Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  He didn’t grow up with thrash metal. Did you share musical influences?

  mc Yeah, because he grew in with the same sort of love for guitar music that I have. We really connected on stuff like Deep Purple, Robin Trower, Jimi Hendrix, and the Allman Brothers. When he was growing up that’s the kind of stuff he was playing. He showed me old pictures of him when he was in Colorado, and not only was he a little pretty boy, but he had some long hair on him.

  When did you decide to join forces?

  mc It was after the Mind record was finished. He called me and asked if I would come on tour as Ministry’s lead guitar player. He wanted to bring out Jello Biafra, Chris Connelly, Ogre from Skinny Puppy, Martin Atkins from PIL, and Terry Bones from Discharge, and we were going to do a supergroup. I was, of course, honored and immediately jumped at the opportunity. It was right after that tour, he and I had bonded so well together that he called me right away and asked if I would come up to work on Psalm 69. Of course I jumped at that, and I’ll never forget the phone call. He was like, “Listen, I have this great idea, and I’ve been wanting to do this since I met you. I want to take my techno background and my synthesizers and my samples, and I want to mix it with your guitar work.” At the time I was like, “Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Let’s do it—anything new.” But I had no idea what he was getting ready to start, because there was obviously a whole new genre of music that came out of that which influenced massive amounts of bands. I was so happy to be a part of that.

  The metallic guitars started on The Land of Rape and Honey and

  got thrashier on The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste. Wasn’t that

  your playing?

  mc That was Al. Al did all the guitar on that. He was inspired and influenced from the Rigor Mortis stuff, and I’m sure other things. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing, but he knew it was in his heart and wanted to give it a shot, and it definitely worked. I came in right after the Mind was recorded, and after the tour we went to work on Psalm 69. We had no idea what was going to happen with that. We didn’t think it was going to blow up the way it did at all. We actually recorded the album in Wisconsin at Studio Royale, and we wound up scrapping half the record. I don’t know how many months we spent up there, but we got a lot done and we thought it was good. But when we got back to Chicago and started listening we decided to drop a lot of the songs. Some of it wound up going to Lard, and we rewrote Psalm 69.

  Al said Sire gave you 750 grand for the album and pretty much all the cash went into buying heroin, coke, and crack and that when the label asked for the record all you gave them was “Jesus Built My Hotrod.”

  mc Yeah, pretty much.

  Were you using drugs heavily before you joined Ministry?

  mc Not heroin. I was into speed and coke, so I was shooting coke, like, massively. And he used to freak out: “What the hell are you doing?” Eventually I was saying the same thing to him because he was doing a lot of heroin. And then we kind of switched. I poisoned him with shooting coke, and he poisoned me with shooting heroin. That was a big bond between us, and it definitely spun out of control for a long number of years. We were using every ten minutes, you could say.

  You were like the Toxic Twins.

  mc Totally. The rest of the band hated us. We were disgusting pigs to them. They were fascinated in a way with how we could even work, but we did. We were functional drug addicts. We spent a lot of money on drugs, man; that was priority to us. Then, of course, we wound up eventually getting so bad with heroin that that became our lives for a number of years.

  You and Al pretty much sat in the back of the bus away from everyone else.

  mc Yeah, the Book Club were at the front of the bus. We weren’t allowed up there, and they were definitely not going to come back where we were. Al and I used to sit back there and shoot up. He would get on his pedal-steel, I’d get on my acoustic, and we’d play “Far Away Eyes” by the Rolling Stones for thousands of miles.

