“You know, they say it takes a whole pack of wolves to take down a moose because one on one, that moose would smack them down. It's like being in the music business. You’ve got your managers, your ex-managers, your ex-bandmates, your ex-labels, your ex-wives, your lawyers, your tax attorneys. Hell, that sounds more like a pack of hyenas to me. You know, I was once told by an ex-manager, ‘Son, you're worth more dead than alive. Because when you're dead, we can sell you off in pieces.’ That's the way it works around here. You don't believe me? Why don't you try asking Jim Morrison, or Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin, or Kurt Cobain, or Amy Winehouse. I'm pretty sure they're going to take my side of the story. Sometimes I think they're the lucky ones. They don't have to deal with these douchebags because they're already dead.”
Thus opens Ministry’s Last Tangle in Paris: Live 2012 album, as well as the 2012 album Relapse. (The song “Ghouldiggers” also includes a quote from the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues.”) This live album released in 2014 combines two compact discs with a DVD. The two CDs, “Ministry Retro Live,” captures 18 songs recorded between 2006-2012 at various venues. The DVD offers 12 of those songs recorded during the band’s DeFibriLaTour July 28, 2012, at La Cigale in Paris, interspersed with interview and candid footage, memorial content celebrating the life of guitarist Mike Scaccia, and material filmed a month earlier—June 28-29, 2012—when Ministry was playing the Vic in Chicago. (Sweet home Chicago.)
The track list of the two CDs is mostly made up of material from post-2000 albums: one song from 2004’s Houses Of The Molé, five songs off Rio Grande Blood, four songs from The Last Sucker, and three songs from the newest release at the time of the tour, Relapse. Al Jourgensen (Alien F. Jourgensen) and the band—John Bechdel on keyboards, Casey Orr on bass, Sin Quirin on guitar, Aaron Rossi on drums, and Scaccia on guitar—also include a handful of older songs. Those pieces include three songs from 1992’s ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ (also titled Psalm 69) and two songs from 1989’s The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste. Given that I first listened to Ministry in the late-1980s, I was particularly pleased that those songs were included.
The band Jourgensen toured with in 2012—captured on the DVD—was well credentialed. Bechdel previously played with Static-X, Orr performed with Rigor Mortis and Gwar, Quirin spent time with Revolting Cocks, Rossi played with Prong and Revolting Cocks, and Scaccia first met Jourgensen while performing with Rigor Mortis.
That meeting is documented on the DVD in interview footage, with Jourgensen recalling how he first saw Rigor Mortis perform in Chicago in 1987-1988—with either Death Angel or Morbid Angel; tellings vary in different sources. (Death Angel played with Rigor Mortis at the Cubby Bear in Chicago in September 1988, so it was probably at that show. Jourgensen lived just down the street at the time.) That meeting and subsequent friendship led to Scaccia (and later Orr) joining Ministry, as well as Jourgensen’s band turning to a much more guitar-oriented sound.
By the time this live album was released in 2014, Scaccia had died, suffering a heart attack while performing with Rigor Mortis in Texas in late 2012. Jourgensen himself collapsed during a show in Paris during the DeFibriLaTour tour, indicating health and substance abuse concerns. Both events led to Ministry largely disbanding, and this album’s release was accompanied by reports that the band wouldn’t record or tour again. Luckily that wasn’t to be. Ministry has since come back from the dead. Ministry played Hellfest in France earlier this year, and since this album came out, the band has released several live albums on Cleopatra and two studio albums with Nuclear Blast. Those records include 2018’s AmeriKKKant and last year’s Moral Hygiene.
Angelina Lukacin Jourgensen’s liner notes to this album recount Jourgensen’s collapse and subsequent return to rehab and recovery. In 2014, Jourgensen sold his 13th Planet compound in Texas and moved to Los Angeles, where he planned to work on film scores, musical collaborations, film and TV appearances, books, and online activity. As of 2019, Jourgensen still lived in Los Angeles. And he remained sober-ish: “Now I just do mushrooms and pot and a little bit of beer.”
I haven’t watched all of the DVD yet, but I’ve seen all but the last few songs. Approaching this more as a record review, I have listened to the two CDs several times in their entirety. Highlights include the production elements in between songs—Jourgensen should definitely consider more book projects and perhaps the lecture circuit—as well as the songs “Lieslieslies,” “99 Percenters,” “Relapse,” “New World Order (NWO),” and “Khyber Pass,” which reminds me somewhat of Dead Can Dance. The performances contain an explicit stance against the politics of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush—and would have been critical of Donald Trump had he been elected at the time. (AmeriKKKant contains songs along those lines.)
If you haven’t experienced Ministry live, the DVD is a close approximation. And if you enjoy the band’s recordings as reflected during this tour, the live recordings will make intriguing alternate takes to what’s on the studio albums.
I’m just relieved and grateful that Jourgensen is still alive, still politically active, still recording, and still touring. It could have gone another way in 2012, and I am thankful that it didn’t. Here’s to many, many more decades of tangling with the powers that be.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment