As Ministry work on a new album and get ready to embark on a European tour in June, the pioneering industrial act’s leader Al Jourgensen has revealed that original Tool bassist Paul D’Amour has joined the band.
D’Amour will first appear onstage with the group when they kick off their tour on June 16th in Nickelsdorf, Austria.
“He was recently here in the studio working on some new stuff,” said Jourgensen upon revealing the news of D’Amour joining Ministry while speaking with Revolver.
Jourgensen went on to tell the story of how he met D’Amour and Maynard James Keenan at Lollapalooza in 1992.
“I used to live with Timothy Leary, and he had given me these bottles of liquid LSD to bring on tour,” Jourgensen began. “I’d put two drops in my bottle of whiskey that I’d bring onstage. I’d drink about half the bottle during a show. So we were on Lollapalooza in ’92, I think it was San Francisco, and when we came offstage there were these two guys who were like, ‘Great show, dude!’ So I gave them my bottle of Bushmills, but I forgot that I had put LSD in it.”
He continued, “So they drank it and they were tripping balls for, like, two or three days. They didn’t know what was going on and they were freaking out. They were ready to call suicidal hotlines. It turned out to be Paul and Maynard from Tool! … But he actually thanked me for that moment because he said it really got Tool going into being a psychedelic band. Pretty cosmic, right?”
D’Amour was a member of Tool from their start in 1990 through 1995, appearing on their 1993 debut album, Undertow, and their 1992 EP, Opiate. D’Amour departed the band in 1995, citing a desire to pursue other projects, and was replaced by Justin Chancellor.
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Tony Campos, who had been playing bass in Ministry, will head out on tour with his longtime band Static-X, who are embarking on a tour in tribute to their late singer Wayne Static. On Ministry’s Instagram page, Campos posed for a pic with D’Amour and Jourgensen as a symbolic passing of the torch.
When we interviewed Jourgensen last year, he had mentioned that Ministry were going to hit the studio at the beginning of 2019 to begin recording a new album. Tool, meanwhile, will release their first album in 13 years on August 30st.