  On one hand the Book Club despised you, and on the other they relied on you guys to create hits like “NWO” and “Just One Fix.”

  mc It was constantly like that, man. Al would work only at night, so we’d go in at seven or eight o’clock, and we’d work all night and into the morning. Paul Barker would come in at 8:30 a.m. with his Book Club gang and start working, and Al would leave. I had to work both ends because I was the guitar player, so I had to not only work with Al all night and have a blast and do tons of drugs and fuck chicks. When that was done I had to do more coke to stay up through the day to work with the Book Club, who were totally disgusted with me. When I would get done with those sessions I would go straight to Al’s room and go, “Look, dude, you have to give me some extra dope for doing this. This is uncool, man.” They would literally sit there and try to write music with calculators. I come from a punk/metal/blues background, where it’s all about jamming and feeling the song, but Barker, Rieflin, and those guys would, I swear to God, pull out calculators and purposely try to write complex mathematical time signatures. For years I never could grasp why Al and Paul were together, because they were so opposite in every single way that it was just a head scratcher.

  You have been such an important part of the band, yet you didn’t play on Dark Side of the Spoon, Animositisomina, most of Rio Grande Blood, and The Last Sucker.

  mc I must have quit Ministry six or seven times in this twenty-five-year-long history I’ve had with Al. We got off heroin around 2000, and I came back into the band after 2002, on the Animositisomina tour, when Barker called up and quit. That blew my mind. The words I said to him were, “Why are you quitting now? We’re going to go in the studio completely sober. This is what you’ve always wanted.” He had just had it with everything that was going on and wanted to part ways. I just never understood that, but whatever; life goes on and things got better.

  Did Paul take advantage of Al financially while Al was a junkie?

  mc Oh, totally. Not only that, he also did a really sleazeball thing and took out a life insurance policy on him, where he was going to collect massive amounts of money for Al dying and had everything on hold. Like Chris Connelly would come in and take Al’s place, and they’d keep the band going and he’d own everything. When Al found out it freaked him out really, really bad. They had worked together for seventeen years! Paul Barker seems like one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet in your life. But he still owes me tons of money that I’ll never, ever see, and he muscled me out of publishing rights and all kinds of stuff because he was running the publishing side of the business. Al never looked at the books; he just put his trust in Paul, and this guy will deny everything that I’m saying right now, but it is true. It’s all on paper, and it’s a fucking fact. I don’t like the guy because he pulled that shit. The last time I ran into him he came right up to me and said, “You hate me, don’t you?” and I said, “Yeah, I do hate you. What’s going on?” I don’t mean to sit here and dis on the guy, but that was some pretty fucked up shit to do to somebody. It was bad, we’ve had bad management—a lot of bad people around us. That was the majority of why Al and I would get at each other and wind up fighting, which would wind up with me leaving. All these other maggots and leeches would say that I was just a bad cling-on. They’d say, “He’s stealing from you”—a bunch of fucked up, fake bullshit. That was the cause of he and I almost never speaking to each other again. It was almost kiddie high school shit. “Someone said he’s doing this, I saw him do this,” and I’d get confronted and get pissed, and it would just get really ugly.

  Have you seen the movie Fix?

  mc I hate that fuckin’ movie. I don’t know if he told you. That’s not him. That’s Barker at his finest. What a joke. Doug Freel, who did that movie, called me at one point in 2004 or something. Al and I were fighting, and he got wind of it. He wanted to get me on film saying what an asshole Al is, and I was like, “Listen, man, just because he and I are fi
ghting right now doesn’t mean we won’t make up tomorrow. I’d never do that for your movie. That’s fucking gross, and anybody who does that can go fuck themselves, because Al is my best friend in the world, my brother. I’ll stand beside him through anything, no matter how bad we’re fighting.” I’m so grateful that I was in rehab when they shot that movie, because I would have been right in there, right next to Al, shooting up like crazy. That’s not something I’d want my kids to see. It was really low, man.

  It would have been one thing if the film continued after Al got clean because there’s a whole other side of the story.

  mc That’s exactly what I was saying from the first time I saw it. Angie said, “Does this make you jones when you watch it?” and I said, “No, it’s portraying Al at the worst time of his life and making him look like a person that I don’t know.” That’s not the way he is. He’s a very generous, great person. He’s a genius. He’s brilliant. He’s a genius in the studio, and why didn’t they focus on that? Why didn’t that come across? His story is a success story. He went through what he went through; he’s alive and making records like crazy. How many records has Barker done? It’s like when people get on these threads [online] and say what a dick Al is: “Bring Barker back. The band’s not the same without him.” Well, what the hell has he been doing? Dwelling on the past.

