Ministry – Jesus Built My HotRod
Description
“Jesus Built My Hotrod” is a song by American industrial metal band Ministry, released as the first single from their fifth studio album, Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs. It was written by the band’s frontman Al Jourgensen, bassist Paul Barker, drummer Bill Rieflin, session keyboardist Michael Balch, and guest vocalist Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers, and was co-produced by Jourgensen and Barker. An industrial metal track with a polyrhythmic structure, the also features elements of rockabilly and psychobilly, and is influenced by the Trashmen 1963 hit “Surfin’ Bird“, and Flannery O’Connor‘s novel Wise Blood.
The song was first released as a single in November 1991, backed with the B-side “TV Song” based on lyrics by Chris Connelly; re-edited versions of both tracks were included in Psalm 69, as well as various compilation albums. The single reached No. 19 in the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart with approximately 128,000 copies as of mid-July 1992, preceding the later success of Psalm 69.
Artwork and music video
The front cover for the single was designed by Paul Elledge, who also did the artwork for Psalm 69. In a 2013 interview Elledge said that Jourgensen and Barker, infatuated with a Chrysler Hemi engine, had favored idea of having “a super-industrial shot of an engine that was kind of like what you would see at a factory, not on an album cover.”Instead of taking a photo of an engine, Elledge requested it from Chrysler representatives.
The accompanying video for the song was also directed by Elledge; the band convinced the Warner Bros. representatives to shoot the video with Elledge, despite latter having no experience of filming. Elledge listened to the song 100 times or more, before creating a storyboard. Commenting on the shoot, Elledge said that he wanted “to make it so that some things I shot people would think was stock (footage) and some things that were stock were things I shot.” Elledge spent three days shooting the band and others featured in video, as well as doing the animation; the band was shot on black so Elledge could layer other footage. From three takes, the final cut was edited during six weeks.
