Back from the dead
With an autobiography out and the final Ministry album imminent, frontman Al Jourgensen reflects on his mayhem-filled life and brushes with the supernatural
Making a telephone call to Al Jourgensen, frontman of the hell-raising industrial rock band Ministry, at his compound in El Paso, Texas, can be intimidating.
After all, this is a musician who hurled firecrackers at Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor just for fun ("This is what we did with the people we liked"), threw furniture off hotel balconies while it was on fire, had his compound raided by 32 members of the FBI, DEA, ATF and IRS (they didn't find anything), and let's not even get into what he did to the wheelchair-bound female midget with a colostomy bag.
I was dead, dude. Let's call a spade a spade. The second one I was floating ... The third time freaked me out. The fourth time is the charm for me, but I hope that doesn't happen for a while.
That's just for starters.
But one can feel the charm, the charisma and even gain an idea of how much wine he's had to drink the moment the 54-year-old six-time Grammy nominee picks up the phone. "I'm glad you wanted to talk to me, the drunk a******," he says by way of a greeting. "And maybe you can get my book to Edward Snowden. That would be great!"
The book he's referring to is the new autobiography, , which has been published ahead of next month's release of what Jourgensen says will be the final Ministry album, The book, co-written with music journalist Jon Wiederhorn, starts with Jourgensen literally dying and ends with him saying goodbye to his best friend and Ministry guitarist Mike Scaccia, who suffered a fatal heart attack while performing onstage. In between, the pages drip with stories so insane that they make Led Zeppelin's tales of rock'n'roll excess seem like child's play.
From the early 1980s, when he was singing over industrial dance music using a faux British accent, to the 2000s, when he was skewering the likes of the Bush family on his heavy metal releases, Jourgensen's US$1,000-a-day addiction to cocaine and heroin had him at death's door several times.
Or as he is quick to point out: "I was dead, dude. Let's call a spade a spade." He growls: "That last one was bad. The second one I was floating all around the room, knew where everyone was in the room. It gave me an understanding of the afterlife and what happens as a human being. The third time freaked me out. Cats are supposed to have nine lives. That was my third and I don't want to be a third of a cat. The fourth time is the charm for me, but I hope that doesn't happen for a while."