  Did you and Al ever come to blows?

  mc We’ve had some pretty bad bitch-out sessions and thrown shit at each other. We’ve fought a bunch of times. One time we were sitting at Sonic Ranch Studios, and we decided it was daiquiri day, so we went out and bought two half-gallons of rum and drank it all. I shattered a little ornament on a table, and a piece of the ornament went into his eye. He took a fucking wine bottle and smashed me on the side of my fucking head—I still have a scar from it—and we went at it, man, hardcore. Blood was flying everywhere. When it was all said and done we were hugging and laughing. That’s true friendship and brotherhood right there. He’s like my big brother—the brother I never had. It’s a weird relationship, but the only way to explain it is if you had a brother. You guys love each other, but you still fight and you bicker, but when it comes to the end of the day and down to the wire you’re always there for each other.

  What are some of your favorite memories of the crazy times?

  mc There we so many. On The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste tour, our bus driver slit the gas lines in Denver at the Embassy Suites and threatened to blow up both buses.

  How did that happen?

  mc The guy’s name was Rick, and he used to drive around Willie Nelson and a lot of the old country guys. His wife drove the crew bus. He was sober, but we fucked him up by giving him speed and pills and alcohol, and he lost his shit and went crazy. He slit the gas lines at the hotel and stood there with a lighter. Finally, security got him away. Then he went to his room, barricaded the door, pulled out a gun, and the next thing you know, a mess of cops were there, arresting the guy and taking him to jail. Al and I loved him so much that we got him out of jail and put him back on our bus, and everybody got pissed. You talk about the Book Club getting mad. Oh my God, were they mad. But we loved the guy, so we were like, “No, you’re staying with us.”

  Ministry and RevCo left trails of destruction through the ’90s.

  mc We went to Japan during the making of Filth Pig. Maybe two other people and I were the ones who were living it up. Al was miserable. He hated it. He called me up to his suite. I went up there, and there was a case of champagne. So he and I hooked up a CD player to the TV, and we had Buck Owens blasting over the speaker. We played it over and over, and then we decided to have a wrestling match. We started wrestling, and next thing you know, shit starts breaking. In Japan they have these really bizarre toilets that dry your ass, and that was really weird to me. We pulled it off the wall and broke it. There was a massive chandelier in the room that we were hanging from. Everything in the room got completely smashed to pieces except the TV that was playing the Buck Owens. We wound up doing I think $18,000 worth of damage. Our band and road manager were so pissed off that they wouldn’t talk to us because that was bonus money or whatever. It was definitely some massive destruction.

  During the ’90s there must have been plenty of sex to go along with the drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

  mc Al will not admit this, but the chicks liked Ministry. There was never a shortage. When we did Lollapalooza, having Pearl Jam and Soundgarden on the bill definitely helped the girl situation. I was pulling all kinds of chicks out of the bar. But there was some crazy groupie action. Once we played a sold out show in LA, and there were these two hot, hot chicks standing by my amps, so we got done and I grabbed them and said, “Come with me.” I took them back to the hotel, wound up fucking the shit out of them, and when I’m done, somebody’s banging on my door. I go to the door and two guys are standing there, and I’m like, “What’s going on?” And they say, “We’re here to pick up our girlfriends,” I thought, “Oh shit, these guys are going to kill me,” so I shut the door and kind of panicked and said, “What’s going on? There’s two guys out there saying they’re your boyfriends.” And the girls go, “Oh, we’d better get going,” like it was nothing out of the ordinary. That really blew my mind. Why didn’t these guys say anything? Why didn’t they kick my ass? It really weirded me out to the point of thinking, “That was a scummy thing to do,” and

  so I kind of started slacking off on the groupie thing for a while. It weirded me out.

