Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen can at first glance seem an intimidating soul. His appearance is set off by long dreadlocks and piercings all over the face; plus you’re bound to take notice of the knife-like stare and intense stage demeanor.
Once you start chatting with him though, you start noticing the guy is actually super-friendly and even warm, with a hearty laugh that easily fills the room. When asked about the day of press he has booked, he says, “Being a promosexual is a very difficult job.”
The past couple of years have been just as weird for Ministry as it has been for everyone else. The band was supposed to tour in celebration of their 30th year since Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste came out, and that’s when Covid hit. Now it’s been 32 years since that album was released, and Psalm 69 is celebrating its 30th instead. To top all that, the band released their new album Moral Hygiene, which quite frankly has to be the best thing they’ve put out since Psalm 69.
Ministry is now back on tour and making up for lost time. Their upcoming show at Anaheim’s House of Blues alongside the Melvins and Corrosion of Conformity is going to be their first performance in Southern California subsequent to the one where they played at Slayer’s final show, which was held at the Forum in late 2019.
“Yes, it’s been almost two and a half years,” Jourgensen says. “Quite the journey since our little imposed quarantine lives that we’ve partaken in. I managed to get the equivalent of almost two, two and a half albums done just by being in enforced imprisonment through quarantine. Believe me, I’m not complaining, but I have a studio in my house so, OK, there’s nothing to do – let’s just be creative for a couple of years. It’s worked out well, but I’m really looking forward to getting back on the road, which I never thought I’d say, but here we are.”
On Moral Hygiene, he says: “I knew when we were done with that, that OK, this is a good one. This is a keeper. After 15 or 17, there’s probably maybe four or five keepers. This is in the keeper category. It seems to be like, everything that’s talked about on that album is really coming to fruition more so than ever. Things like fascism coming to a head. They’re trying every legal trick in the book to impose authoritarianism on this country, with voting rights and all the stuff that we were singing about then is now coming to fruition.”
Jorgensen has consistently been the type to voice his opinions on things he’s passionate about, with some level of the punk rock rebellion inherent in the man as well as his various bands. The band’s latest offing is overtly punk, containing an “anarchy”-esque font to a guest feature by Jello Biafra, as well as a cover of “Search and Destroy” which was originally performed by the Stooges.
“It wasn’t a conscious effort, but it definitely started steering in that direction,” Jorgensen says. “What else do we have to lose? They’ve stripped away everything from us. We’re in quarantine with no possibility of making any kind of money over the next couple of years. We’ve just got to hunker down and that was the DIY punk rock spirit of the early ‘80s, late ‘70s, which I was a part of as well. It kind of was a throwback that way. It was getting into a hot tub time machine and going back to that.”
Jourgensen has been tight with Biafra for some time now, with the duo even forming a 1988 project together named Lard. Jourgensen says there’s more of that coming.
“[Jello] didn’t come here – he’s in San Francisco,” Jourgensen recalls. “We exchanged hard drives, and some drop boxes and stuff. I just knew that song was meant for him. I tried to take a stab at the vocals and I wasn’t happy with it, so we sent it to Uncle Jello, and he came back with that. We were like, ‘Yes, that’s it.’ Because we had all this time on our hands, we wound up writing another five, six, seven songs that are headed Jello’s way and I’m eagerly anticipating his renditions of his vocal takes on those songs. So it looks like we have a new Lard album coming out, too, next year. That’s a bonus.”
The Ministry song on which Jello sings is titled “Sabotage is Sex,” and it’s a snotty punk anthem as well as one of the highlights of the album.
“That track is a throwback,” Jourgensen declares. “It was a lot of fun to make, just the exchange process – this is the new reality we live in. This is how you write music. You send it through the ether and somebody picks it up and does their stuff and sends it back through the ether to you. There you go, without any human contact. This is where we’re at. But either way, it was still a lot of fun. Just hearing the process of how that song grew. I can’t wait to play this stuff.”
“We have a two-year lag because of COVID,” Jourgensen says. “I kinda thought it was dumb – we had scheduled a 30-year anniversary tip of the cap to that era of Ministry, and I was down for that, it made sense, but two years later in quarantine, this is now the 32nd year of Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, not the 30th, and Psalm 69 is now hitting 30. So we’re in a strange spot, so on this live show, we are going to give a little bit of a tip of the cap to some of the Psalm 69 songs, as well as MIATTTT, as well as Pailhead, as well as RevCo. It’s literally a throwback. When that’s done, we come out and start hitting them with the new stuff.”
