My big bad Ministry page

I’ve always loved Ministry. “A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste” is probably one of my desert island discs, and I recently rekindled this love by reading Al Jourgensen’s fantastic autobiography. Sure it’s gross, and x

MA

MA

Ministry, Animositisomina -From the first crunchy guitar riffs and weird drumming inflections, and dissonance, of opening song “Animosity”, the interest is filled instantly. Wow! I had reservations about getting this album, as I thought that they were a spent force after the disappointing “Dark Side Of The Spoon” and infrequently brilliant “Filth Pig” (not to mention Al’s admission in his autobiography that this album was made in such a drug blur that he barely remembers it, and dislikes it as a result), but this has restored my faith in the band’s ability to keep on. It’s also the last album to feature Paul Barker(and probably the album he had the most input on), with several cool bass licks surfacing throughout, especially in the final track “Leper”.

Opening the album with style and a great buildup, “Animosity” is a great song with a huge sound and a very cool angular guitar solo. Love the shouted chorus outro – wish I knew what they were saying, though! “Unsung” builds around a great riff, and just zooms and zooms in drone-like fashion, with some thick, thick vocal sounds. “Piss” is a piece of streaming riffage and drum noise, ugly vocals, glomming on and on. “Lockbox” starts off with some very cool drumming, and all sorts of zooming and zooming. “Broken” has more song structure, with droning and repetitive riffs, groovy beats, and recognizable country-like verses and choruses – it also has a cool near-ending, and refrain. Breaking up the mood a bit from the same-sameness of the first half of the album is “The Light Pours Out Of Me”, a relatively faithful cover of a song by Magazine, Barry Adamson’s old band, and it sounds a bit new wave-y, with a more than just a bit of staticky Ministry bite (it’s also the only song that is more than just a single word). “Shove” is spare, with drums and a layer of funky bass, then drone guitars, and wild energy. “Impossible” is more avant garde, with weird Merzbow phasings for exactly one minute, before we get into some sort of grand rock concept. And in the end some sort of grand phase-out, with strange locking sounds – it is the longest song on the release up to this point. “Stolen” is more minimal and avant-garde at first, building up to something. The final song on the album, “Leper”, starts off with a bunch of atmospheric sounds and some great bass bleating, some wild electronic bagpipe-y noise, it zooms into full, huge production and massive drum sound about four minutes in. Wow! You appreciate the bombast all that much more after hearing the long lead-in. It zooms and zooms and zooms, and then you realize… that it’s an instrumental!

MHOTM

MHOTM

Ministry, Houses of the Mole – The distortion on the vocals is often a bit too thick, but the riffs are great, the production splendid, and the angst hot and heavy. Love this stuff. This album has all of the Ministry sounds you know and love, this time with a bit more variety than previous release Animositisomina, with a slight feeling of re-hashing big song ideas from A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste, which some say “this albums is the best since… that…” (then again – can the use of trademarked sounds be considered re-hashing?).

“No W” hits hard and heavy, and we get our first George W Bush samples, right before a useless Mike Scaccia needle solo. “Waiting” has a “Thieves” feel to it (structurally the intro is very similar), with great, thick sounds. Love this stuff! “Worthless” is a bit more tuneful, outside of the sledgehammer beat, and Al’s vocals are echoed into infinity. Lovely! Somehow sounds like Killing Joke’s “The War Dance”. “Wrong” starts off with some very cool bass tracks, and some strange Al Jourgensen vocals (non-distorted, basically, and sounding creepy), and then the big chunky guitars – great riffs!! The George W Bush sample here is scary, and the “solo” is just shredding riffs. Love it. “Warp City” is a nutty song, with very cool bass lines (by John Monte, who also played with Mindfunk, and many other bands), insane drumming, and a crazy redneck tale of a man who shoots his wife – wild, wild, wild!! There’s even a bit of crazy sax here!!!! “Wtv” is a nutty song that samples all sorts of crazy soundbites, including the radio guy who advises against mailing chickens; the lyrics are hyperactive – I wonder if they could do this live!! The later part of the song contains long quotes from George W Bush, and others: “…shot outside a liquor store,” “…ladybugs – by the millions!!” Amazing samples!! “World” starts off with some very nice bass-y riffs and some great drums and other build-up. Great samples, and interesting sounds instead of a solo. “Wkyj” zooms and glooms, and seems to have a line by Gibby Haynes – “I have a parasitic soul… with a need to feed!” (I guess this is all they could salvage of the sessions) There’s some sort of weird radio DJ thing at the end of Wkyj introducing “Worm”, with heavy drums, slow, and major riffing, harmonica sounds, atmospherics, little gloom. It’s slightly new wave influenced stuff, sounding good, with a cool harmonica riff thing. Nutty “don’t kill yourself” samples, and solid, endless, mindless atmospherics. It tunes out to mouth harp sounds. Very groovy. The song’s length is 9:11, the last minute of which is silence, probably not a coincidence. “Psalm 23″, originally a bonus track, starts off after the previous song’s one minute pause with some cool “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” ska-ish drum sounds and guitar atmospherics that are just lovely. The lyrics start off being very spooky, gothic, but then the real Ministry stuff kicks in, and it becomes akin to “So What” in parts. By the middle it is snarling and nasty, and then it smoothes out to become some sorta jam-out – great full-song transformation!! “Walrus” is a bunch of studio mucking-around, kind of dull.

This album is the first of three that picks on George W Bush, and as a gimmick each song on this album starts with the letter “w” (except for one – Psalm 23, the 10th track of 11). Even the song “Worthless” seems to inform itself from “The War Dance”, which also starts with that letter. Funny… In Al Jourgensen’s autobiography, he mentions how by the time he got to the third album he stopped hating Bush so much and seemed to be pitying him, as he saw him less and less a power figure rather than a puppet, making the anti-Bush bile in this album a bit mis-cast. But that’s okay, I guess…

BSAT666S

BSAT666S

Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters, Biers Welcome Ladies Drink Free – We all knew that Al Jourgensen once did a stint as a country music DJ, so honky tonkin’ certainly wasn’t far from his heart, and we all know that you can hear country sounds filtering through into Ministry songs even – titles like “Warp City, maybe – and a few others. Hell, yeah!

Finally, in 2011 we get the long-promised Al Jourgensen country release, Bikers Welcome Ladies Drink Free… with 13 songs on it of course! From the title you know it’s going to be funky and funny, and the release doesn’t disappoint!!

