The Revolting Cocks Return
Fresh off Ministry’s Grammy nomination — for Best Metal Performance for “The Great Satan” — frontman Al Jourgensen is gearing up to drop new records by both the industrial powerhouse and his side project, the Revolting Cocks, this spring.
Due out March 7th on Jourgensen’s new imprint 13th Planet/Megaforce Records, Cocked and Loaded is the first Revolting Cocks record in more than a decade. “It’s pretty prurient and juvenile and everything else that Revolting Cocks are known for,” Jourgensen says of the new songs, with titles such as “Jack in the Crack” and “Viagra Culture.” “It’s basically middle-aged men regaining their lost, juvenile delinquency years and being absolutely sophomoric. It’s great.”
The ten-track effort features a host of guests — including fellow Texans Gibby Haynes (Butthole Surfers) and ZZ Top axeman Billy Gibbons, the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, and Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen. “I’ve known all these guys for years,” Jourgensen says. “We’ve been talking about doing stuff together, but this time it seems the skies opened up, the planets lined up and everything worked out. Pretty soon we looked on the shelf, and damn, there was almost an album there.”
The guest vocalists are being slated for appearances with Jourgensen and Cocks bandmates Phil Owen and Luc Van Acker when the group hits the road May 5th. They’ll be opening for Jourgensen’s other band Ministry, who release a new studio album, Rio Grand Blood, in April. The album, titled after ZZ Top’s 1972 album Rio Grande Mud, takes aim at Bush America.
“We kind of have this administration that’s just a little bit arrogant and very transparent, as far as their agenda,” says Jourgensen. “This little war going on overseas, the little Iraq thing, that’s kind of got my goat, too. The arrogance of the right has just got me. All these wimpy liberals — good for Howard Dean, screaming into a mike, showing them the left isn’t all about granola and alfalfa sprouts!”
With so much on his plate, the hard rocker admits that putting Rio together meant “hauling ass.” But with two new members, Tommy Victor (ex-Prong) and Paul Raven (ex-Prong and Killing Joke), the project took off. “The most fruitful collaboration I’ve ever done in my life has been this record,” says Jourgensen. “The three of us used to be competition, between Prong, Ministry and Killing Joke, and now that we’ve kind of joined forces — shit! We should have done this twenty years ago.”
As for what Ministry will sound like live? “This is the fastest, hardest, most maniacal record I’ve ever done.”