Ministry Read online

  Dedication

  For my two angels, Angelina and Carmen

  In memory of Michael Ralph Scaccia

  June 14, 1965, to December 22, 2012

  Epigraph

  “If you remember the nineties, you weren’t there.”

  —al jourgensen

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  So What? The Significance of Ministry

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Resurrecting the Beast

  Chapter 2: From Cuba to Oblivion

  Intervention 1: Ministry Frontman’s Stepfather

  Chapter 3: Teenage Wasteland

  Chapter 4: Symphony for the Devil

  Intervention 2: Pick Your Poison

  Chapter 5: Twitch of the Death Nerve

  Intervention 3: Luc Van Acker

  Chapter 6: The Land of Rape and Honey

  Intervention 4: Sascha Konietzko

  Chapter 7: The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste

  Intervention 5: Dead Kennedys and Lard FrontmanJello Biafra

  Chapter 8: Truly Revolting

  PHOTO SECTION

  Intervention 6: Revolting Cocks Vocalist Phildo Owen

  Chapter 9: Psalm 69

  Chapter 10: Welcome to the Lone Star State

  Intervention 7: Butthole Surfing with Gibby Haynes

  Chapter 11: Filth Pig—Dirt, Degradation, and the DEA

  Chapter 12: The Psychedelic Evolution of Leary

  Chapter 13: Dark Side of the Spoon

  Intervention 8: Salvation—Angelina Lukacin-Jourgensen

  Chapter 14: Animositisomin

  Intervention 9: Mike Scaccia: The Final Interview

  Chapter 15: Houses of the Molé

  Chapter 16: Rio Grande Blood and Other Cocky Shit

  Intervention 10: Tour Manager Holger Brandes

  Chapter 17: The Last Sucker

  Intervention 11 Al Jourgensen

  Chapter 18: From Beer to Eternity

  Acknowledgments

  Discography

  Copyright

  So What?

  The Significance of Ministry

  Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails): Ministry was the single-most important influence in the sound and concept of Nine Inch Nails. When I heard Twitch I was intrigued. When I heard The Land of Rape and Honey it blew my mind. The production, presentation, and the aggression broke all the rules and was truly inspiring.

  Corey Taylor (Slipknot): The Land of Rape and Honey is still one of my favorite albums—it’s sick. One of the reasons I’ve been so over the top in Slipknot is because of Ministry. Al was the progenitor of so many kinds of chaotic music. If there was no Al Jourgensen, there would have been no reason for artists to become completely unhinged. He took everything that extra step. His music is so fucking visceral and sick and dark. I have total respect for Al. He has used everything at his disposal to make a really dark soundtrack for people to listen to and lose their minds.

  Joey Jordison (Slipknot): Ministry is not as much a band or a movement as it is a culture. They have probably inspired me more as a songwriter than as a drummer or guitarist. They have the ability to throw you into a trance with a single riff for minutes on end and still retain a verse/chorus structure that actually means something. This is a band that makes you stand up and pay attention, causes you to expand your record collection, makes you open to new endeavors and ideas—not to mention take mind-altering substances! They’re not an industrial band, a metal band, or an alternative band. Simply put, they are one of the greatest rock bands ever. They are the premiere leaders of the scene that followed them, even though they had no intention of starting it.

  Jonathan Davis (Korn): I loved Ministry because they were so original. They did a complete 180 from “(Every Day Is) Halloween,” to the softer stuff, to when they started doing hard industrial with Twitch and then the heavier albums after that. Ministry has influenced every band, whether it’s the tones of the guitars or how the music is done. Ministry is like Black Sabbath or Pantera—those bands that made their mark and have their own sound. And Al Jourgensen is a performer and an epitome of a true rock star. He lived life way beyond anything, and I think he’s a genius. I’ll never forget meeting Al for the first time because when he shook my hand he had a needle in his arm.

