They say that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and Ministry's Al Jourgensen certainly made a lasting impression when he first met rap legend-turned-Hollywood star Ice Cube in the early '90s.
The former N.W.A. rapper and Jourgensen's industrial-metal pioneers were both booked to play the main stage on the second Lollapalooza tour, in the summer of 1992. And in a 2017 interview with Metal Hammer, Jourgensen recalled that his first meeting with Ice Cube was unorthodox, to put it mildly.
"Ice Cube started drinking my fuckin’ beer before we got offstage and then bitched about the kind of beer we had," Ministry's mainman recalled. "So I stripped naked and started rubbing my cock on him, which he didn’t like."
No shit.
In Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour's excellent recently-published oral history of the ground-breaking alternative rock festival, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored History of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, Jourgensen revisits this anecdote, and also reveals how he and Ice Cube moved past this somewhat uncomfortable first encounter and struck up a friendship.
"I remember at the beginning of the tour, he and his crew were in our dressing room taking our beer," Jourgensen told the authors. "And I was like, Well, fuck that. I'd just gotten outta the shower after coming offstage, and I had a towel wrapped around me, and I basically chased him down the hall with my fucking dick in my hand, going, Here, you want some of this? I know that his bouncers got a big kick out of it. Instead of gettingt my ass kicked, they were laughing their asses off."
Talking about Ice Cube's involvement in the tour, Jourgensen added, "It must've seemed to Ice Cube like being behind enemy lines. Like, this was an experiment - let's put hip-hop culture in the middle of this rock culture, and see how it works. I'm sure he felt under siege."
"He [Ice Cube] and his people had their battles," says stage manager Michael 'Curly' Jobson. "There was racism pointed at them by dipshit skinhead right-wing clowns."
The turning point as far as Ministry and Ice Cube were concerned occurred in Charlotte, North Carolina, around the tour's stop at the Blockbuster Pavilion on August 25, 1992.
"We did a show and there was a bunch of rednecks, like typical MAGA-type people today, that were all pissed that there was a rap band at a rock festival," Jourgensen recalls. "And they were there for violence."
Which, when Ministry's stage crew took offence at their presence, they got, as Jourgensen remembers.
"I was sitting on the balcony of the hotel, watching my crew fight a bunch of rednecks," he told Bienstock and Beaujour. "And I had no idea, but Ice Cube was in the room. next to me, so he was out on his balcony with his guys, seeing what all the kerfuffle was about. He looked over at me on my balcony as we're watching, and he goes, 'Damn, man, I never seen so many white people fight at one time in my life!'
Jourgensen closes out the story by saying, "When Ice Cube found out what the fight was about, he came up to me and he goes, 'You guys are cool'. So we had a good relationship from there on out... In the end it all turned out well. You know, people can get along."