The first song, “Quicker Then Liquor” is a cool stomper that starts off with some cool “With Sympathy” era programmed drum beats, but then gets into some real country twang, with harmonica and some unprocessed Jourgensen vocals about substance abuse. “If you want to die quicker, then the answer isn’t liquor, the answer’s got to be – heroin and cocaine.” “What’s Wrong With Me” sounds more Ministry-like, at least in terms of the vocals – distorted, echoed, it could have been on an actual Ministry album if the usual ton of production layers were added. Nice moody Rush-like solo from Mike Scaccia on this one, and some new wave melodies at one point thereafter, ha ha… “Medication Nation” is a mock-reggae song countrified and built around a very hypnotic chorus that sort of goes on and on and on… Cool slide guitar, nice fiddle. “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man” is a way-too-fast cover of the Gram Parsons/Byrds classic, with some nice fiddle. “The Only Time I’m Sober Is When You’re Gone”, a cover of a Heartsfield song from that band’s 1973 debut, is probably the most country of the songs on this collection, and even comes with a stop-music break in the middle and a nice fiddle solo. “Cheap Wine Cheap Ramen” is about the joys of playing music on a major label, and is a pretty average country song – good fun, though, with a blistering Mike Scaccia solo, while “Down The Drain” is noisier, with tons of distorted harmonica noise, some hoarse Ministry roars, and another cool fiddle solo – “go get ‘em, JoBird.” “Sleepless Nights Bar Room Fights” speeds along with more of the same, and some funny sampled sounds. There’s also a frenzied cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of The Devil”, confirming my suspicion that I’m not the only one that considers them a country band. “Ten Long Years In Texas” is a really hick-sounding tune, rhyming “Texas” with “taxes”… yup! “I Hate Every Bone In Your Body Except Mine” is a jokey songs with a band sing-along part to it. Love the naughty lyrics, and the strange tale of a freaky romance that descends into madness, and more of that sampled “go get ‘em, JoBird” fiddle stuff. “Take Me Away” is a yucky ballad-sounding tune, but the band quickly recovers its mojo for the closing track “Dignity”, which starts off with some sweet, funky guitar grooves and yummy off-key echoing relatively un-processed vocals – it’s a cool little hummin’ closer to the project. Like it!

Ultimately, the best songs are the last one, and the first bunch, with a fair amount of filler as it moves along, reaching its nadir with the penultimate track, but then it all snaps back quickly for a satisfying finish.

My only criticism of the release would be that Mike Scaccia’s solos often sound mis-matched to the songs themselves – he’s no country guitarist. It also gets a bit irritating having Al call him out song after song after song. Al sings off-tune in some songs, probably on purpose (this should probably be a praise, not a criticism, actually), and finally, way too many songs have the same warp city galloping horse-beat behind it, even “Drug Store Truck Driving Man”, which speeds the tune up excessively. But hey, small stuff.

If you read Al’s auto-biography, you learn that he was hoping to do another Buck Satan album with Mike Scaccia, and it’s sad that he never did as Mike died onstage at the end of 2012.

Funnily enough, this is my 666th review for Amazon, heh heh…

MRGB

MRGB

Rio Grande Blood – When considering Ministry’s “comeback” albums after the murk of “Filth Pig” and “Dark Side Of The Spoon”, the first two “Animositsominia” and “Houses Of The Mole” may be criticized as a bit too same-y; by that token, I sometimes wish that the next two – Rio Grande Blood and The Last Sucker – were a bit more consistent! Never happy… but never mind that either.

This is a great album, though, even if there are a few misses, and it has some standout songs, including “Lies Lies Lies”, probably their tightest and most iconic Ministry song of the past 20 years. The opening song, which is also the title track, is a 100% Al Jourgensen track, as he plays all parts – vocals, bass, guitar, programming, producing and mixing. It’s a nutty number that manipulates George W Bush statements into some sort of scary demonic confession. Funny nonetheless, especially in its fake-sounding-ness. “Señor Peligro” is a crazy death metal number, with biting riffs, huge drums, and “Thieves”-style vocals. It’s a huge, huge song!! Amazing!! “Gangreen”, though, is some sort of weird imitation of S.O.D.’s “Sargent D of the SOD”, with a long ramble on some tough-as-nails caricature of a marine. Oh well. The screamed vocals that follow are a bit flat and whiny, and Al’s certainly visited this turf before on Psalm 69 (with “Hero” – great song!!). Oh well. “Fear (Is Big Business)” is a very fast guitar song that starts off with some old school electronics. “Lies Lies Lies” is the big song on the album, and it’s a great one – cool dialogue samples, great riff, nice stop-and-start touches, cool lyrics, great chorus, fantastic screaming, good musical interlude where the solo should be, and the vocal distortion is just right. “The Great Satan remix” is a reworking of an older song that sounds fairly ordinary. “Yellow Cake” is a great song that starts off with some dub sounds, a Bush quote, and some cool bass bits, a busy guitar area, and some very cool, unique vibes. I don’t know another Ministry song quite like this one. “Palestina” is a raunchy rock song, pretty formulaic. “Ass Clown” starts off with some atmospheric sounds, before getting into a totally nutso Jello Biafra rant, role playing a White House tour guide and talking about “home of the ass clowns, see real live white collar terrorists in their own natural habitat”, etc. After that it’s a pretty standard Ministry metal number. Good riffing and jamming later on. “Khyber Pass” is a grinding piece of grunge mythology, with a wailing cry from Liz Constantine that sounds like a prayer call (wish I could find out more about who she is, though…). There are some lyrics about searching for Bin Laden at the Khyber Pass, and some great riffage throughout – sort of like Ministry’s “Kashmir”. “Sgt. Major Redux” is more silliness and outtakes from “Gangreen”… as if we needed this nonsense. A-HOOOOH-AH!!

The album’s main players are Al Jourgensen on every song, guitarist Tommy Victor (Prong) on many songs, and Paul Raven (Killing Joke) playing bass on the second half of the album and contributing keyboards, vocals, drum programming, and other stuff throughout. The songs are often stitched together by cool dialogue quotes and soundbites parts, often by George Bush. The anti-Bush tirade seems a bit silly now that he’s been out of office for so long, and given Al’s realization that as “The Last Sucker” he was probably more of a puppet anyway and worth pitying, but at least we get a good album out of it. Three songs from this album were used in Katherine Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker”.

Actually, the album is so good I also ordered it on white vinyl!!

MRGB1MRGB2

 

It’s numbered out of 3,000 and I got number 668 – the Neighbour of the Beast!!

MTLS

MTLS

The Last Sucker – Some standard rock songs, without too much mucking around, but it’s all fun all the time!! A great cover of The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues”, and some fun at the end with “End Of Days”. The crew working on this is nearly the same as the last album – Prong’s Tommy Victor and Killing Joke’s Paul Raven, and a few other characters – and Fear Factory’s Burton C Bell sings on the last three songs of the album.

“Let’s Go” is nearly a punk rock tune in its simplicity (more of that later on). “Watch Yourself” starts off with what sounds like Noam Chomsky talking about the new McCarthyism of the Bush administration. Al’s voice is distorted deep for the verses of this song, it doesn’t sound so great. “Life Is Good” is pretty standard, as is “The Dick Song”, which is about Dick Cheney, it doesn’t get interesting until the end. “The Last Sucker” sounds kind of like a Prong song, or maybe a Rob Zombie tune, with some standard stuff about George W Bush; not good! “No Glory” zooms into rock again, with strange stop-and-start moments. “Death & Destruction” starts off with some weird George W Bush speechifying and manipulation, then a gigantic guitar roar. “Roadhouse Blues” is a stunning cover of the Doors classic, drenched in noise and chaos. Love it. “Die In A Crash” is a cool little punkish song, with vocals by Burton C Bell, sounding like a blend between Jello and Al (who provides backing vocals). Nutty little stuffer, with cool bass sounds! “End Of Days (Pt. 1)” is an epic grunge Ministry rocker – lumbering, huge, and with the requisite cowbells and giant guitar solo – that leads into “End Of Days (Pt. 2)”, with its atmosphere and experimentation (there’s even a rap!) and cliched production values, that nonetheless soars away and becomes something truly remarkable! “Part 2″ starts off with a cool little mood riff and a rap, then a children’s choir (think Talk Talk!!!! !!!!), while the second half of the song takes in Dwight D Eisenhower’s “Military industrial complex” speech from the time of his resignation – remarkable to hear such a long sample, and it makes a great album closer. This is the longest song that Ministry has ever recorded, at just over 10 minutes long. “Die In A Crash Remix” is a nice little bonus I got – it’s completely different from the punky album version, as it moves with electronic beats, mood and spooky, nutty sounds (early Front 242 anyone?).

MCU

MCU

Ministry and the Co-Conspirators, Cover-Up – Wow! Ministry has been doing covers on nearly every album since Filth Pig, when they did a weird cover of Bob Dylan’s weird song “Lay Lady Lay”, and in 2008 they released an album full of previously-released covers (but only some of them – they left off , and the covers done by Revolting Cocks like “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”, Ministry’s cover of Magazine’s “The Light Pours Out Of Me”, or Buck Satan And The 666 Shooters’ cover of the Byrds’ “Drug Store Truck Driving Man”); near the end are three covers that appear elsewhere – “Lay Lady Lay”, “Roadhouse Blues” (one of their best songs in ages), 1000 Homo DJs’ cover of Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut”. The songs each have something subtly different about them, most significantly “Supernaut”, which has more subdued riffs (?!?!), and some new voice samples. Nice.

At the beginning of the album are seven new covers, and the first one is really great – a creative cover of the Stones’ “Under My Thumb”, which starts off with some serious new wave keyboards, and then some sort of scratchy Mark Lanegan and Isobel Campbell duet of the classic ’60s rocker, that rocks out in the chorus. Short and sweet. A cover of T Rex’s “Bang A Gong” hardly sounds much different from the original, but just interesting enough for people to say “huh?” “Radar Love”, the Golden Earring classic, has a shorter intro, and sounds a bit off-key with the whispered opening verses, but it rocks and is good fun. “Space Truckin’” is a cool and faithful cover of the classic Deep Purple song with plenty of cowbell and double drums. Wow! “Black Betty” is okay, but a bit over-produced, even more than the Ram Jam version of the famous Leadbelly tune. “Mississippi Queen” is a very cool throaty version that sounds like it could be by Goatsnake. The programmed drums are a bit too aggressive, though – oh well! ZZ Top’s “Just Got Paid” is given the nasty death metal touch, with a great, tight, needle-precise hit on that amazing riff. Love it!

After the three re-runs already mentioned (“Lay Lady Lay”, “Roadhouse Blues” and “Supernaut), Uncle Al really goes overboard with three versions of “What A Wonderful World”. Not what you’d expect from such gloomy and angry song peddlers, but it actually works… sorta. The main version, at seven minutes, with a full gothic piano intro, is just too long, and after a sweet, short run-through of the song for the first half of the song, the thrashy multiple repetitions of all the verses of the song in the second half seems just seems wrong. The “short slow version” probably works best, as it perks up a bit, leaves off the thrash, and successfully wrings out the right emotion (yes, I never thought Ministry would pull off emotionality, but it did!!); the “short fast version” is not too bad either, it’s a fun live (or is it Memorex?) version that gets playful and fast; it’s okay.

The final tune is a silly version of “Stigmata” sung by some guy a la Willie Nelson. Next!

MATCCUC

MATCCUC

Ministry and the Co-Conspirators, Undercover – Another set of nutty covers, only three years after the last one. This one is a bit more uneven, combining “covers” of five Ministry songs (nearly half of the release!!!), along with a non-classic rock selection – Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”. The other six of the 12 songs are classic rock, exactly like what was on “Cover-Up”.

The collection kicks off with “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath, bringing to three the number of Sabbath titles that the band does (along with “Supernaut”, an old nugget from the 1,000 Homo DJs project, and later on this album also “Paranoid”). Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold” is a pretty standard little number. The cover of “NWO” is pretty similar to what was on Psalm 69, okay, and the cover of “Stigmata” is a bit thinned out. “Paranoid” rages, with plenty of wacky instrumental parts added, the bridge appearing a second (unneeded) time, an extended nutbar solo (or solos), all leading to a near-doubling of Sabbath’s shortest song to four minutes. Draaaaaag it out. AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” is an inspired selection, as few other bands can rival the huge Ministry sound. It’s a good little cover, full of bombastic pomposity. The band’s version of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” is huge and metallic, quite a lot different than the original, to say the least, but still fairly true to the original with its boogie stomp (Jourgensen idolizes ZZ Top and Cheap Trick – probably more than any other band after Black Sabbath, I’d say). There’s yet another remix of “Jesus Built My Hotrod”, nothing special there, and a blistering approach to Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” – a song with special meaning for Jourgensen, of course – that he sings with full off-key aplomb. “Every Day Is Hallowe’en” is a funky rock remake of the ancient song from the band’s first album, something Jourgensen has tried to turn his back on, but which he embraces quite fully here. There are hardly any keyboards on this one, the main beat re-created with guitars. Cool! “Paint It Black” is a deliciously-evil-sounding little number, in full production, while “Khyber Pass”, a Ministry song, brings it right back down – a great, mysterious song that deserves 20 minute-long remixes, not short little ones like we get here at only seven minutes long (shorter, actually, than the version on Rio Grande Blood!). This version differs from the album version as it has a longer intro (wailing female vocals) and a shorter verse-chorus section (“Where’s Bin Ladin”). Very nice!

MR

MR

Relapse – Not considered one of the best Ministry albums, with its un-glamorous stripped down basic rock production, it’s still a stellar release – something that would probably be a crowning achievement for any other band. Opening track “Ghouldiggers” is an Al riff on being an industry product, set to dreamy near-death-experience atmospherics, followed by some yucky verse, and a tight anxious chorus. Weird “record label secretary” segment ends the opening track – a hammy thing that’s not even terribly hammed up! Al’s sense of humor has fallen a bit flat here… and he doesn’t mind sounding very burned out. “Double Tap” is fast and nasty, and has some nice Middle Eastern dobro sounds. Freaky death metal. “Freefall” starts off with a “twenty dollars… and you can have all the croke you can handle….” with that being a blend of cannabis and coke. Nice! It’s a cool, catapulting song, though!! “Kleptocracy” is a goofy song with a catchy chorus! This one has a political quote in it! “United Forces” is a silly version of the classic Stormtroopers Of Death song (which – let’s not forget – uncle Al has mentioned that SOD was the real inspiration for the Ministry guitar sound) that just goes on for way too long, and has a weird intro-refrain at the end, so a bit of a disappointing post-”Cover Up” revisit… but glad to see SOD getting recognition nonetheless!! “99 Percenters” is a bit poppy (or, at least, as poppy as Ministry could ever get), but it also rocks quite nicely. “Relapse” is a chunky rock songs with some “joe six-pack” samples. The lyrics are pretty weak… “Weekend Warrior” is probably the best song on the release – it just goes on and on and freaks out with a great little character. Love this song!! It’s not a long one, but it has amazing verve and spirit – short and sweet! “Git Up Get Out ‘n’ Vote” is nutty death metal, and it just goes on, with scolding “rock the vote” messages (and how should non-American fans of Ministry care about this?). Not a standout track. “Bloodlust” is a rockin’ groovy number that takes it all over the map. Love it!
“Bloodlust (Lust for Blood Remix)” is a true 1990s digital remake with all the electronic sounds to keep it going. Zoomy – yeah!!

MFBTE

MFBTE

From Beer To Eternity – It’s easy to deride this album as being Ministry’s final-final-final album (there had been so many), but of course this one would never have happened were it not for the sudden death of long-time Ministry collaborator, guitarist Mike Scaccia, who in true rock ‘n’ roll tradition, died onstage rockin’ out. RIP Mike.

The album is fantastic, and a great epitaph and eulogy for the great band and the great guitarist. It is also the most eclectic and experimental Ministry album, at least since the early days, and a great listen. The title is a bit silly, but I guess “eternity” means something, and Al still likes his beer (he may have gone back into rehab for beer recovery, since – according to his autobiography, released the same year as this album – he had given up everything else and needed at least something to keep his buzz going. “Hail To His Majesty (Peasants)” is a weird, hateful thing that is full of bizarre electronic sounds, it is more avant garde than Ministry has been for a very long time, and it zooms around and around in weird trajectories, including a section of great Ministry sounds, some nice stomp, and some interesting industrial sounds, samples, everything. Very interesting. “Punch In The Face” is a cool, scratchy thing, quite different from any other Ministry song, that is a bit more measured than the opening track, but just as weird and bloopy, although it still has a cool needly solo. Great layers, and goofy samples! “PermaWar” sounds a lot like the opening song from Relapse, with its strange drawling singing style (not Al’s best), and there’s also a huge female chorus (!?!?). Meh… “Perfect Storm” is a big nutso stomp that just goes on and on! It’s nearly a punk song… “Fairly Unbalanced” is a nutty guitar song about Fox News’ reporting, with lots of crazy dialogue samples. It’s a pretty big song. “I would vote for George Bush even if he was barbecuing babies on the White House lawn.” “What we want to get back is to where our country was 100 years ago.” Cool “pound away at” sample loop and echo, which blends the song into “The Horror” – some great goofing around here, with electronics and sound, and samples like “God intended” and “legitimate rape.” Yeah!! “Side Fx Include Mikey’s Middle Finger (TV 4)” goes all over the place, starting off with some righteous thrash that pummels and punishes all over the place. In the middle there’s a whole section of weird goofing around, more samples (medical, for the most part), and then it gets back to full rock mode, and then just goes all over the place into nutty remixing. “Lesson Unlearned” is sort of a funk song with all sorts of jazzy female vocals. “Thanx But No Thanx” is probably the best song on the album, starting off as a reggae bust-up, before zooming into character-speech, Al as some sort of redneck ex-marine William Shatner/Ted Nugent sort of voice. It gets into a very dynamic number that zooms around a lot, with a very silly-sounding guitar solo. “Change Of Luck” starts off with some cool near-acoustic mellow guitar riff, then some strange Middle Eastern mood buildup, Over eight minutes, and the longest song on the album. Eventually we get to some chorus, a whole bunch of other stuff, a guitar solo, nice. “Enjoy The Quiet” is a short and sweet electronic ambient noise zoom, and that’s it.

This probably could have been mixed as a Revolting Cocks album, as it’s closer to RevCo in spirit and experimentation, but Mike Scaccia was closer to Ministry than RevCo, so this is a proper homage to the man. RIP.

RCCAL

RCCAL

Revolting Cocks, Cocked And Loaded – A great album, song-for-song, although quite different from the previous RevCo outing, Linger Ficking Good, as there is no Chris Connelly. Members of Cheap Trick and ZZ Top apparently play on this album, but who can hear their parts above all of the buzz! BUZZ!!

The opening track “Fire Engine” is a lot of fun, and it’s a blistering rocker with some huge drums. “Ten Million Ways To Die” is a strange piece of lounge music set to the voice of a creepy narrator, that then busts open into a full-on screeching rock number! “Caliente (Dark Entries)” is an insane Bauhaus cover voiced by a babbling Gibby Haynes. The original is cool, but Al and Gibby did a much better job on “Jesus Built My Hotrod.” Oh well. “Prune Tang” is a silly Helmet-sounding hardcore number, with some grunting and groaning and “singing”, with deep voices saying “pruuuuune taaaaang.” “Dead End Streets” starts off with programmed drums and guitar chugging, some nice riffs, some insane Jello Biafra vocals, some cool slide guitar stuff. “Pole Grinder” has some great samples (“Being a man, or being a woman, has nothing to do with your genitalia”, and “Man, or woman… or BOTH?”), cool bass riffs, freaky man-girl voice distortion, great riffs, droning beat, samples, funky chorus. One of the best songs on the album. “Jack In The Crack” is minimal, noisy, experimental, goofy. Kind of a dull, filler type of song, but it has its heavy moments. “Devil Cock” is some silly mixing of aggressive sounds, with nutty horror film samples. “Viagra Culture” starts off with electronics, drums, and a nutty Jello Biafra megalomaniacal character rant that reflects the eventual lyrics about “everybody else must lose, but I must win; we have met the weapon of mass destruction, and it is I!!” Sort of a Ren and Stimpy momen here. Cool song, that builds into a nice chugging guitar riff and electronics tune. Nice – edgy, but relaxed. Groovy “solo” in the middle. “Revolting Cock Au Lait” is the closer that is full of female vocals ranting in sexual puns, big broad flanged-out guitar sounds, and naturally plenty of roosters (cocks) crowing. Love it!!

RCCO

The Revolting Cocks, Sex-o Olympic-o – This album sounds significantly different again from any of the previous RevCo albums, perhaps coming full circle in terms of the RevCo legacy as it is nearly as electronic as the first album was, but in a totally different (updated) way. The electronics are wacky, bass-y burbles, reminiscent of Rob Zombie stuff I suppose, or KMFDM, with crunchy Ministry guitars added into it, and a few different types of vocals. The lead singer is Josh Bradford, with uncle Al Jourgensen providing backup vocals on some songs. Nearly all of the song titles are groovy, like “Hookerbot 3000” or “Robo Bandidos.” Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander and ZZ Top’s guitarist Billy Gibbons are listed as “Proxy Cocks”, not sure why – it’s hard to hear which songs they’re on, if any at all. Ditto for original Cock Luc Van Acker and Phildo Owen, Skatenig, and the voice of “Beers, Steers and Queers”, although again their contributions are not easy to distinguish. Some bass parts are by Paul Raven, who died two years before this was released, and he turns up on “Keys to the City” and “Wizard of Sextown”. The main vocals are provided by a young Canadian, Josh Bradford, guitarist from the Burlington pop-metalcore band Silverstein, and they’re okay, a bit silly and snooty sometimes. All right! Of all the RevCo albums, this is the one that’s the most same-y; that’s not a bad thing, though, as it fairly grooves, but this certainly sets Sex-o Olympic-o quite far apart other RevCo releases, which are full of jarring changes and so much outrageous nuttiness that this one seems pretty sober.

