Although it might not be immediately obvious when listening to, say, The Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Taste or The Land Of Rape And Honey, Ministry's Al Jourgensen has long claimed that Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top were the two biggest influences on his band's music.
Making reference to the fact that he didn't originally intend becoming Ministry's frontman, Jourgensen once told Classic Rock that he “always wanted to be Jimmy Page, not Robert Plant”, and in 2016, talking to The Quietus, the industrial metal figurehead revealed that he considers Zeppelin's frontman “a total douchebag” after meeting him in Chicago in the 1970s.
Reflecting on the old maxim that you should never meet your heroes, Jourgensen told former Louder writer Kiran Acharya, “I’ve had my share of both. William Burroughs: good, Robert Plant: not so good.”
Revisiting the night in question, Jourgensen continued, “I was working at the Wax Trax! record store where I was the new guy. Everyone was going to see a concert and I had a date with a girl, but because Zeppelin played Chicago that night I had to keep the store open for Robert Plant and his entourage.
“They kept me there until about one in the morning, playing records, me running around like his fucking man-slave servant. Finally this stack of fucking records comes up to the counter and he says, 'Just put it on my tab, man.' I was thinking, Fuck you! I have to call up the owner, I can’t just give you this shit. I wound up leaving there at about two in the morning and blew my date with this chick.
“I was like: Goddammit! What a douchebag! He’s there yelling at me, the poor little clerk who doesn’t set the policy, when the owner got on and told him he could have 25 per cent off. He wanted them for free. There was this back-and-forth with me taking the brunt of his assholism, and I missed my date with the hottest girl. It was just a mess. So I put Robert Plant in the douchebag column.”
Ironically, Plant's hunger for buying new music later impressed another Chicago-based noise-maker, Steve Albini.
After working on the Page & Plant album Walking Into Clarksdale, Albini told Musician magazine, “The thing that impressed me about both of them is their genuine enthusiasm for music, even after being bombarded with it daily for so many years. They were constantly talking about their favourite records and bringing in new discoveries. Robert alone probably buys as many as fifteen records a week.”
