This song is off of Anthrax’s sixth studio album, Sound of White Noise and it was one of their bigger hits from the John Bush era. No less than James Hetfield referred to this as being a “perfect song.” The video mixes surreal imagery with clips of the band playing.
If the man with the mirror looks familiar, that’s because he’s played by Frank Silva, who was also Killer Bob on Twin Peaks. This was Silva’s only role outside of Twin Peaks.
Director Paul Elledge was a photographer who also directed videos for Ministry.
Needless to say, that’s the famous Gibby Haynes providing the vocals on Ministry’s Jesus Built My Hotrod. Gibby recorded the vocals while he was in Chicago, doing the first Lollapooloza tour. Ministry’s Al Jourgensen told Songfacts, “Gibby came down completely drunk off his ass. He couldn’t even sit on a stool, let alone sing. I mean, he was wasted. He fell off the stool about 10 times during the recording of that vocal. He made no sense and it was just gibberish. So I spent two weeks editing tape of what he did, thinking it still was better than what I was thinking of doing with the song.”
Fortunately, Gibby’s vocals saved both the song and probably the future of the band. Ministry had already been given an advance of $750,000 to make an album. According to Jourgensen, the band spent all the money on drugs and ended up with only this song to show for all of their efforts. In an attempt to at least get some of their money back, Warner Bros. released the song as a single and it quickly shot up the charts. For a while, at least, it was Warner Bros’s top selling-single of all time. As a result, Ministry got another advance of $750,000 and this time, they actually used the money to make an album.
As for the video, it’s all about car culture. Paul Elledge also directed two videos for Anthrax.
Now we have reached Ministry’s industrial metal years. This is probably my favorite Ministry songs of the ones I have heard. It’s also both better in music video form, and worse at the same time. It’s worse for a minor reason. The video has him say “Jesus was the devil.” That’s not what he says in the song. In the song it’s “Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil. Jesus was an architect, previous to his career as a prophet.” The one on the song is much better. However, the video does add something I absolutely love. At about three minutes and twenty seconds we get a guy who looks like the man with the horned-rimmed glasses saying “drag racing” several times in a row. This music video seems to throw every repetitious thing they can into the pot to create this hard rocking industrial metal song. This included dialog and imagery. The imagery being something they couldn’t do in a purely audio form.
This time Alain Jourgensen seems happy. In fact, I’d say it’s almost like he’s floating on a cloud as he seemed to be doing literally in the music video for Over The Shoulder. The music video also has that tying in of everything to the theme of the song visually thing going on. This is one of those songs that I would suggest watching in music video form, and not just off of the album.
I don’t really have anything else to say about the video or the song except that I think it’s one of the best music videos I have watched for this ongoing series of posts.
Director Paul Elledge would direct a couple more music videos, but that’s all. He did an excellent job here.
Through the Shattered Lens 