Album opener “HookerBot 3000” is okay, with a nice moody electronic intro, moody stuff that probably had RevCo fans scratching their heads when they first heard it, and then the guitars kick in with some friendly pop sounds, you hear Al screaming “yeah yeah yeah” in the background – sounds like he’s having a great time. “Keys To The City” is like a disco album with crunchy guitars and a thumping bass beat courtesy of Mr Paul Raven. “Red Parrot” is just a big “RevCo, let’s go” song, that adds some honky tonk piano – nice!! “Robo Banditos” maybe stands out a bit, with its gothic vocal delivery, and lots of Spanish chatter – it’s also a big, driving song. “Cousins” is a rockin’ little number that sounds like RevCo’s cover of “Dark Entries” from Cocked And Loaded, but it is actually a nutty song about incest: “why walk down the street when you can walk down the hall?” “Dirty little secret”, etc. Yuck!! But it’s a funky song nonetheless. “Touch Screen” is a groovy number with a falsetto chorus and some blips and bloops. “I’m Not Gay” is probably the standout track on the album, with its moody buildup, the heavy programming, more blips and bloops, and humor to boot! It also has a bit more of Uncle Al’s vocals and rousing chorus. “Abundant Redundancy” starts off with huge drums and guitars and distorto-vocals – it could be a Ministry song – but then gets into the sequencers and nuttiness. This song rocks harder than any other song on the album. “Lewd Ferrigno” is a freaky buildup song that starts off nice and quiet, with narration, then screamed vocals, and some slowdown, before a full-on Al Jourgensen shriek-out!! “Wizard of Sextown”, the longest song on the album, is a weird dub jam-out that just sort of goes on and on and on, with also nice Paul Raven bass lines. “HookerBot 3000 [Discoa-A-Go-Go Mix]” starts off with harsh sounds, and then just goes all over the place.

Books

MTLGATAJ

MTLGATAJ

Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, by Al Jourgensen and Jon Wiederhorn - I was a fan of Ministry in the ’80s and ’90s, especially the Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste release – the ones before and after were good too, but that one was something special – classic song after classic song, and no filler. I lost interest after Dark Side Of The Spoon, and didn’t listen to anything after that, except when a Grammy-nominated song like “Lies, Lies, Lies” popped onto the radar, or when they put out a heart-stopping cover like “Roadhouse Blues” (or when they were in a Stephen Spielberg film, like AI, but that all felt a bit different)!

Of course, given what I knew about Ministry and its grand poobah Al Jourgensen I knew that Al would have a great story to tell, and being a fan of rock bios and auto-bios this was one I had to get. And I’m glad I did – it’s a fantastic read full of great stories and anecdotes, with classic quotes every other page or so. It pops open another side of life and exposes it in all its gristly glory, and it gets into the strangeness of being a stranger in a strange band! It’s also gotten me to investigate the rest of the Ministry catalogue (and new stuff by Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters, and also newer RevCo), most of which is fantastic.

In fact, the book is exactly the sort of romp you’d expect, delving into all sorts of info about his messed-up childhood and family life (probably wasn’t all that messed up, given how he settled into a middle class family, but the tale of his beloved grandmother dying of face cancer is indeed very, very sad). It gets into record label and band politics too, especially around Paul Barker, but doesn’t spend too much time on it, describing recording sessions, tours, collaborations, collapses, busts, and everything else a trouble making industrial music bandit should expect form life.

High points of the book are about rock ‘n’ roll girlfriends, including Aimee Mann (!!!) and Sean Yseult (didn’t know about that one either – and she doesn’t write too much about it in her book), who he nearly drove off a cliff. He does get into being a terrible person at times, and there’s plenty of depraved stuff; but you also get the sense of a man enjoying the insanity of life who still also has the work ethic to put out something monumental even when the sky is falling, living life backwards, etc. There’s crazy drug stuff, there’s stuff about aliens, and if that’s not enough there even weirder stuff about clear spiders (Gibby chimes in on this one too). Another highlight of the book is that there are chapters and passages written by his partners-in-crime, including his wife Angie, Gibby, Jello – and even Mike Scaccia, writing from the afterlife, and other partners-in-crime. Really top notch stuff.

There are classic passages where he writes about seeing the Ramones in Colorado with Jello Biafra and Wax Trax Records co-founder Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher in the audience, his friendships with Timothy Leary (Sean Yseult wrote about this too in her book) and William F Burroughs (with whom he bonded over stoned racoons, entering a short list of friends such that “up until the time of his death [Burroughs] would call me about once a week and we’d talk.”), hanging out with the Skinny Puppy guys, hanging out with KMFDM, hanging out with Anthrax, the death of Dimebag Darrell (Ministry was playing in the same town as Damageplan the night he was shot, and may have been tailed by his killer), getting married in Graceland, and hanging out with Ronald Reagan Jr. He talks about confronting Henry Rollins who got all sour-pussed about having a junkie on his bus, and about his rivalry with Rob Zombie, who he viewed as a pretender. Strange how he got pissed off with Robert Plant the one time he met the singer of his adored Led Zeppelin, keeping him holed up in the Wax Trax record shop with prima donna behavior (even though Ministry got a free plug out of it). There’s also a lot of talk about the Chicago Blackhawks, whose owners he’s friends with. Interesting.

The photo section is pretty cool, although the cover shot – with multiple face piercings and blotchy tattoos – is extra gruesome and, well, makes you want to be careful about leaving it lying around the house. You see Al as a kid, as a teenager, in his early new wave phase, with a variety of hats and bandannas, with Timothy Leary onstage singing “Thieves”, one pic with his daughter, one pic with his step-dad, two with his mom, and a few with Paul Raven (RIP), Mike Scaccia (RIP), with the Cheap Trick guys, and with his 13th Planet cohorts. A-hoo-ah!!

The book starts off with all sorts of loving quotes from major industry names validating Ministry; this is unnecessary and very indulgent, as anyone reading the book will surely already know how important Al and Ministry are, but it’s still pretty cool hearing Trent Reznor say “Ministry was the single-most important influence in the sound and concept of Nine Inch Nails” (we get to read a bit more about Mr Reznor later in the book too). Naturally, most people quoted adore A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste, but then there’s Blake Judd of Nachtmysterium (who is he/she, and what is this band’s relevance next to the other big names cited, namely Slipknot, Korn, Fear Factory, Disturbed, Prong, Anthrax, Dead Kennedys?), who adores Filth Pig. O-kayyyyyy… The foreword by co-author Jon Wiederhorn is interesting enough as it sets the scene, even though he over-uses the word “obviously”. Al himself then gives a long-winded intro (which eventually merges into Chapter 1) where he revisit one of his many near-death experiences (perforated ulcers that nearly caused him to bleed to death), ruminates on life as a living legend/ex-junky, and drops comments like how Relapse was the most fun album to record for him (strangely, it is also Ministry’s crappiest album, although it does have a great Stormtroopers Of Death cover on it, “United Forces”). He recounts the recording of the Buck Satan album, and all sorts of other insanity. But, as usual, there are great quotes: “I’d get drunk, vomit, and fall asleep. Then do it again. It’s not glorious, it’s not glamorous – it’s what old rock stars do before they die. They puke on themselves. And that’s why Ministry’s 2012 album was called Relapse.” His wife Angie would call him from some awards ceremony that he’d bailed on, and he’d be so wasted that he’d answer her in mid-puke, saying “that’s nice honey. I have to go die. Can you call back?” Nice anecdote about how Al got Sam D’Amruoso, drum programmer, to do the snotty lyrics for “Weekend Warrior”. “[Sammy] wrote out something and recorded it himself just to get a guide vocal one night while I was drunk and passed out. He expected me to go back and redo it later. But when I heard it, I was like, ‘Nope, sounds good the way it is. I’m gonna have to give you a vocal credit on that one, dude.’”  Thanks, Grandpa Jourgensent!