  Jamey Jasta (Hatebreed): I saw one of their videos on Headbanger’s Ball so I went to see them on Lollapalooza. That was one of the first times I saw super-heavy, aggressive music cross over into the mainstream and beyond. There weren’t a lot of melodic vocals, the riffs were so hard, and the pit was violent. But everyone was loving it. It was crazy to see a band that aggressive get that much mainstream exposure and success. It gave me hope for what I wanted to do.

  Luc Van Acker (ex-Revolting Cocks, ex-Front 242): I was pogo dancing to Ministry’s “Cold Life” back in 1981! I am slam dancing to “No W” right now. Ministry at Lollapalooza is the greatest live act I ever saw in my entire life. Al Jourgensen is not ready for a lifetime achievement award but rather “Kick-Me-in-the-Teeth!” honors, as he has done with his music over the past twenty-five years.

  Chester Bennington (Linkin Park): Ministry made me want to play music. I was home screaming “Deity” because I wanted to sound like Al Jourgensen. I had no idea how he did it. I didn’t know they used effects on their voices, but I would do everything I could to make my natural voice sound like Al. There was something about Ministry that was heavy but it wasn’t metal, and I couldn’t figure out how they did it. It was so different from anything else I had heard, but it was so heavy and hard.

  Burton C. Bell (Fear Factory): Al Jourgensen perfected industrial music to the point where it appealed to a metal audience but was still rooted in electronic music with really cool, heavy melodies. Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey is like Sex Pistols’ groundbreaking Nevermind the Bollocks for industrial music. It’s just vicious, aggressive, and intense, but it’s real and it influenced so many people, including myself, to follow suit with their own blend of metal and industrial.

  David Draiman (Disturbed): The very first show we did after we were signed was on a bill opening for Ministry. As a heavy Chicago band, Ministry were local heroes of ours. So we were honored and excited to play with them. I go in to meet them during sound check, and Al’s doing hits off of a crack pipe. He was doing the same thing between verses onstage in front of everybody. I was like, “Goddamn dude. That’s some hardcore shit.” It was like, “Welcome to the music industry.”

  Chad Gray (Mudvayne): He’s the godfather of industrial music, and his influence in unbelievable. He gave it that darkness that maybe only drugs could do. And that rhythmic repetition . . . oh, my God! He treated the guitar like the gearhead electronic geeks treated their loops and samples. To hear a guitar playing at that tone in a way that felt like it never ended was like getting a jackhammer in your forehead.

  Tommy Victor (Prong): Ministry created an entirely new genre. They reinvented it all—electronic, punk, postpunk, goth, industrial, metal. No other artist can make that claim.

  Scott Ian (Anthrax): I am not a religious man, but I have been a faithful follower and member of Al’s Ministry for more than twenty years. Thank you for the guidance.

  Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys, Lard): One thing that doesn’t come across in Ministry is that [Al]’s got one of the most razor-sharp and quick wits about him of anybody I’ve ever known. He has a great sense of humor.

  Ben Weinman (Dillinger Escape Plan): When I was just getting into music they
were one of those bands that was not part of the mainstream, and that got me into really extreme music. I would listen to regular radio rock and then I’d hear Ministry and go, “Wow, there’s something different about this. This defies the typical rules of what’s popular right now.” To me, they seemed like the biggest band in the world. Their sound was massive, their message was

  massive, and their delivery was massive. Psalm 69 was such a huge record for me because that came out in 1992 when I started getting into punk and hardcore. Dillinger was one of the first bands I was in that was combining metal, hardcore, and punk together and trying to bring it into the same platform. Ministry influenced me to say fuck everything. It doesn’t matter. Just combine everything you’re into and make sure the message is really clear and in your face.

  Blake Judd (Nachtmystium): I was only thirteen when Filth Pig came out, but it blew my mind and it remains, hands down, my favorite album ever recorded. And after I discovered that, I explored everything else. I absolutely adore the entire Ministry catalog. I’m the dude who likes Twitch and I even found something to like in With Sympathy. But from The Land of Rape and Honey up through Filth Pig, those are some of the best records ever recorded and were way ahead of their time.

  Foreword

  Visions of the Carnival

  and the Invitation to Insanity

  by Jon Wiederhorn

  Lying across the bed in my dorm room cell at Boston University in early 1990, I was lazily flipping through a copy of some European metal magazine I had picked up at the Harvard Square newsstand, looking for an interview with Metallica. Since the band had finished touring . . . And Justice for All and hadn’t yet released The Black Album, there wasn’t a whole lot for them to talk about, so the interviewer was asking softball questions like what they were doing in their down time and what new stuff they were listening to. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich didn’t have much to say about either, but guitarist Kirk Hammett was gushing about this wild band Ministry, who he said were combining cool metal guitars with this crazy, heavy electronic music. Not long after, my college buddy and concert peer Devin Gladstone tracked down a promo cassette tape of The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste and dubbed me a copy on a dual cassette boom box. At least the tape was a Maxell, so as degraded as the sound was, I could still tell that this was some next-generation shit.

  I was blown away by the precision and brutality of the opening track, “Thieves,” which merged a sharp, choppy thrash riff with the sounds of a whirring dentist drill, scraping metal, and screamed, distorted punk vocals. Then there were these movie samples from one of my favorite Stanley Kubrick films, Full Metal Jacket: “Get up, get on your feet” and “Kill, kill, kill. You will not kill.” “Burning Inside” was creepier but just as intense, blending rapid tribal beats and a simple, ripping riff with an incisive chorus hook washed in echoing vocal distortion that transcended angry and bordered on psychopathic. Ambient, haunting, bass-heavy soundscapes like “Cannibal Song” and “Dream Song,” which included spoken word bits by frontman Al Jourgensen’s future wife, Angie, were the stuff of heavily sedated nightmares. But the kicker was “So What,” a sadistic number with a rattling beat, a droning bass line, and samples about murder, backed by wheezing laughter and interjected with blowtorch guitar bursts.

  Unfortunately, I missed the carnival tour for the album, but by the time the live soundtrack to its brutality, In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up, came out, I had graduated from college and was freelancing for Melody Maker, Spin, Raygun, and Alternative Press, so I was able to wrangle a free copy of the CD. While writing about everyone from Kate Bush to Slayer I kept tabs on Ministry and Jourgensen’s side project, Revolting Cocks, and marveled at the absurd electronic-based debauchery of Beers, Steers + Queers. I followed interviews with Jourgensen and was impressed by how witty and irreverent he obviously was. I remember reading a story in Melody Maker by the Stud Brothers in which Jourgensen asked if they wanted a beer and the writers shot back, “Got any heroin?” Without a pause or a chuckle, Jourgensen reached into a bag and took out two needles, at which point the journalists recoiled in horror. It was then that I thought to myself, “I gotta meet this guy!”

  My opportunity finally came in early 1995 when Pulse, the in-house publication of the now-defunct Tower Records, flew me to Jourgensen’s new compound in Marble Falls, Texas, where Ministry were diligently working on the follow-up to the heralded Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs, which featured one of their biggest hits to date, “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” with guest vocals by Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. The album was a near-perfect mélange of metal malice and electronic spite, the breakthrough release that provided enough cash flow for Jourgensen to indulge all of his demons, and the alternative, metal, and electro communities were salivating to see what Ministry would do next. Because no album was scheduled, my editor asked me to check out the new tunes and see if they were good enough to devote a cover story to the album.

  I’d like to say that my experience was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that eventually blossomed into Jourgensen’s official biography, but nothing could be further from the truth. The band sent a representative to pick me up at the Austin airport and drive me to the compound. It was the only predictable and stress-free part of the entire trip. The operative rule of Ministryland was hurry up and wait. Time seemed to stand still, and although the place was cleaned up and all the junkies and other hangers-on were cleared out to sanitize the experience, any notion of sanity left the moment the door to the estate was closed.

  From the outside the place was gorgeous. There were three well-maintained buildings and a tennis court. The lawn was mowed and the hedges and shrubs were nicely trimmed. It could have been a neighborhood community center or a small museum, but once inside it was more like a passageway to hell. There were bottles containing animal fetuses on the mantle, chairs covered with the bleached bones of dissected roadkill, and a painting of a clown by renowned serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

  A representative for the band offered me a beer, and we chatted for ninety minutes about the contemporary alt-rock music scene, the latest Hollywood blockbusters, the frustrations of our respective jobs. Finally Jourgensen appeared without a sound like a beamed-aboard character from Star Trek. He was clad in black, wore a black bandana that held back his dreadlocks, and had a closely shaven beard—a look that was obviously later appropriated by Johnny Depp for the Captain Jack character in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

  For some reason Jourgensen seemed irritable and dispirited, like a tour guide who hated his job. He briefly led me through the compound, stopping to show me the bedrooms with mirrored ceilings and the pool room, which I surmised was used for shooting more than just pool balls. Our final stop was the studio, the board of which was scattered with Polaroids of nude groupies. When I mentioned to Jourgensen that the place was like a Caligula of his own blackened aesthetic, he frowned and explained how he didn’t build it and it was once owned by Texas oil executives who would leave their wives for the weekend and come there with their mistresses. Without a smile, Jourgensen played me a macerated version of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” and a batch of slow, dirgey, agonized songs that didn’t yet have titles.

  Then it was time for the interview. Jourgensen sprawled across a couch with a bottle of Bushmills, and I fired a volley of questions at him, none of which he seemed pleased to answer. When I mentioned the reputation he had for acts of debauchery and chaos at the Chicago Trax Studio and asked if similar shenanigans went on in Texas, he said he liked to shoot guns but wouldn’t elaborate, and when I asked him if he shot anything else, he looked me in the eyes and said, “Yeah, journalists who ask nosey questions.” Clearly Jourgensen wasn’t going to reveal what went on here after hours, so I moved on. We talked about the morbid décor of the place, and he jumped to the defensive, saying, “What’s more debauched, some animal fetuses in a jar like in a high school science lab
or idiots in a metal mosh pit trying to pull the top off a stage diving girl?” I asked why the new songs were so dirgey and lacked keyboards or samplers, and he succinctly replied, “I got tired of typing all the time and I wanted to rock out.” He deflected any further questions about the music and made various jokes about masturbation. I asked him about the division of labor between him and his longtime partner Paul Barker, and he ended our conversation, which had gone on uncomfortably for far too long.

  I next crossed paths with Jourgensen when I was an editor at Guitar magazine and Ministry were about to release Dark Side of the Spoon. Although the album was widely reviled, I thought it was a bleak, enjoyable return to form after the hook-free funereal metal of Filth Pig, which I had savaged in a lead review in Rolling Stone, much to the dismay of the band’s publicist, who grilled me for having a personal vendetta against Ministry because of my unpleasant experience in Marble Falls. The ninety-minute-long interview for Dark Side of the Spoon, however, was excellent, though Jourgensen doesn’t remember the conversation (some of which is reprinted in this book), since he was so incapacitated by drugs at the time.

  Thinking I was now a welcome party in the Ministry camp, I set up my next interview in 2003 when I was on staff at MTV News and Jourgensen came through New York to promote Animositisomina. He seemed in peak form. He was clean and newly married, and he cracked jokes constantly as he willingly detailed the creation of the record. A year later I talked to him again for MTV for Houses of the Molé, and in addition to revealing that he had found a new muse in president George W. Bush, he discussed the departure of his longtime bandmate Paul Barker and revealed that aliens invaded the studio while Ministry were making the album. Afterward he gave me a goodbye hug, and I was sure we were pals. Imagine my surprise when, during one of the final interview sessions for Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, he told me he hated me when we first met. Thinking he was referring to the Pulse magazine incident, I smiled and recalled how frustrated I was when we didn’t hit it off in Marble Falls. As it turned out, he had absolutely no recollection of that interaction; it was the MTV interview that had made him seethe. Jourgensen thought it was perfunctory and that I was asking a list of prefabricated questions and couldn’t wait to get it over with so I could go write about Beck or Radiohead. Plus, he admitted, I asked too many questions about Paul