(Warning: Gross material ahead)
This is probably the grossest piece I've ever written. While being invested to rock music in general, the punk section is barely touched by me during the most of my life, aside from bands like My Chemical Romance, Simple Plan, Blink 182, you know, those 2000s Pop Punk bands. Recently, I started to listen some of the heavier punk bands, those like The Misfits who mainly touched by their more metal influenced sound. From what I've read and researched, punk rockers have a certain knack for controversy, And the subject of this story inevitably raised the bar so high, no punk rockers since have duplicated that level of infamy.
What we are looking at here is probably the most infamous punk/shock rocker ever lived, and his name was GG Allin. His real name was Kevin Michael Allin, but thanks to his ultra-religious, abusive monster of a father, he was born named Jesus Christ Allin, believing that young Allin was the child of prophecy after claiming that Jesus visited him in his dream. He was born in Lancaster, New Hampshire, USA on the 29th of August 1956. And as predicted, his parents Merle Allin Sr. and Arleta Gunther, along with his younger brother Merle Jr. lived in a log cabin with no running water and electricity, and to top it all off, Merle Sr. was the type of man that was known to be "unstable" to put it mildly. This trait inevitably passed on to young GG, who was put into a special education class and severely bullied due to his nonconformity stance. Only after their parents' divorce, Allin's legal name was changed by his mother to Kevin Michael Allin, but his other name, "Jeje" as his brother pronounced, was kept as his nickname, ultimately evolved to GG.
And this effectively turned Allin into the man that he was, but I'll save that for later. Allin had always had fascination for rock music, especially due to his musical influences being mostly British Invasion bands from the 1960s. He also idolized the country music star Hank Williams, but not until one Alice Cooper arrived and cemented his influence on Allin's overall sound. Surprisingly enough, Allin didn't start as a vocalist, rather as a drummer. He did this while forming his first band with his brother Merle no less named Little Sister's Date, but that band only lasted a little over a year. From then on, Allin went on to join (and founded) several bands, like The Jabbers, Scumfucs, and the last one at the time of his death, The Murder Junkies. At this point, his main instrument was his vocals. He was not interested in breaking out to the mainstream, as he became the household name in the underground hardcore punk scene.
Perhaps his prime era was also considered as his most violent era, as during the mid 1980s, he practically abused anything and everything everyone threw at him. On top of that, he held a strong misanthropist, anti-authoritarian, non-conformist, and anarchist stance. On one occasion, he proclaimed himself as "the last true rock n' roller", as per his stance that rock music in general is a personification or rebellious attitude. Let's do a breakdown about a typical GG Allin live show. Allin's choice of attire (or lack thereof) is a white jockstrap, a leather jacket, and sometimes accompanied with a pair of sunglasses. Hell, most of the time he would show up buck naked. It started normally for one or two songs, once the show reached the third or fourth song, all hell would break loose, partly because of Allin's tendency to go out of control and start punching his own fans and in some extend, himself (he hit his head repeatedly with a microphone until he bleeds out of his head), but mostly for his drunken state and his nasty habit of SHITTING HIMSELF IN FRONT OF HIS OWN AUDIENCE. Not only that, but the sick bastard also went as far as either (don't read this while eating) eating his own discharge, or threw them to the concertgoers, with all of those INCREDIBELY NASTY SMELL. The way he did this is to ingest a copious amount of laxative before he entered the stage. Other crazy antics he did also including shoving things (mostly his microphone) up his ass and causing millions of US Dollars in damages.
Allin was also have a knack with suicide threats. It all started somewhere in 1989, where Allin stated that he would commit suicide during one of his shows at Halloween, but the plan never came to fruition, as he would end up arrested instead. Hell, one of those arrests even landed him in prison in late 1989 for "assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder" of a female acquaintance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but later reduced to a felony assault charge after a plea deal. He was imprisoned from Christmas Day of 1989 to 26 March 1991. But instead of reporting to parole, he went straight back to touring. And during his imprisonment, he wrote his essay titled The GG Allin Manifesto.
This punk rocker arrived with a bang, and he departed with a bang. The day was 27th June 1993. The place where it all happened was a small club called The Gas Station at 194 East 2nd Street in Manhattan, New York. It was a typical GG Allin and the Murder Junkies show, with all of those chaotic antics by the shock rocker. After just three songs, the show ended in a chaotic fashion when a brawl broke out, and a totally intoxicated Allin then went out leading his fans into the neighborhood. He then crashed into his friend Johnny Puke's apartment and continued to party along with everyone else. During that time, Allin ingested a heavy dose of heroin. It was too much that he overdosed on it and fell unconscious. On 28 June, when morning came, and Puke noticed Allin's body still in his apartment, already dead due to his overdose the night prior. He was 36 years of age. His funeral became something of a low-level party, as mourners gather around with alcohol and various audio devices, blasting his songs while Allin's bloating corpse was lying in a casket, unwashed and still reeking of human turd. GG Allin was finally laid to rest on 3rd July 1993, in Littleton, New Hampshire. Even still, Allin's gravesite had become something of a pilgrimage site of all hardcore punk aficionados, with his gravestone desecrated on a daily basis as an act of "respect" like GG himself would have wanted it.
In short, Kevin Michael "GG" Allin was a punk rocker like no other. Musicians of his caliber might not be famous for his sound quality, or his poetic lyrics, but one thing is for sure, that he shaped the landscape of hardcore rock n' roll to be the thing that it is today, even though all it took to get to this point was someone flinging shit onto each other while at the same time punching others in the face. GG Allin was a wild man, and he demanded us to remember him that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment