Jesus Built My Hotrod

Gibby came in absolutely shitfaced. He couldn’t even walk. I looked at him, laughed, and said, “Hey man. Well, let’s see what you’ve got.” We set him up with a stool, gave him a microphone and a fifth of Jack, and played the track. But we didn’t exactly get lightning in a bottle. Gibby started babbling some incoherent nonsense, knocked over the whiskey, and fell off the stool. We propped him back up again and heard, “Bing, bang, dingy, dong, wah, wah, wah, ling, a bong…” CRASH! Back on the floor. We went on like that for take after take, getting nothing but gibberish with a few discernible words, like “baby,” “gun,” “trailer park,” “around,” and “Why? Why? Why?!” Finally Gibby passed out. He was gone. And that was it. But I knew there was something there. If only I could extract the magic, it would be like pulling a diamond ring out of a septic tank.  I edited the song on my two-track at home. I spliced so much tape to make his gobbled-gook should like words; I swear to God, even in my fucked-up state, I had the rock-steady hands to conduct delicate brain surgery. Cut-tape, cut-tape, cut-tape – all night long. Three weeks later it started to sound pretty good. I added these samples about drag racing, put in these crazy backward tape noises, race car sounds, a redneck thrashing beat, and this off-kilter riff. Mikey did these wild blues solos, then I added the nonsense spoken-word intro to go along with Gibby’s moronic lyrics: “Soon I discovered that this rock thing was true/Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil/Jesus was an architect, previous to his career as a prophet/All of a sudden I found myself in love with the world/So there was only one thing I could do was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.” To this day journalists ask me what the intro and lyrics are about, and I honestly have no fucking clue. We were just winging it.

 

– from Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen

Ministry


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