How Ministry's "Jesus Built My Hotrod" became a hit and a middle finger to Warner Bros

Originally published at: How Ministry's "Jesus Built My Hotrod" became a hit and a middle finger to Warner Bros | Boing Boing

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@GilbertWham, remember when Loftgroover was playing Jesus Built My Hotrod when he was DJing?

Good times. I think it finally broke the stupid “guitars and techno can never mix” meme that some arsehole put in my head.

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So there was only one thing that I could do
Ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long

That album blew my teenage mind the first time I heard it.

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I’ve often imagined me and my peers in another few decades. At the retirement home, gathered around the piano. A lucky few with tambourines, jealously guarded. And singing along with our large-print edition song sheets as the pianist plays.

Ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long …

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It’s rock Man, rock-n-roll.

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I still have the CD-Single and I still play it sometimes. I still prefer the longer Redline/Whiteline version. It truly is a rock masterpiece. Everybody hated it when I played it at my college radio. Especially the college radio “boss”.

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Smaller university radio was the place to be in the early 90’s, I guess? Not only did we play most of the tracks from The way to Succeed…, I even convinced my hair stylist to play Scare Crow at the hair fashion show he expected a few of us “alt” and “goth” kids to participate in exchange for haircuts and a good Manic Panic soaking. Good times!

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I feel like a kid again smoking weed in my friend’s basement. Good times.

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348s

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The first time I heard this was on the massive, ex-bowling alley dance floor at a huge club. "Who the fuck is This?!" I demanded of my BFF. When she answered, I didn’t believe her. “Bullshit! This isn’t shitty trendy dance music; it can’t be Ministry!”

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He couldn’t fix these holes that mysteriously appeared in my body work. He just said, “That’s nothing, it doesn’t stigmata at all.”

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Just come back in three days, it’ll be fine.

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You can thank my lovely wife!

From 1987 - 96 Pussycat (my lovely wife) managed a small independent recording studio in Nashville, Sound Vortex. It was in the basement of a house in the Belmont neighborhood near the university. Their thing was alternative rock, not country. Driving and Crying, Jason and the Scorchers, Swans, Filter, Tool, lots of interesting bands cut demos there.

Al and the boys were down from Chicago and one evening while taking a break on the back porch someone asked her “What’s that droning noise?”

“Oh, that’s the race cars over at the fairgrounds. Wanna check it out? It’s really loud.”

So Pussycat escorted the Ministry guys to the redneck races.

“Wait, what they doing now?”

“It’s the pre-race prayer,” she explained.

“They pray before a race?!?”

“Oh yeah. This is the Bible Belt, they pray before every sports event.”

They were flabbergasted and wrote that song in response.

ETA - She wanted me to add that “Ministry were exploitative, bandwagon-hopping jerks and Al was a drugged out asshole. The Filter guy was really nice, though.”

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I kind of wonder if the song inspired the title of the Dead Milkmen song The Infant of Prague Customized My Van that came out a couple years later.

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Kick out the preservers, Grandmother Carers!

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It was my last year in college before I moved out of my hometown and went on to study to five other universities and as a payback for the college’s “extracurricular activities” manager selling of our antenna and emission rights to a pop radio, I replugged most of the on-campus speakers and blasted whatever I could to annoy him. Butthole Surfers was one (“U.S.S.A.” on Locust Abortion Technician, “Brainwash” from Flipper. You name it). He was lucky I did not discover Boredoms until I had earned my diploma and was working to pay my studies.

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YouTube really disappointed me when they didn’t even attempt to offer closed captions for that music video.

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LH-Gibby-Haynes

Slightly off topic-- I recently noticed there were a bunch of live Butthole Surfers shows (including some decent recordings from the mid-80’s classic era) on the internet archive. I was excited to hear them but realized the high-weirdness of who they were in that era has been overshadowed by the general high-weirdness of reality. “You really had to be there.”

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My JUCO roommate introduced me to this album. It is the only Ministry album I own, though I should go and find some more. I really liked it over all. I was totally into industrial and techno at the time and this was more metal but appealed to me.

I think this is my favorite song on the album though.

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