“This presidency isn’t a surprise to me. You could see it coming a mile away. But the scope of the corruption is unparalleled”: How Ministry’s Al Jourgensen tried and failed to bow out with the George W Bush-baiting The Last Sucker
Ministry mainman Al Jourgensen recently announced that he would be releasing one more album and then retiring. But he’s been here before – he said the same thing around the time of 2007’s The Last Sucker. And as Metal Hammer joined industrial metal’s great wild man in his Texas compound, he was serious.
And so it ends. Ministry founder Al Jourgensen is perched on a stool in his Sonic Ranch recording studio, a cleverly disguised converted garage in his modest home located in sun-cooked, Mexico-bordering heart of El Paso, Texas. It’s just past midnight but still hot enough to bake your bones and make the weak exhale of an oscillating fan your lifeline. He drags deeply on a Winston cigarette, the last of a few dozen today, pushes his sunglasses back up his nose, and pours himself another of glass of wine. Look closely and you’ll notice the red surface is reverberating against the sides a little, because at this very moment, the last, just-finished track of the final Ministry record is currently blasting at roughly the volume of a shuttle launch.
Rewind four hours. Al’s reclined on a couch in his lounge and cackling at political satire The Daily Show on a big screen TV. Just above it sits a large portrait of serial child-killer John Wayne Gacy, which he proudly states was painted by his daughter from his first marriage when she was just eight-years-old. Near it, on a vast expanse of wall are framed pictures of Al Jourgensen’s storied past. Countless tour posters, a painting of 60s counter-culture icon Timothy Leary, who Jourgensen lived with for two years in Beverley Hills in the late 90s, dropping acid, and – most notably – shat in the fountain at a party being thrown by Larry Flynt. It was painted by Hollywood A-lister Susan Sarandon.
Next to it is a photograph of famed Naked Lunch author, heroin addict and Ministry collaborator William S. Burroughs. He’s holding a 12-gauge shotgun he taught Al how to shoot. Adding to the curious scene, on the next couch over, are Fear Factory singer Burton C. Bell, who’s here to discuss signing his upcoming Ascension Of The Watchers project to 13th Planet [he’ll sign it later tonight, in blood], the record label Al shares with his wife and ultra-organised manager Angie – who’s currently in the kitchen cooking burritos for everyone – and Prong frontman Tommy Victor, who’s in town to put the final touches on his upcoming Power Of The Damager record and suffering a mighty toothache, not forgetting a migty dose of abuse from Al for his decision to do a cover of Kiss’ Parasite. Both Tommy and Burton feature on The Last Sucker, the eleventh and, as Al already began suggesting years ago, final Ministry record ever.
Surrounded by friends and mementos like these, this eerily familial scene – completed by the oblivious play-fighting of two labradors, Ozzy and Lemmy, and four napping cats on the adjoining stairs: PJ, Kitty, Ziggy, and Chelviston – has a distinct feeling of masked sadness, like forced jocularity around a terminal patient’s hospital bed. As we retire to an office bedecked with a wall-spanning portrait of Rasputin, it becomes clear just how wrong that assessment is. Just beyond the window, a pair of caged cockatiels, Sid and Charles Bukowski – who Al has taught how to sing the first few notes of Richard Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries – flutter in the setting sun as Al surveys the landscape of Ministry having finally reached the horizon.
“Look, the synchronicity of this is great,” he says, straddling a chair and pulling it up to a waiting bottle of red, the second or third of an impressive daily procession that does nothing to slow his wits.
“I was depressed during the Clinton years. How do you get mad about a President getting a blow job? Bush is leaving, he’ll be in jail, and I’ll be on easy street. I’m just glad that I did a really good album to end it with as opposed to hanging on too long like the drunk guy that stays at your party all night that you can’t get rid of.”
He lights a cigarette and explains how it was toward the end of Ronald Reagan’s reign over the American presidency, in the late 80s, that he first experienced real political discontent. But his decision to finish with Ministry involves more with the pendulum inevitably swinging back on conservativism’s chokehold on American politics once Bush has left office.
“I’ve made my point. As you get older you start thinking about a bigger paradigm. I’ve worked my ass off and now I want my piece of serenity, and I deserve that,” he says, sounding very convinced. “For years I hated my job, I hated the people I was surrounded by, the management, the record labels… and that was a big part of the drug addiction, when you’re literally surrounded by hopelessness. I didn’t see a way out and all of a sudden there was a light.”
What if America elects an even bigger asshole?
“Nope! I’m done,” he snorts. “I’ve been prepared for this my whole life. There’s no going back. I’m moving on.”
As much forewarning as he may have given, there’s a finality to all this, a kind of certitude that in any conversation would elicit a natural, ‘are you sure about this?’ To understand why, you only need to consider what Al Jourgensen is leaving behind.
Al and indeed Ministry’s story is one in which rock music, politics, and drug use freely intermingle. He was born in Cuba 48 years ago but raised in Colorado and then Chicago, the son of a Cuban mother and a Norwegian stock car mechanic, a gas-guy. It was on a hot day in May of 1966 that Al was sitting in the pit-lane of of the Indianapolis 500 watching his Dad work when his musical life began.
“I’ll never get rid of that sound, man,” he says with an appreciative grin. “It was so fucking loud and so fucking cool. That’s what got me into it, into turning music up. I’m not deaf. It’s this visceral thing.”
And it wasn’t long, four years to be precise, before his political awakening began. By 11 he was avidly reading the papers and conscious of the Nixon administration’s corruption amid the disastrous turn of events in Vietnam. He was so compelled by events that he ran away from home to witness the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which is notable for two things: violent clashes between protesters and politicians, and a legendary eight-hour gig by garage-rock icons the MC5.
