“It was a case of meeting one of your idols and realising he is a total douchebag.” Ministry's Al Jourgensen on the night he worked as a “man-slave servant” for Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, and how it screwed up his love life

Robert Plant, Al Jourgensen.

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.”