You Hate Me and I Hate You

I know, I know:  You saw a tiny bit of blood in that Towers of London post a little while back, and watched Brooklyn Ski Club and Brooklyn Vegan talk about The Black Lips’ Mercury Lounge show (in which band members started making out, playing their guitars with their penises, urinated in their own faces and spit it at the crowd, etc.) and thought...

Yawn.  Borrrrring.

Now GG Allin, there was someone who put his money where his mouth is.  Or, at least, his feces.

Born Jesus Christ Allin, Shock-punk rocker GG would defecate on stage, rub it all over himself, fling it at the audience.  He’d cut himself (or just bang his head against something until he was bleeding), punch audience members, try to shove his privates into their mouths, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  His oft-postponed promise to die on stage one Halloween night suffered a final setback when he OD’d in June of 1993.  Though his funeral date is considered a holiday to some, it seems perfectly appropriate to remember the composer of “Die When You Die” on Easter Sunday.

GG Allin – Highest Power (mp3)

(Credit TMFTML for initiating this post by linking to a cover of “I Kill Everything I Fuck” (“I’m infected with AIDS/I fuck every day/I kill everything I fuck”); you can watch Allin rehearse the original (clothed!) here.)

The music was as much a shit-smear as his performances.  Some sample song titles:  “Bloody Mary’s Bloody Cunt,” “Castration Crucifixion,” “Kill the Children Save the Food,” “Sleeping in my Piss,” “Suck My Ass It Smells.”  A lot of the songs aren’t bad at all, some are bouncy and poppy.  But they all seethe.  It’s vitriolic and valid.  Allin created a figure of pure hatred; his “art” was an attempt to express all the ugliest aspects of humanity.  It was shtick, certainly.  He was deranged, definitely.  And he might have missed the point, entirely.  But no one’s going to be more GG Allin than GG Allin was, so these other jokers might as well give up trying.

I was at NYU when Todd Phillips (who went on to make Old School) was filming the Allin doc Hated (which you can buy at Amazon), and had a couple friends who worked on it.  Phillips had (supposedly) smuggled Allin across state lines – he was wanted on drug charges in several states – to film a “spoken word” performance he’d booked at the university’s student center.  I still have the Washington Square News from the next day, “Naked Performer Kicked Out of Loeb.”  It begins, “A nude performer, who put bananas into his anus, threw a chair into the audience and broke a woman’s eyeglasses...” (someone has posted the article, in its entirety, here).

I didn’t go.  There’s a place for fecal-flinging rock n’ roll, and that place is any room in which I ain’t.  Some people thought GG was a joke, but when the shit hits the fans, the joke's on you; I might have missed a legend, but at least he missed me.  Besides, legends never really go away.  In that spirit I found this online:

Note that he has zero friends.  (Unlike, say, Neil Diamond.)

There’s a good little bio of Allin at the AllMusicGuide, another in the Wikipedia.  ggallin.com is “the official resource for the true king of rock-n-roll” and contains mention that one of Allin’s bands, The Murder Junkies, are on tour this month (no NYC dates); I have no idea how that would work.

Punk Records recently posted a slew of Allin mp3s (including his cover of Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita”), and there’s piles of Allin footage on YouTube.  All the following videos are Not Safe for Work.  Hell, they’re not really safe for home, either:

GG Allin – Live at the Fastland, Asbury Park, NJ, 4-25-93

GG Allin – “Bite It You Scum” (live)

GG Allin – “Bite It You Scum” (from Hated)

GG Allin – Last Show(?) at the Gas Station, NYC

tags: black lips  easter  gg allin  towers of london  

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