“This presidency isn’t a real surprise to me. You could see it back then, coming a mile away. But the scope of the corruption today, and the arrogance, is totally unparalleled. It’s like this really huge buttfucking.”
But there’s another road leading into this junction of volume, music, and mainstream-hating rebellion. It was in the summer of 1973 that Al, at the age of 15, snorted his first line of cocaine. It was only the first step toward what by 1980, while still singing and playing keyboards for Special Affect and a year before forming Ministry, would transform into a full-blown heroin addiction.
“I spent 18 years chasing that elusive first high,” he says, grinning. “I remember it was in Boston, and I was like, ‘where have you been all my life? I’ve got my new girlfriend, wahey I’m married!’ I took to heroin like a fish takes to water, dude. It was kind of like my reaction against being told what to do, what to wear. You’re talented, they sign you, and then you realise you just shook hands with the Devil. It’s a paradox. Heroin was like the only thing that made sense to me.”
It’s that addiction that Al explains robbed him of most memories of what, from the outside, looks like an impressive ascent. First, toward becoming an icon of underground industrial music in the 80s and then, in 1991, fodder for an alternative-hungry MTV with the hit-single Jesus Built My Hotrod, which would appear on Psalm 69 the following year. Despite massive sales, this was not a happy time. For starters, his relationship with Warners was, well…
“They know more about my bodily functions than any other label,” he says with a cackle. “I sent them cum. I signed my contract in piss. I Federal-expressed a diaper full of shit to them from Paris. And Ministry? We were worse than The Who,” he says with all sincerity. “We would go entire tours without saying four words to each other. And if we did, it was ‘go fuck your mother.’”
And, it seems, always in the background of this fucked fairytale was a creeping narcotic menace, soon to become a full-on monster by the mid 90s.
“I’d go to a nice restaurant and I couldn’t understand why people would be pissed that I was smoking crack at the table. I would tie-off and shoot-up in a fucking restaurant. I just didn’t understand. It was like ‘why can’t I?’ I was a fucking product of the system.”
Fuelled by the monetary success of Psalm 69 and later albums, Al’s habits would spin out of control, ultimately resulting in a Federal bust of his compound just outside of Austin, Texas, in 1995, and his subsequent arrest and sentencing to five years of probation. It was at that point that his life really fell apart.
“I was shooting $500 of dope a day. I sold a Ferrari for a pound of coke. Traded it. Here’s the keys. Give me the coke. That’s fucked up. I was gone. I wanted to die. I was completely fucking on my deathbed. I sold my house, I had no place to live, I had no cars, I had nothing. I had one guitar left that I hadn’t pawned out of like 50 guitars and I was sleeping on a crack dealer’s couch in Austin, 1996. And I’d just completely lost it. I didn’t know who else to call.”
The person he called was Angelina Lukacin, who he’d known for years. In the absence of sanity it was she who pulled him back from the brink and helped him rebuild his life.
“Without her, I wouldn’t be here. I don’t mean to kiss ass and say that to get a blow job. She literally made sense in a time when there was no sense.She was like ‘just come to my house and stay at my house’. It was in New York city, across from this park, this giant junkie-fest. Like everything in my life, I’ve done it backassward. She took off work, she spent months with me. I never had to go to Betty Ford [a rehabilitation clinic] or none of that crap.”
It was at that point that Al sees his real life as having begun. As he puts it, all that came before was merely a preview for the movie that he’s living now. As for Angie, the pair would marry at Graceland in 2002.
“One day I woke up and got out of the matrix.I’m a peaceful old sage. I’m happy. It’s time.”
Be afraid. Al’s musical career is built on indignation, debauchery, a disdain for authority. This may be good for Al the person, but you wouldn’t be wrong to wonder whether Al the musical firebreather has any more gas in the tank. And you wouldn’t be first. It took six months to produce The Last Sucker, cradle to grave, and everything was going along smoothly – right up until the last two weeks.
“I was like ‘oh fuck, oh fuck, it better be perfect’,” says the sage, clutching his fingers to his lips. “That’s when Angie was like ‘shut the fuck up’ and I just did it. There was that adjustment period of realising this was it. It’s so different from making records before, where it’s like, ‘you’re so useless, junkie, hurry up and write us a song!’”
So it seems that as Al has shed the life that fuelled his addiction, so he’s shed the band as well. We enter his studio, where wraithlike producer Bixby is waiting. He puts The Last Sucker disc in, and – true to Al’s origins – cranks it to roughly the sound of your inner ear imploding. It’s full of fire and indignation, a cannon-blast of ire that can only come from someone genuinely, ferociously annoyed. This is an album that, from Lawton Outlaw’s elaborate artwork based around conspiracy theorist David Icke and the Egyptian book of the dead, to the music itself, screams anger and, more sadly, it seems to say farewell.
Al bites the end of a cigar at the start of End Of Days, a blasting epic that, halfway through, transforms itself into something else with a joyful apocalyptic sway, a jam-sesh. Burton C. Bell’s vocals appear on it, as do Angie’s. As Al will later explain, over wine, cigarettes and hazy stories of his wilder days, it’s the product of a 14-minute jam-sesh on which it isn’t Al having the last word, but ex-American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, a recording of a speech that was given on his leaving office in 1961. It’s about the threat of the military industrial complex. It’s about what’s happening right. Fucking. Now. The irony that a Republican has the last word on the last Ministry record isn’t lost on Al, but ask him why and he’ll play the track again. There’s a blip at the end – someone saying something. It’s impossible to make out what was said. As he explains, it’s himself at the end of that jam, tired and spent, saying, ‘that’s it fellas. That’s all I’ve got’.
“Yeah, but we made it backwards,” he says with an easy smile. “We’re freaks.”
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 170