  Al said he once had a five-some with four chicks and there were mother-daughter scenarios.

  mc Yeah, I went down that road too.

  What about the girl with the colostomy bag?

  mc He told you about that? I have to tell you, man. I’ve seen a lot of fucked up shit, but that really grossed me out. I had to yell at him over that one. I was sleeping in my bunk, and I heard him coming into the bus. I kind of opened the drapes to my bunk, and I thought Al was with a little boy. They went into the back room, and I heard this moaning and all kinds of sexual shit. The bus was shaking, I was freaking out, pacing back and forth in the front lounge, going, “Man, he can’t be fucking a little boy back there—there’s no way!” I sat down by the table, and this weird, little midget girl comes out. I said, “Dude, what are you doing? What’s going on?” And Al goes, “Man, you wouldn’t believe it. She had a colostomy bag and I was fucking it.” I was so disgusted. I was like, “Dude, please, man, don’t do that anymore.” Al’s a crazy bastard, man. He’ll go for anything weird like that.

  What was your low point when it came to drugs?

  mc When we started Filth Pig we were such full-blown junkies. I weighed, like, 120 pounds. I was wearing my girlfriend’s clothes because I was so little. And I’m not a little person, man. It was really dark days. I left the band after Filth Pig because of my addiction, and Al and I had a really bad falling out as well, and it was all due to getting busted and being drug addicts.

  Are you talking about the Marble Falls drug bust?

  mc The Austin bust was bad. It took me a really long time to get clean, even after that. I fell deeper into it. I got even worse. After the raid and the arrests Al and I parted ways. I moved back to Dallas and became a hermit; I tried to clean up. I went into AA. I got hit really hard: I had seven years probation, 950 hours of community service, and a lot of legal fees and I had to go into rehab. I cleaned up for six, seven months, and then after an AA meeting, I was like, “Fuck this, man. I’m going to get wasted,” so I went right back into it, full blown. It wasn’t until 1999 that I’d had enough, and with methadone I managed to get myself off heroin. I was clean, but the ironic thing is that three and a half years ago I had neck surgery and I’ve been in pain management since then.

  Over the years you’ve had neck and back problems?

  mc A few years back I slipped some discs in my neck and lost all feeling in my left side. I had to have emergency surgery on my ne
ck, where they replaced three of my discs. I was seconds away from being paralyzed, but found this amazing doctor who fixed me, and after that they found out I had a bunch of problems with my lower back. I have six herniated discs in my lower back. I’m in pain management and all kinds of therapy over it.

  What kind of pain management?

  mc I’m a legal opiate user now, because that’s the only thing that kills my pain. My back is so wasted that I can’t get surgery because I’d have to be in bed for two years, and I can’t afford that. So I’ll be on pain medication for quite a while until they come up with some remedy to fix back problems. It’s kind of funny now when I go through the X-rays at the airport, and I have my medication sack right there on the conveyor belt full of morphine, and it’s completely legit. I’m on five different kinds of pain things. I was on oxy. It didn’t work anymore; they put me on morphine. I also take Lyrica and Flexeril as well. It makes me functional, takes away my pain, and I can work my ass off. I’m still in a lot of pain, but fuck, I don’t have the kind of money to take two years off and lay on my side, not to mention that would drive me up the wall, because I’m a workaholic—I have to be moving all the time.

  It seems like a lot of metal musicians in their forties suffer from neck and back pain: Philip Anselmo, Dave Mustaine, Tom Araya.

  mc Yeah, and it kills me when I watch some of these young kids bang their head like I used to. I tell them, “Hey man, be careful with that,” and I show them my scar and tell them what happened, and they just kind of laugh it off. But it’s a pretty scary deal, man. I had to learn how to play guitar all over again after my surgery. That was my therapy. I couldn’t even do a G chord. It was hard, but I think it made me a better player.