A few weeks ago, Al Jourgensen was floating in the swimming pool of his Los Angeles home, and the Ministry frontman was in an existential mood. Lying still, gazing up at the California sky while looking back on his life, he raised his fist and shook it at the universe.
“I’m getting to that age where I’ve got to start thinking about my mortality,” the 65-year-old tells me on a video call. “I waved my fist in the air and said, ‘You’ve got to promise me you’re not sending me back here!’ And, I swear to God, I heard a voice in my head that said, ‘No. You paid your dues, man. We’ll find you somewhere better.’”
Jourgensen has already died three times – or at least seen his heart stop. He founded Ministry in 1981 and went from playing synthpop to defining industrial metal with mechanical-sounding drums, distorted snarls and staccato guitar chords. But, just as well-known as his musical achievements are his addictions. The musician had his first drink aged eight, and began using hard drugs at 12. He’d use both until his mid-50s and mid-40s respectively, overdosing on heroin to the point of clinical death twice, before flatlining once more, in 2010, after an exploding stomach ulcer.
“The first death was the weirdest,” Jourgensen says, talking about it as casually as a walk to the shops. “I was at a party and OD’d. When I came back after being defibrillated, everyone was astounded that I could tell where everyone was, even in different rooms. I’d been hovering above me, watching all the panic and mayhem below as they were working on me.”
It’s heartening seeing a man who’s endured so much struggle look so healthy today. He appears young for his age, his facial tattoos joined by white teeth and long dark hair, and he chuckles during discussions of even the most tumultuous experiences.
The musician isn’t a self-described “promo-sexual” – “once I’m done with a record, I move on from it,” he says – but we talk a little about Ministry’s forthcoming 16th album, Hopiumforthemasses. It continues the band’s EDM-metal bent and has the political bite they first unleashed on their 2004–2007 anti-George W Bush trilogy: Houses of the Molé, Rio Grande Blood and The Last Sucker. Today, it’s the alt-right and incels inciting the band’s ire. In opposition to what stereotypes suggest, Jourgensen clearly isn’t becoming more rightwing as he ages.
“My own mother is a Trump supporter,” he says, “and I’ve stopped talking to her. I’m like, ‘How can you support somebody that would have made us the villains?’”
Jourgensen and his mother are Cuban immigrants. He traces his political engagement back to his earliest memory: being on one of the last flights leaving his home country post-revolution, age two. An only child, he was subjected to racist bullying when he started school in Chicago, while his mother married an American man who had no interest in being a stepfather. Speaking Spanish, Jourgensen’s mother tongue, was banned in the house.
The isolation led to his early exploration of drink and drugs. “I found older friends,” he explains. “I’d get out of school and go to a friend’s house, who was smoking pot. They were 18 or 19; I was 12.”
Many musicians would say they found solace in certain artists or albums amid such ostracism, but not Jourgensen. He initially wanted to ride bulls in his teenage home town of Breckenridge, Colorado, and didn’t view music as a potential career path until he was 18. “When I went to an actual professional-amateur rodeo event, I lasted less than one second on one bull and he crushed my entire ribcage,” Jourgensen laughs. “I had to go to the hospital for a couple months and I thought: there has to be a better way to meet chicks!”
Fascinated by the then-nascent…
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