Ministry‘s 1992 release, “Psalm 69: The Way To Succeed And The Way To Suck Eggs“, brought the band mainstream success with its platinum selling album sales. But it also saw the band’s frontman, etc. Al Jourgensen and late guitarist Mike Scaccia‘s drug addiction spiraling out of control.
Jon Weiderhorn, who helped Jourgensen compile his memoir Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, heard numerous tales of the decadence and insanity that went into the “Psalm 69” sessions from Jourgensen himself and recently shared seven of them to Revolvermag.com.
Among them were a $1,000 a day drug habit, with Jourgensen offering: “I was shooting up, smoking crack and drinking Bushmills laced with acid and it was a cycle that I’d repeat 10 times a day, at least.”
To afford it, the band spent much of their initial $750,000 advance for the album on drugs. Somehow, despite only having “Jesus Built My Hotrod” to show for the money, the band got the label to eventually pony up another $750,000 to complete the album.
“Jesus Built My Hotrod” featured a severely intoxicated Gibby Haynes from Butthole Surfers and a lot of studio trickery, with Jourgensen explaining:
“Gibby came in absolutely shitfaced. He couldn’t even walk. We set him up with a stool, gave him a microphone and a fifth of Jack and played this thrashy, redneck rock track we were fucking around with. Gibby babbled this incoherent nonsense, knocked over the whiskey and fell off the stool. We propped him back up again and tried again. ‘Bing, bang, dingy, dong, wah, wah, ling, a bong!’ He slurred shit like that for a while then — crash! — back on the floor.
We went on like that for take after take and got nothing but gibberish with a few discernible words, like ‘baby,’ ‘gun,’ ‘trailer park,’ ‘around’ and ‘why, why, why!’ Finally, Gibby passed out and it was up to me to turn all that babbling into a track.
It was like pulling a diamond ring out of a septic tank. I edited the song on my two-track at home and I spliced so much tape to make his gobbledy-gook sound like words….”
You can delve in further to the madness of speedballs for productivity sake, overdoses and more that surrounded that album over at Revolvermag.com.
