Al Jourgensen is not only the founder of Ministry, the single most influential and popular industrial band that ever graced this doomed planet. The well-inked-and-pierced singer is also behind several other cult bands, including Revolting Cocks (which featured members of Front 242, Nine Inch Nails, Prong and Skinny Puppy) and Lard (featuring Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra) and collaborated with pretty much everyone, from Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi) to ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, The Cult’s Billy Morrison, Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielson and Trent Reznor.
Since the mid-1980s, you’ve heard Jourgensen’s tunes on the soundtracks of many popular TV series (Miami Vice), video games (the Tony Hawk’s franchise), documentaries (Murderball, Sound City), animated family movies (Turbo, Rango) and many genre features, including The Matrix, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Free Jack, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, Richard Stanley’s Hardware, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Saw 3, 4 and 5 and John Carpenter’s Escape from LA. Upon mentioning that last one, he admitted he didn’t get to work with the Halloween director but still got to see him in the flesh decades later, saying, “I saw John Carpenter live, playing with his band with his son, and that was amazing. … The only thing I don’t like about Carpenter is that he does his own music, so there is no chance I’ll ever get to write a score for him!” [Laughs]
The most rabid cinephiles out there are certainly well aware the man has also sampled many genre movies over the years. He did it first with Ministry, using dialogue excerpts from James Cameron’s Aliens and Oliver Stone’s Platoon in 1988’s The Land of Rape and Honey. The 1989 album The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste included lines from Clive Barker’s Hellbound: Hellraiser, Brian de Palma’s Scarface and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
On 1992’s ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ (aka Psalm 69), Jourgensen spoiled us by featuring bits from Barker’s Nightbreed, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist III and Stuart Gordon’s The Pit and the Pendulum. He sampled cult classics Deliverance, 2010, Evil Dead II and Dirty Harry on a couple of Revolting Cocks records, too. Thus, we always knew he was one of us. He even borrowed the corpse of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Grandma for the Do Ya Think I’m Sexy music video, fer chrissake!
And thanks to Mike Scaccia (1965-2012), Jourgensen’s late, great guitarist, the Ministry frontman was exposed to lots of horror movies over the years. “At that time, I had in the band the world’s biggest horror fan, my best friend Mike Scaccia,” recalls Jourgensen, adding, “He was the biggest Argento fan, a real horror movie aficionado … to the point that we sometimes had to say, ‘Okay, Mikey, we already watched three movies today, man … can we just stop, y’know?’ [Laughs]
With a brand new album to promote (click here to read our review of HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES), Ministry’s main man gracefully accepted RUE MORGUE’s offer to sit down for a Zoom chat before heading out on a North American tour. And he was eager to share some insights about his most recent collaborations and tour mates as well as fascinating stories from his work in genre cinema.
On HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES, you got great guests, as usual. Your old pal Jello Biafra sings on “Aryan Embarrassment,” Pepper Keenan of Corrosion of Conformity and Down plays on “Goddamn White Trash” and most surprisingly, we can hear New York-based global punk dub band collective Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz on “Cult of Suffering,” a down-tempo song that almost sounds like RevCo; It might very well be my favorite one off the record, which is kind of surprising since it’s very different from everything else. How did that collab come about?
It was surprising to me too! [Eugene] had a show in L.A, and it turns out he was a longtime Ministry fan, so he got his manager hooked up with mine, and he just wound up in my house! See, I have a long-standing policy: If you’re gonna be in my [home] studio, I don’t care who you are; You have to record. So, we came up with that song in one night, and I hadn’t even met this person before! It was beautiful.
For the upcoming tour, you’re going back on the road with fellow Canadians Front Line Assembly and Gary Numan before joining Alice Cooper and Rob Zombie again for the second U.S,.leg of the Freaks on Parade tour. Two awesome line-ups!
They’re great, man! This [first one] is just a rolling caravan of people that are actually having fun, man. Even our road crews get along. This is something I never experienced in 40 years, this line-up of us, Numan and Front Line … We just plow through it, with nothing but laughs and giggles. So, it’s probably my favorite tour of all time! And [the Freaks on Parade tour] is just another good one. I’ve known Alice for like, 30 years, and Rob for about 35. So, it’s good because we’ve known each other for so long – just good, professional people. And it’s really funny, too, because Rob, I think, just turned 55. I’m 65, and Alice is 75! God! [Laughs]
We also have to talk about Wicked Lake, this fun 2008 horror flick starring Angela Bettis (May, 2002’s Carrie), Will Keenan (Tromeo & Juliet) and Tim Thomerson [Near Dark, Trancers]. You also had a quick cameo as an art teacher in addition to producing the soundtrack featuring music from Ministry and bands from your 13th Planet label. How did that project come into your life?
The [movie’s] director and producer, Zach Passero, directed the Revolting Cocks Fire Engine video. Back then, we were both living in El Paso. It was shot all over New Mexico. It’s the most fun I ever had on a film set. It was his first movie, and I think he did a great job with it. He just gave me complete creative license to put together the soundtrack. He said to me, “What you already put out [through your label] works with what we have, so just use that.”
Easy, eh? Around the same time, the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker from the great Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Strange Days), featured a metalhead character and not one but three Ministry songs. I know it’s not a horror film, but war is hell, right?
Yeah, that’s the real horror right there. So one day, I get a call from Kathleen Kennedy, who was the producer on A.I., and she was producing this one, too. And she asks if I had anything [they could use for the soundtrack], and I did. I had a brand-new song I’d just composed for NCIS, the TV show, which got rejected for not sounding “Ministry enough.” So, next thing you know, that same song ends up in The Hurt Locker, which went on to win a bunch of Academy awards at the Oscars! [Laughs]
Speaking of A.I. Artificial Intelligence [2001], you got to star with Ministry in a Spielberg movie, which was a Kubrick project before he passed away. I’ve read it’s actually the Full Metal Jacket director who approached you in the first place…
Stanley Kubrick’s secretary called me twice, and I hung up both times, thinking it was a prank phone call. The third time, she puts him on the phone! Apparently, he had heard the sample from Full Metal Jacket on the song Thieves and just went, “I just want this man to do the main score and soundtrack for my new movie.” So, he sent me the script, which I thought was amazing. Basically, the original script was about the Jude Law character, this male prostitute android, who died [in his version]. It was really dark. Then, Spielberg bought the script, and he said, “You’re not doing the whole score, [but] you can do one song and be in this one Flesh Fair part.”
That’s a fun, albeit pretty short. scene, with melting robots and chrome skull masks. Plus, there is also a music video for What About Us, the song that Ministry performs in A.I., which was shot on the movie’s set. Did Spielberg have anything to do with it? Did he actually shoot it himself?
Yes, that was Spielberg’s first rock video! And now, it looks like I’ll get to work with Martin Scorcese. He just did Killers of the Flower Moon, and there is a follow-up documentary called Long Knife, for which I just did the sound score. Leonardo di Caprio is the narrator, his dad is an executive producer and it’s directed by this investigative journalist named Greg Palast. I just sent it over, and they freaked out on one of the songs!
I can’t wait to hear it! So, I guess if we’re lucky, perhaps Scorcese might even direct a music video for Ministry!
Fingers crossed!
Head to Ministryband.com for more information about Ministry’s tour dates. The band is currently touring North America until April 5, with English new wave legend Gary Numan and Canadian industrial pioneers Front Line Assembly. Then, later this summer, Ministry will regroup with Alice Cooper and Rob Zombie for Freaks on Parade part 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfSHHujQcqw
