hid our stash behind the ashtray—popped the vents out, put our stuff in there, and clicked it back in just as the cops came up to us with a flashlight. “Is there a problem, officer?”