By Chapter two, nearly 40 pages into the book (including fore-words and intros, etc), we finally get to his roots, talking about how a remarkable left-handed baby was born three months premature in 1958 to an unmarried millionaire’s daughter in pre-revolution Cuba. “I wasn’t born in some fancy American hospital. I was born in Havana, Cuba, a third-world country that’s just as likely to use dying fetuses as kindling for the poor as they were to fight to keep them alive. I was jaundiced with a failing liver. I was completely yellow – even my eyes. I had 60 percent hearing loss. In other words, I was a mess long before I entered the music industry.” Of course, he became a refugee at six years old, with his family trying to get out of Cuba, re-settling in Florida, his famous millionaire grandfather now resorting to working in a restaurant to support his family. Wow! Tales of his grandparents’ life, their split-up, and future hijinks is interesting and charming, even if it’s quite sad.

He has an interesting family, though, and not just his grandparents – seems he had a famous uncle, Leo Brouwer, a famous classical guitarist, “probably the best, after Segovia.” Another great-great-aunt wrote the famous folk song “La Malaguena.” Then, on Page 10 he goes from talking about his kinky grandmother to mentioning his first run-ins with aliens (“grays”) and how he had a green triangle on his neck for two weeks after meeting some of them! And the fun doesn’t stop there, as his mom goes husband shopping. “My mom was a Cuban Charo Latina Chiquita with nice tits and a hot ass. And my [aspiring NASCA driver step-] dad was kind of a nerd, so he said, ‘Alright, I’ll give up cars and take the pussy!’ Deal!” He talks about his life-long love of the Chicago Blackhawks, and how it helped him bond with his step-dad (who he seems to admire, begrudgingly, more than he does his mom, who’s never mentioned in a positive light, and who doesn’t get an opportunity to say anything in the book). On page 13 he talks about his first exposure to modern music – the Stones and “Paint It Black” Yes!! Then it’s onto Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top and Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn! Yes!!! Music became a passion. He talks about his first job, which was shoveling shit from race horses, including Secretariat, an American thoroughbred that took the Triple Crown in 1973.

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, thee 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.

Seems like he was a chubby kid! So he got into sports (via his step-dad), and quite good at baseball. Then he got into drugs, vandalism, and stealing cars. He also went to the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and got pepper sprayed! Got laid at 13, the same year he started shooting cocaine (!!!), although  he talks (much) more about the latter than the former (sex doesn’t figure too much into the story, unless he’s talking about weird adventures with groupies – the girl with the colostomy bag, the full, disgusting description is on Page 173, for example – or hanging out with the nyphos during his paradisical year in the sanitarium). Yes, rock ‘n’ roll has been his life, but drugs has been a near-second. Had a hard time figuring out if he was a jock or a stoner, since he was a bit of both, ha ha haaa… This includes a crazy story about him playing third base when the second baseman got struck dead by lightning.

 The sky was overcast but it wasn’t raining, then out of nowhere, KAPOW! A blinding, jagged bolt of lightning crashes down from overhead, and Danny [Cadman] hits the ground smoldering. I was the first one over there. His flesh was burned black; there was no question that he was dead. Maybe God was actually trying to hit me and had bad aim or something.

Death visited from time to time, and he had a sad goodbye with his grandma Carmen, who died of jaw cancer (which he nearly contracted himself – it was discovered early and cleaned out).

Doctors cut out her entire jawbone to remove the tumor to try to save her, but all they did is turn the last days of her life into a living hell. When I saw her it was hard to maintain eye contact and not turn away. She looked like Skeletor or some creature from Dawn Of The Dead. I talked with her a little about baseball and school, but I was choked up the whole time. She was so beautiful before that, and suddenly she’s looking at me with no face. She was all withered from the chemotherapy, and her long red hair was gone. When you know you’re seeing someone for the last time, it’s really hard to know what to do. That was one of the shittiest experiences I’ve ever had because I really loved her. She helped make me who I am, and suddenly she was gone. Fourteen-year-olds shouldn’t have to deal with that shit. Grandma Carmen wasn’t that old either. She was in her early fifties – which is pretty young to lose half your face. God, I still love her and can’t believe what she went through and how strong she was through the entire ordeal. She never felt sorry for herself. She just endured the barbaric experiments they performed on her until her dying day.

Eventually he spends a year in a mental institution, disowned from his parents, having the time of his life being dosed on high quality, free drugs, and hanging out with other crazy nymphos, and where he met a tutor who introduced him to Burroughs, Bukowski, Crowley and Leary, “all these guys who would become friends and peers later in life.” Not sure about Bukowski and Crowley, but he did meet the other two. He also got electro-shock therapy, like all the rest of them (Iggy, Roky), and then went to Colorado! Here he formed a band called… Slayer! Not the Slayer, but he came up with the name for his early band of misfits. Pretty funny. Eventually he meets a girl who takes him with her to Chicago, founds the music department at her school, then uses the foundling department’s equipment to paste together a song called “I’m Falling”; the Wax Trax guys go insane over it, and they push him to get a band together. Thanks, Jim, for laying the Ministry seed!! He gets into forming his first versions of the band, and mentions how he got into doing lead vocals accidentally. As the composer and engineer, “I had no interest whatsoever in singing for Ministry. But after we tried out twelve vocalists who all sucked, I figured, ‘Fuck, I might as well do this myself and save myself the pain of listening to some other knucklehead who isn’t as good at sounding British as I am.’” Of course, “Cold Life” soon followed, and Ministry was on its way. “To everyone’s surprise, ‘Cold Life’ went to number forty-five on the US dance charts in 1981. We celebrated by doing too much coke and getting fall-down drunk – you know, the usual.” The band thing started to get out of control, and eventually he got roped into making poppy music that he didn’t like; Clive Davis of his record company Arista called him up with a pep talk, and even got the Thompson Twins to talk to him to try to bring him around to the company’s way of thinking. Crazy! Interesting stories about his affair with Aimee Mann, their trysts in a haunted house, and being the inspiration of Til’ Tuesday’s song “Voices Carry”. And when you read the lyrics, it makes sense:

The drug thing takes off, and on page 52 he gets his first stab of heroin – he can’t remember who introduced it to him – and we’re off on a 20-year voyage of living on the dealers’ cycle. Oops! Later on, Al confesses that he was the on e who introduced Layne Staley of Alice In Chains to heroin, who took to it voraciously (just as John Phillips did when Keith Richards turned him on to them, we learn, in Life), and there are plenty of sad drug stories – Jeff Ward died of drugs, Bill Tucker died of drugs, Mike Scaccia nearly did, Patty Jourgensen was a bad junky – and many times Al nearly died of drugs himself. As a junkie, he also wasn’t a great father for his daughter Adrienne, and he seems remorseful about it the two times he mentions it in the book. “Before Sire picked up Ministry I was writing TV and radio jingles to help support our drug habits pay the rent, and feed the baby.” Sounds pretty crazy. There’s also a weird story about how the song “Every Day Is Hallowe’en” saved his life – he went into the wrong part of town to buy drugs and some guys wanted to kill him, until the recognized him. “It’s alright. It’s the bop-bop man. He’s cool.” Crazy!! If only Joe Cole had been so lucky.

Eventually he does the Twitch sessions with Adrian Sherwood, and he’s off in music production heaven (interesting story of the speed dealer who lived off of just three clients: Adrian, Lemmy and Gary Moore). “Best teacher in the world. I wouldn’t know my ass from my elbow if it wasn’t for Adrian Sherwood. Being able to live in London and work at Southern Studios with Adrian was awesome, man,” even though Sherwood’s friends were “criminal yobbo skinheads” and “speed freaks and soccer hooligans” who stole his wallet and he “got into a few Trainspotting-style bar fights there with bottle smashing across the head and beer mugs to the face.” He also shot a cool video with Storm Thorgerson for “Over The Shoulder” that includes real cornershop robberies, car thefts, a nail omelette, etc.

Then we get to Page 67 when he talks about Pailhead, Revolting Cocks (Sale fiches!!), the Twitch recording sessions, recording Big Sexy Land next door to the Ramones “I’ve never seen anyone consume that much beer”), and being in Belgium, London and Berlin (where an East German gun tower sniper played head games with him by keeping him in his gun sights). Wow!!

In his guest chapter, Luc Van Acker gives a good assessment to working with Al Jourgensen. “From a lawyer’s point of view you could say, ‘Oh, he’s ripping everyone off.’ That’s not true. It’s sad and he’s heartbroken now because every single guy except me thinks he ripped them off, while he has invested everything in the future. Meanwhile, the best music any of these people ever made in their career, they did with him.” Sascha Konietzko, the mind behind KMFDM, says something similar, “There were a couple of people who treated us like total assholes, worse than you would treat the shittiest support band. Chris Connelly was the top asshole amongst them all, and Martitn Atkins was a close second, for sure. Chris Connelly was so fucked up every day he didn’t even know what bus he was on. He would haplessly float about in swimming pools until someone would get him.” Sounds like Ulli, the anarchist from The Big Lebowski, in real life!

The section from page 59-61 is a list of the drugs that they were doing to accompany each album. As a barometer, it seems that he went from being under the influence of nothing on With Sympathy (although he played Asteroids with Paul McCartney in the recording studio lounge), all the way up to Filth Pig, which was 99.9% heroin, and Dark Side of the Spoon, which saw coke resurfacing on the menu. Animonisitisomina was clean, although Al was still weak from cleaning up and wasn’t happy with the record (I am – it’s great!), and then it was all booze afterwards.

Page 94 describes some of the madness from the A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste:

I’m not an artist or a producer – I’m still the guy who cleans up race horse’s shit, just like I did when I was young. And in the case of The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste, it’s amazing that I could walk straight enough to scoop properly. The album was practically shat out of the bowels of complete insanity and debauchery. We’d be in there working, and I’d look out the studio window and see a five-foot-tall Greate Dane fucking a girl. We built a motorcycle ramp in an alley behind the studio, and we’d ride the motorcycle up the ramp and crash it into a fence about eight feet away. We fired off shotguns in the studio and sampled the noise. It was Caligula on heroin, coke, and acid. And that was just the beginning.

Definitely the best stories of debauchery were from this period, and Al talks about playing with the Chicago Cubs and hanging out with them a bit. Great stories. Strangely, he didn’t like the album very much, although it is at this time that he struck up his initial relationship with Angie, who later saved his life and became his wife (interesting point from later on – Angie’s dad, who once played for the Montreal Canadians, is Al too, “that’s why Angie has ‘Al’ tattooed on her shoulder: even if I fuck up, she’s still got her dad.”) “A lot of diehard fans call The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste on of the top three Ministry records, but I can’t stand It, mainly because of the condition I was in when I made it. I could feel the machine slowly taking over and felt helpless to stop it. I don’t feel like the songs are the best I’ve written or that they’re even in my top one hundred.” Nutty things about live shows, such as being attacked by darts by fans at some shows (“The thing I don’t get is that if you hate a band that badly, why pay money for a ticket and bring expensive darts to their show? He probably bought the record, too, to make sure he hated it. Who does that?”), dealing with band members getting arrested (even Barker was arrested for jaywalking, and “one of our hired-gun band members – an English guy with a bad attitude – was busted for statutory rape a couple times.”), and drinking beer with otherwise-straight edge Ian MacKaye during Pailhead sessions (“It was the first time he had beer in years, and it was the shittiest stuff – like $4.99 a case – and tasted like metallic tent water. It was called Brewnigs, but we used to call it Nigbrew. We drank a shitload and got wasted”)! They even spent hours dialing in to a sex line for laughs.

Funny stories about collaborating on the Lard project with Jello Biafra, the germophobe diva. Finding Metallica (“three wankers with mullets”) drinking beer in his dressing room, and harassing himself all over them (similar to another funny story when he did the same thing to Ice-T on the Lollapalooza tour, The Cult during Big Day Out, and later on even to suicidal porn star Savannah). Great story about working with GWAR on their Scumdogs Of The Universe recording when they were broke and consumed the beer and coke that was Al’s fee for producing “some tracks” (probably only one song, “The Horror of Yig”, as far as I know). He also expresses a lot of appreciation for Danny Wirtz, the grandson of the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, and how they became great friends – cool story! “Good old Danny Wirtz saved my ass more than once, that’s for sure.” Stories of working with the hastily-assembled Skatenigs (whose lead singer Phildo Owen became a singer for Beers, Steers + Queers-era RevCo, and once had a penis suit that shot fake sperm into the crowd that was the envy of GWAR) and The Mentors during the A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste tour (including their unbelievable 350-pound moron of a lead singer El Duce) are stunning in their madness!

I went into the bathroom and found this fucking guy there, naked from the waist down, lying in a pack of Dorito chips, urine 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.

Turns out El Duce knew Bill Rieflin, one of the Ministry drummers, who hated him for something that he had done in high school, then later on tried to rape Al’s mother right in front of him, and later got killed by a freight train in an easily-avoidable accident. El Duce stories are priceless, and the book is full of them!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXEm6fhI7P0

The book has tales of buying inflatable sheep from a sex shop, and hanging out with Pantera and Gibby Haynes (“Hands down the second-craziest person I’ve known in my life”) of the Butthole Surfers – all on the same one page!! At one point, they moved all the furniture from their hotel rooms to the roof and lit it on fire!! Around this time, Al also met (and tormented) Trent Reznor, who helped them out while on tour by pitching in some replacement equipment and becoming a Revolting Cocks roadie. “It was his first time on tour, and we called him ‘Mama’s Boy’ and whipped Black Cat firecrackers at him all the time. He tried to keep up with our drinking. We wouldn’t let him stop, so he’d puke and pass out, and then we’d draw dicks and pussies and the word ‘fag’ on him in permanent Sharpie marker.” Nice. Traveling through Mexico with Phildo Owen trying to kick heroin, running out of money in Manzanilla, winning it back by betting on crab fights. “If we lost, we had no money to cover the bets, so we would have gotten killed. Fortunately, our crab, this big fucker with a giant claw, won every tournament. We made enough gas money from two days of crab fights to drive home. We didn’t eat or anything – just gas money. Both of us returned craving drugs worse than ever.” End of chapter. Bleak! There’s been a lot written about the professional and personal rift that eventually grew between Phildo and Al (who mentions it at one point, briefly), although the fact that Al has not written Phildo out of the book probably indicates that everyone’s made nice.

He has an interesting Lollapalooza encounter with Henry Rollins, one guy I really like a lot:

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.

He also hates R Kelly, who was using his studio at one point and tried something funky with Al’s daughter. “He totally freaked out my daughter. At the time I was living in one of the studio bedrooms with Patty and Adrienne. I heard her scream, so I grabbed a suitcase and hit R. Kelly over the head with it. I had to fight my way out of his posse with the suitcase, swinging it at anything that moved. That he’s not in jail is buy generic cialis mastercard.” They also pissed into Al’s studio piano and trashed it.

His approach to songwriting is fascinating and cosmic:

People think there’s rhyme and reason to what I do, but almost everything is plucked out of thin air. It’s almost like these passages are transmitted to me in my sleep, and when I wake up I go and get my engineer so we can translate what I just heard in my head. That’s how I write all my songs. We don’t calculate them out or anything; they just come together. It’s almost spiritual. These snippets and riffs and random chaos swirl around for a while, gradually falling into place. It’s like assembling a giant three-dimensional puzzle made out of pieces that keep changing shape. I don’t know how it happens – it seems impossible – but somehow it works.

Interestingly, this is the same approach Keith Richards describes in his book, how songs exist in the cosmos and float around there until you intersect with them. Sadly, Al never gets to meet Keith, a fellow notorious junky survivor, although he nearly did – a Texas hanger-on and friend of Stones saxophonist brought the Stones over to his house one time in Austin, but he didn’t believe that the band was downstairs playing pool, so he grumpily sent everyone away. Oops!

He also talks about the distorted vocal sound, which did not come from other industrial bands, who he didn’t listen to, but Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators – another contribution we have old Roky to thank for! I’ve read somewhere else that he probably also learned about shouting lyrics from Ian MacKaye, I believe it was in Our Band Could Be Your Life, although he doesn’t give this credit in the book.

One of the interesting things about the book is that Al, like Lemmy, mentions prominent gays in his past, in this case his college coke connection (Lemmy had a gay roommate who was murdered by homophobes). He eventually goes one step further than Lemmy did, though, by admitting to a drunken gay fling (!!!), which is interesting. We also find out how superstitious he is – onbe of the things assistants like Danny Wirtz were in charge of was making sure that all of his talismans are in order, and then he mentions how he won’t fly on the twenty-third because of an old saying, twenty-three skidoo. “If you travel on the twenty-third of any month, you’re toast. That goes back to the wagon-trail days of the Wild West: If you set out on the twenty-third to go from Missouri to Oregon in a wagon, you were sure to die.” Weird (and also not in keeping with the phrase “cialis 4cpr riv 10mg”, which means “beat it, kid; scram; get lost”, or its supposed history, but that’s okay…).

Of course, his hatred of George Bush went on to fuel three great Ministry albums, including the masterpiece Houses Of The Mole, their best album since Psalm 69. He talks about Texas becoming a police state with Bush as governor, and also the actions against David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. He was there! Wiping out his car, motorcycle crashes, spider bites, and other insanity also took place at this time. Then he was also onstage with Johnny Depp the night that River Phoenix died outside of his club The Viper Room, tussling with Depp during his solo and other misunderstandings. Insane. Weird how he mentions being infuriated by The Cult, who he called posers for wearing Speedos (“skin suits for your cock and balls”), or how he tortured Courtney Love so intensely, stealing her drugs, humiliating her sexually, and all sorts of other nastiness.

As much as she hated me, Courtney wound up sleeping with me, except I made her shave her giant beaver before I’d get in bed with her. It was mainly because she didn’t have any dope. I turned over her purse looking for needles, but there was nothing there. So I said, “Eh, okay. Let’s fuck.” I think she did it out of fear. I didn’t rape her or anything, but she was so afraid of me and Mikey that she probably figured it was better just to fuck me than to say no. And it was very unsatisfying – I think I came, but I’m not sure. After we were done I grabbed her set of clothes that were laid out by the bed and threw them out the window. Even after that episode Courtney and I shot up together a bunch of times. I may have stolen her heroin, but I was polite enough to share it with her. Some things about her were really gross. She had seventeen pictures of her kid, Frances Bean Cobain, in her wallet after Kurt died, and the kid wasn’t with her or anything. It was just a trophy for her, so she could hand out pictures. She’s so egocentric and self-centered, and that’s why Mikey and I tortured her so much. She went on the air afterward in a radio interview and said I was the most hideous and horrific person she’d ever met. I thought that was pretty cool.

Al calls her “a very conniving, clever person. But I knew that, so her crazy act didn’t throw me.” They also leaned on Evan Dando when he tried to stand up for her. Gross, right? He even gets a bit irresponsible, saying “Here is a tip for any young bands who have drugs on their bus or in their van. Leave burgers or pizza out; it distracts the guard dogs. They will go straight for the food and forget about the pot, coke, anthrax spores, or whatever else you may be hiding. Not that I advocate traveling with any of that stuff – I’m just saying.”

But there’s always other sides to Al after the debauchery and meanness. One of the auxiliary chapters is by Holger Brandes, who had been a tour manager for the band in the European leg of their 2008 C U LaTour. Despite all of the horror and debauchery that Al and Ministry are associated with on tour (and probably any other time as well), he had a lot of nice words for Al. “Al might be an unusual guy to deal with. He might look weird; he might be an alcoholic. He might polarize people, but for me he became a real friend, and his intelligence, his humor, and his warmth for the people around him deserve respect and appreciation.” So it shows that there’s still a cuddly human in there for people who are serious and who know how to spot it (and all this shows what a complicated guy Al is, warts and all). He also gets into some of the weird logistics about tour managing, this short chapter is a good read.

There are cool tidbits of information in the book, like learning that “Bad Blood” from the 1999 Dark Side Of The Spoon release was from the 1985 Land Of Rape And Honey sessions, and Hollywood anecdotes such as the description of working with Stephen Spielberg and his cast of Hollywood weirdos (composer John Williams and animatronics expert Stan Winston talk about themselves in the third person, for example) on the horrible movie AI, probably hoping it would be s good as Full Metal Jacket… It wasn’t. He also had to work with Limp Bizzkit on a remix, because they wanted Al’s “Thieves” vocal distortions. A funny tale of Al having fun with Fred Durst in the studio and taking his $10,000, despite him not getting anything out of it. Don’t like that band, and they sound horrible doing “Thieves” live…

Like all rock bios/autobios, the book becomes much less interesting in the second half, and Al himself is far less raunchy and quotable. He went through his worst drug days, he came through a survivor (obviously – Layne Staley and all the others who didn’t make it didn’t write autobiographies) and then entered a bit of a holding pattern – life turmoil, awards ceremonies, compounds in Texas, visits to the hospital, regular collaborations with his posse of usual suspects, etc. There’s also an auxiliary chapter on “How to save the planet with two dirty words: Social Democracy” that is not well thought through. He also talks about a “STEGAL” act that “put a cap on the greed of banks”, which is actually online pharmacy tadalafil 20mg of 1932, which just goes to show that he wasn’t really up on all of his facts. He also talks about how “there are 8.5 billion people in the world now”, so I wonder if he’s taking the piss, especially when he follows that up with “That’s too many fucking people.” Riiiight…

Of course, I’m also still crying out for updates, and keep a close eye on Al’s website, his facebook page, and all that other stuff. Seems like Al went into rehab again (despite his cover of the defiant Amy Winehouse song “Rehab”), this time to cure him of his last vice, alcohol. A great book, any music fan should read it…

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