When Horror Collided With Rock: The Gory, the Weird, and the Just Plain Gross Lore of Shock Rock
It’s a cliche at this point in time; the ridiculously frantic parent lamenting their woes on that ‘satanic, and just obscene’ music. All Elvis had to do to garner the attention of priests and over-involved soccer moms across the states was shake his hips. The Beatles dared disagree with America’s racial segregation and sang I Want To Hold Your Hand and suddenly they were corrupting the youth.
Well, when you see old footage of some of their fangirls, it’s honestly kinda understandable that one might come to the conclusion that they were being demonically possessed.
But the point here is that it was not exactly difficult — at least by today’s standards — to shock and shake the older American population any time between 1955 and the turn of the century. A simple and surface-level concept such as long hair on boys was equated by many to outright delinquency. And oh, if only the Elvis shaking-of-the-hips critics could catch a glimpse of Miley Cyrus’ twerking at the 2013 VMAs. Or literally any other pop star footage of the ten years that have followed since.
But what about the panic that would ensue when these same prudish and overly sensitive people caught sight of horror movie gore combined with significantly more abrasive music? Well, that panic was a phenomenon indeed.
In fact, it was one that would ultimately last for decades. Sure, it was always waxing and waning, but in every decade from the 1960s to the millennium there would be at least one or two artists who drive the parents, priests, and other ‘concerned’ adults to rush out with their pitchforks in droves. Over less than four decades, the genre of shock rock evolved from cheap, some may even say corny gags and costumes into displays of excess blood, guts and at one point human feces (more on that later, unfortunately). The theatrics of its pioneers on and off the stage have also, for better or for worse, produced some of the most infamous tales of rock ‘n roll.
So, as Ozzy so eloquently stated, all aboard!
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Widely considered the godfather of shock rock, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins rose to popularity in 1956 with his hit I Put A Spell On You. While he initially conceived the song as a ballad, it became a bluesey and outright guttural number when he and his band recorded it one-hundred percent plastered. In fact, he remembered absolutely nothing about the recording process and needed to relearn the tune from the recording.
When the song quickly became a rousing success, radio DJ Alan Freed gleefully dared Hawkins to emerge from a coffin onstage while performing it. Although he initially turned this offer down, the $300 Freed pledged proved all too much for him to resist.
Along with the coffin choreography, Hawkins incorporated rubber snakes and voodoo props, which included a smoking skull on a stick the humorous singer dubbed Henry. While these antics are incredibly tame by today’s standards, they were absolutely reviled by the common middle-aged Americans of the late 1950s.
Hawkins soon came to regret outlandish stage shows, however. A highly capable musician with both classical and jazz experience, he later stated that it was unfortunate some only knew him for his “Screamin’” and stage props. As he later stated himself, “Why can’t people take me as a regular singer without making a bogeyman out of me?”
But regardless of his own opinions on his legacy, he would pave the way for the absolute whack jobs to come.
Arthur Brown
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the singer’s band in the late 1960s, was a sort of middle ground between Hawkins’ outlandish but ultimately harmless theatrics and the downright insane antics (on and offstage) of later acts such as Alice Cooper. Brown’s stage shows included a flaming metal helmet, zany makeup, and the occasional strip show. In 1970, the singer would strip naked onstage at the Palermo Pop 70 Festival in Sicily, Italy. He was subsequently arrested and deported from the country.
However, once The Crazy World of Arthur Brown lost several members and fell apart in the early 1970s, his popularity fizzled. While he’d have a wide variety of projects following, he never did reach the level of commercial success he had with his outlandish stage shows in the ‘60s.
Alice Cooper
And now, we must discuss the king of shock and horror rock himself, the one and only Alice Cooper. Well, technically we’re talking about a band named Alice Cooper for the first eleven years or so.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the Alice Cooper legend is that lead singer and, for lack of a better term, the face of the band Vincent Furnier was the son of a evangelical pastor. The now-Boogiemanish figure also suffered from severe asthma, which prompted his family to move from Detroit, Michigan to Phoenix, Arizona. It was there, in the middle of the snowbird and retiree-infested desert, that he would join Cortez High School’s cross country team.
Arguably the most notorious rock band of the 1970s came not out of delinquents in a gang or even weird, nutty theater kids, but a bunch of goody two-shoes on the high school cross country team. Furnier joined his teammates Glen Buxton, Dennis Dunaway, John Tatum, and John Speer first formed a band to compete in the school’s annual Letterman Talent Show. They impersonated the Beatles, and to their eminent shock they were incredibly well-received by their classmates. This spearheaded their move to creat an actual band, the Earwigs. Long story short, they switched out a couple members and ended up with Furnier on vocals, Buxton on lead guitar, Dunaway on bass, Speer on drums, and North High School footballer Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar. They changed names several times throughout the ‘60s, going from The Spiders to Nazz and finally, they landed on Alice Cooper.
The moniker was chosen as almost a sort of gag, the type of name one might think of a sweet old woman down the street having. It was meant to strikingly contrast their already-freakish image and lyrical matter. Furnier also had begun to sport his now-infamous stage makeup and costumes. The makeup portion was inspired by Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Emma Peel from The Avengers.
Being the oddballs they were, the band set out to catch the attention of music producer, musician and eccentric Frank Zappa. Their new manager, Shep Gordon, arranged an audition for the band with Zappa in an effort to convince him to sign them to his record label, Straight Records. When Zappa remarked only that the band come to his house “at seven o’clock,” they assumed he meant that as in seven in the morning. Well, it turned out he didn’t but was nonetheless impressed with the willingness of several twenty-somethings to come and perform psychedelic rock music in the wee hours of the morning. This along with the music itself was more than enough to earn them a contract with Straight Records.
Their rise to fame as horror rock icons happened by what they claimed to be an accident. Their first coverage in the American press came when at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in 1969, the touring staff for whatever reason ushered a live chicken onstage. Seeing as he had little to no experience with animals, Furnier — who by then had begun to be referred to as Alice Cooper — saw the wings on the bird and presumed it could fly. It was then that the fabled “Chicken Incident” ensued. Furnier tossed the bird into the audience, thinking that it would fly away (and that perhaps people in the pit were not complete and utter demons), and the unknowing chicken was torn to shreds.
It was then that the tabloids saw their chance at selling a grotesque amount of papers and the self-righteous religious types could finally grandstand. The musical landscape had grown boring, after all; the Beatles were broken up and Elvis was chilling out in Vegas. Time for a brand new delinquent to discipline!
Upon viewing the front pages of national newspapers claiming that Alice Cooper (AKA Furnier, not the entire band) had beheaded the chicken and drank its blood before the audience, Frank Zappa instantly phoned him and asked if it was true. Furnier/Cooper made it abundantly clear the entire situation had been an accident and was being horrifically exaggerated.
As legend has it, Zappa replied, “Well, whatever you do, don’t tell anyone you didn’t do it.”
Their 1969 debut album Pretties for You and their 1970 sophomore effort Easy Action were released to little commercial success in spite of the abundant press from the “Chicken Incident.” Deciding they just might be too much for the hippie-heavy L.A. crowds, the band moved to their new home base of Detroit, Michigan in 1970. It was in that dark and desolate hellscape of a city that they would meet producer Bob Ezrin, who would help their music reach the same levels of publicity as their stage shows were.
Their third album, Love It To Death, would hail their first hit single, I’m Eighteen. Then came the inevitable increase in the riskiness of the tour’s stage antics. On their 1971 tour in support of Love It To Death, they would implement theatrics depicting Alice Cooper, a character now synonymous with Furnier, being graphically “maimed”. The staged fights, gothic modes of torture and all-around insanity would all culminate in Cooper being thrown down into an electric chair and “executed.”
According to Cooper himself, this was to showcase the evil side of rock ‘n roll, as “There was nobody vying to be the villain… And I was more than happy to be the villain.”
On the following tour for their fourth album Killer, they upped the ante by including a live boa constrictor hanging around Cooper’s neck throughout the show, the ax-chopping of baby dolls, and the infamous guillotine execution at the climax of the show.
Inevitably, during the commercial peak of the band’s career with their fifth effort School’s Out in 1973, the parents of Cooper’s delinquent followers began to fight their rise to the top of the popular music industry. The first to attack was Mary Whitehouse, a Christian activist who actually hailed from Great Britain rather than the states. Instead of, you know, tell the kids to lay off the blood and guts, she decided to take the censorship route and persuaded the BBC to outright ban the video for School’s Out. Despite her efforts, the single itself reached the number one slot on the UK charts. Terrified by the failure of Whitehouse’s efforts, British parliament member Leo Abse approached Home Secretary Reginald Maudling and petitioned to completely ban the group from performing in the country. However, Alice Cooper continued to tour the UK and corrupt hordes of their children.
Meanwhile in the states, equally corrupt hacks in the government and church alike tried their absolute damndest to successfully ban the group, their music, and most of all their stage shows. Just like in the UK however, they continued to sell out arenas and break box office records previously held by The Rolling Stones. Unfortunately, the band chose this exact time to implode. By 1974, Glen Buxton had already left the band due to his waning health, and the pressure of having become one of the most infamous acts in America had resulted in a completely disharmonious group of egos. In 1974, the Alice Cooper band called it quits.
Then, in 1975, Alice Cooper the dude decided to keep on trucking. His name now legally changed to the moniker, perhaps the first villain of rock ‘n roll returned with a vengeance on his debut solo album, Welcome To My Nightmare. To this day, he continues to tour, release albums, and repeatedly execute himself onstage. While he may not have been the first pioneer of shock rock, he would ultimately pave the way for the multitudes of others which followed, including the one and only KISS.
KISS
The Kabuki-ish made-up faces of Gene Simmons (Demon), Paul Stanley (Starchild), Ace Frehley (Spaceman) and Peter Criss (Catman) have become icons of American culture. Chances are, most people know of the band named KISS even if they haven’t heard their music.
They seem so campy and such a relic of a certain period in time that it is often lost on younger generations just how controversial they once were. The band, formed out of New York City, would both play their first show and secure their first record deal in 1973. Rising to fame just in time for the fall of the first Alice Cooper band, KISS found their niche in the music business almost instantaneously. During their 1974 appearance on the Mike Douglas Show, bassist and master businessman Gene Simmons would have his first interview. A certain segment of this interview would live in rock ‘n roll infamy; a made-up, unnaturally long-tonged Simmons referred to himself as “Evil incarnate.” The reactions that came from the studio audience are, in all honesty, hilarious considering how much crazier of acts came later. The interview garnered a host of uncomfortable facial expressions from a significant portion of the onlookers.
Despite their initial lack of record sales, they quickly cemented themselves as a must-see live act. Their now-infamous over-the-top antics are widely considered to be what carried the stage shows. Gene spitting blood (actually a concoction of yogurt, eggs, maple syrup and red food coloring), Ace Frehley’s guitar erupting flames as he played his solos, Peter Criss’ elevated and sparking drum set, the productions are now the stuff of legend.
By 1976, they began working with Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin, who would make a gigantic, incredibly controversial success story out of another band from another dark and dreary American city. Their first collaboration with Ezrin, Destroyer, would become a massive hit and propel the group to an untouchable level of stardom. This year would also mark their first international tour, during which they would be accused of antisemitism in Germany and other European nations due to the “SS” in their logo loosely resembling the Nazi SS symbol. The irony, you see, is that both their lead singer/rhythm guitarist Paul Stanley and their bassist/band leader Gene Simmons are Jewish.
Similarly to the case of Alice Cooper, Gene Simmons in particular was quite a mild presence behind the caked-on horror show makeup. Even with Frehley’s and Criss’ substance abuse issues, the four original members of KISS were nowhere near the craziest partiers of the hard rock music scene. While this is fairly obvious now, the stage presence was an act and they simply knew how to milk people’s terror at anything less straight-laced than Happy Days.
But back in 1976, both this concept and that of Stanley’s inspiration for the “SS” coming from lightning bolts were foreign to the German government, which banned the symbol from being used in any capacity during those stops on the tour.
Grown American adults with nothing else to occupy their time also began to theorize that KISS stood for either “Knights in Satan’s Service” or “Kids in Satan’s Service,” both of which Simmons denied.
Then, following the band’s 1977 appearance in Marvel’s Howard The Duck comic, they stirred a fair bit more controversy by selling this comic containing ink with samples of each band member’s blood mixed in. And so began some of the most legendary merchandising to date. KISS — namely Simmons — figured out how to successfully slap their made-up faces and logo onto everything from lunch boxes to coasters to backpacks to a Howard The Duck comic containing their literal blood.
While they would later attempt to ditch the makeup and costumes in a move to appear more authentic, KISS’s onstage antics and status as shock rock icons is undoubtedly the largest part of the legacy they have left on American culture.
Ozzy Osbourne
If you thought Alice’s chicken incident was a lot, then I don’t know what to tell you about what’s up next.
At this point in shock rock’s story, we see a decline in the deceivingly clever and straight laced marketers who simply knew how to make parents upset. Now, those dudes must make way for some of the wildest partiers in music history. It is at this moment in the plot that we acknowledge one of metal’s founders, none other than Ozzy Osbourne.
While the legend of Ozzy began in the late ‘60s with Black Sabbath, his onstage antics and backstage debauchery wouldn’t reach a fever pitch until the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
From the moment he arrived on the rock ‘n roll scene, he was perceived by the elders as a spawn of Satan himself and the youth as an absolute icon. Not only was Black Sabbath’s music the darkest, sludgiest stuff of its time, but Osbourne undoubtedly paved the way for what we now think of as “The Rock ‘n Roll Lifestyle.” Basically, his music being perceived as “Satan Worship” is perhaps the least memorable piece of his legacy.
Throughout the 1970s, his drug and alcohol abuse made for a hellacious reputation and was unfortunately the cause of his 1979 firing from the band.
In the wake of his departure from Sabbath, he would embark on one of the most successful and most fabled solo careers of all time. In 1980 preceding an interview with CBS, his future wife Sharon suggested he release three doves as he entered the room for the talk. Being Ozzy, he decided to let two of the birds go and snack on the head of the third one. Soon after, he continued indulging in animal heads with a bat a fan tossed onto the stage at a concert. This resulted in the Humane Society of America going after him, ultimately a moot effort. Soon following these atrocities in 1982, he urinated on the Alamo, resulting in a life ban from performing in San Antonio that was lifted in 1992 following him paying the caretakers of the landmark $10,000.
Then, tragedy would strike in 1982 when his twenty-five-year-old guitarist Randy Rhodes was killed in a plane crash while on tour. It was in the wake of this loss that Ozzy’s drug and alcohol abuse would once again skyrocket. While on tour in 1983 with Mötley Crüe (more on them later, believe that), he was reported by the band to have snorted a line of ants, lapped up both his and Nikki Sixx’s urine from the ground beside a hotel pool, and mooned all other guests at said pool.
In the midst of all of this, he married his manager and longtime caretaker Sharon Arden (now Osbourne). Somehow, they are still married with children and grandchildren to this day.
In recent years, it has actually been discovered that Ozzy has a literal genetic mutation that has aided him in surviving the hellacious amount of abuse he has put himself through. Although he suffers from Parkinson’s Disease and is no longer able to tour, the fact that he is not six feet under is perhaps the most incredible plot point of the shock rock story.
Mötley Crüe, W.A.S.P., and a whole lotta hair metal
As is extensively documented, the 1980s were an absolutely off-the-wall, chaotic time in history. If one is to delve into everything that decade brought to the table, an entire series of books, documentaries and more are needed. Even for just the comprehension of the history of Mötley Crüe, W.A.S.P. and the other “hair” bands of the era, I suggest you delve into more than just this blog.
Simply because I do not have the time nor space to write a fully fleshed history of these acts and how much they contributed to the shock rock phenomenon, I’ll just provide the footnotes.
Mötley Crüe and the “Hair Metal” or “Glam Metal” movement that accompanied them came at perhaps the ideal time in American music history. The rock ‘n roll giants that the young rockers of Crüe had grown up with were either in the midst of imploding (Aerosmith) or abandoning what had made them special in the first place (KISS ditching the makeup and costumes that literally everyone knew them for). The scene was largely dominated by new wave and synth pop, the American public suddenly obsessed with the technological advancements the new decade brought.
This managed to piss off an entire generation of sleazy heroine addicts in L.A. enough for them to veer off into the complete opposite direction.
In 1981, a young Nikki Sixx’s hero worship of Aerosmith and Kiss would drive him to form one of the most notoriously hedonistic bands of all time. While he initially wished to call this effort “Christmas,” guitarist Mick Mars thankfully intervened and suggested Motley Crew, which was then changed to Mötley Crüe (the umlauts were inspired by the German beer Löwenbräu, which the entire band avidly drank at the time). As previously stated, we’ll simply summarize the craziest bits of the Mötley saga:
They basically came out of the womb fighting. At their very first show at the Starwood in Los Angeles, the band jumped into the small crowd and brawled after an audience member’s loogie landed on vocalist Vince Neil’s prized white leather pants.
In 1982, Mötley toured Canada. They pulled a publicity stunt in which they wore spiked stage costumes to the Edmonton International Airport and were stopped by customs, who considered the embellishments to the clothing to be “dangerous weapons.” It was during this encounter that the officials also found Neil’s carry on filled exclusively with porno magazines, which they also took issue with and labeled “indecent material.” This day marked the first of many times the band would be arrested!
On the same tour, they were “banned for life” from the city of Edmonton after drummer Tommy Lee tossed a television out of a window in the upper stories of the Sharotan Caravan Hotel.
In 1983, they released Shout At The Devil, their highly controversial sophomore album. Its fourth track Bastard would make it onto the PMRC’s “Filthy Fifteen” list (more on that later) and its original album artwork featuring a pentagram was pulled and replaced with photos of each band member. To promote the album, they joined Ozzy on his Bark at the Moon tour, on which the aforementioned snorting of the ants would take place.
By 1984, the drug and alcohol abuse would begin to take a horrific toll on each member. On December 8th, 1984, Vince Neil would wreck while driving drunk with Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley, killing his passenger and injuring the passengers in the other car. While he was charged with vehicular manslaughter and sued for $2.5 million, he served only eighteen days out of his sentence of thirty days in jail.
Sometime in the mid-eighties, Sixx and Lee partook in a competition amongst themselves to determine which one could abstain from showering the longest and still find desperate groupies to sleep with. The winner would ultimately be Lee, seeing as a groupie vomited spaghetti onto Sixx from the disgusting odor he emitted. This is allegedly what inspired the title for Guns N Roses’ later album The Spaghetti Incident.
While on tour in support of their fourth album Theatre of Pain, Sixx would suffer his first heroin overdose in London, England. When his drug dealer found him unconscious, he assumed he was dead and threw him into a dumpster. As it turned out, this would be the preamble to an even larger scare and a significant chapter of the rock ‘n roll mythos we know today.
In the winter of 1987 came the overdose of all overdoses, the one which would live in rock ‘n roll infamy. On December 23rd of 1987, Nikki Sixx died for two minutes after overdosing on heroin. His paramedic, a Mötley Crüe fanatic, revived him using two shots of adrenaline. This event would provide Sixx with the inspiration for the absolute banger he wrote two years later, Kickstart My Heart.
In 1988, the band was hit with perhaps the strangest tidbit of controversy in their career, Sixx’s alleged doppelgänger, Matthew Trippe. He hit Mötley with a lawsuit claiming that in 1983 following a car crash in which Sixx was hospitalized, Trippe took over in his place. He apparently wished to receive his “proper royalties” for this time period but eventually dropped the charges in 1993.
And while they would definitely find controversy later, namely with Lee’s domestic violence charges and prison time, their 1980s heyday came to a close when the band achieved sobriety and earned themselves a number one album with 1989’s Dr. Feelgood.
Now, while Crüe are certainly one of the more notorious bands of the hair metal era, there was an entire genre and music scene dedicated to overdosing on smack and hairspray, getting laid, and most importantly pissing off parents and other authority figures.
As aforementioned, Crüe’s Bastard made it onto the “Filthy Fifteen” list in 1985. Many of their contemporaries including W.A.S.P with Animal (Fuck Like A Beast,) Def Leppard with High ‘N Dry (Saturday Night) and Twisted Sister with We’re Not Gonna Take It would also have this incredibly high honor of angering Tipper Gore enough to be singled out before the United States congress.
Now, a brief summary of what exactly went down: The Parents Music Resource Center or the PMRC were established by a collective of bored Congressmen’s housewives. By far the most prominent in leading this charge was Tipper Gore, wife of Senator Al Gore. This group’s goal was ultimately to limit the violent, sexual or my personal favorite, satanic content that was played on MTV or the radio and sold in record stores across the United States. Forget parenting your children and enforcing rules in your own home, let’s go and limit what artists can produce and what other consumers can buy! The Filthy Fifteen was a list of the absolute most objectionable songs these self-important wine moms could find.
Just a side note, if you’re trying to find something with “Objectionable amounts of violence,” I can think of perhaps twenty songs from and before the eighties that beat out We’re Not Gonna Take It.
When their complaining somehow reached the level of “Importance” needed to garner a congressional hearing, opposing witnesses Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver filed into the room (Snider in his classic, over-the-top leather and denim wardrobe) and proceeded to academically annihilate the coalition of censorship-hungry imbeciles. And you don’t need to hear it from me, go and watch each of the three’s testimonies yourself.
Basically, Crüe did lots of crazy stuff and although the eighties were weird on all fronts, you still couldn’t stop the same breed of controlling self-righteous hags from attempting to exert control over the artists of the time.
GG Allin
Now, I have often heard a particular sentiment regarding several artists on this list; that their onstage antics are the only reason they became famous and their music had nothing to do with it. Seeing as Mötley Crüe is one of my top three favorite bands and I love some Alice Cooper sometimes (especially during spooky season), I will definitely argue with that criticism in certain cases.
But absolutely not in that of GG Allin. To put it lightly, there are a plethora of reasons that GG Alin’s name conjures up insane stage antics and not his music for most people.
Born Jesus Christ Allin in Lancaster, New Hampshire to an abusive lunatic named Merle and his soon-to-be divorced wife Arleta, Allin and his older brother Merle Jr. were raised in what both remember(ed) as an absolute living hell. The cabin in which the family resided had no running water or electricity and Merle Sr. took no hesitation in relentlessly beating his wife and sons.
He was also a religious fanatic; he had insisted that Jesus Christ (as in the real one, not his child) had visited him prior to his second son’s birth and informed him that the boy would be the next Messiah. So he prescribed his son to years of intense bullying and named him Jesus Christ. The nickname “GG” actually came from the fact that Merle Jr. couldn’t pronounce Jesus and instead called his brother “Jee-Jee.”
Soon enough, Arleta grew tired of her husband’s declining mental state and the beatings he subjected her to. In 1961, she filed for divorce and escaped the semi-isolated cabin with the boys. In 1966, she remarried and moved the family to East St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
Throughout school, Allin would be relentlessly bullied, both for his name and the fact that he was enrolled in special education classes and was forced to repeat the third grade. He fell into the habits of many poor “white trash” kids at the time; drinking, drugging, stealing, and otherwise violating the law.
As a sophomore in High School, he began cross-dressing, inspired by glam rock band The New York Dolls. Around this time he first delved into music. His first band, Little Sister’s Date, featured Merle Jr. On bass and himself on drums. As influences, he listed Alice Cooper, Mott The Hoople, Iggy Pop and The Stooges, Aerosmith, and of course the aforementioned Dolls.
Pretty bitchin’ taste if I do say so myself.
Somehow, Allin managed to graduate from school in 1975 and formed another band called Malpractice in which he again played the drums. The effort broke apart in 1977, and from here until the mid-eighties Allin partook in multiple groups, eventually becoming a frontman. He became a front runner in the hardcore underground scene in bands such as The Jabbers, The Scumfucs, The Texas Nazis, and Cedar St. Sluts. As one can probably devise from the names alone, he was not a friend of the censorship-hungry PMRC types nor the American mass media.
During a 1985 performance in Peoria, Illinois, GG Allin rose to national attention after he chose to…umm…
Well, he shat on the stage.
Yes, my dear reader, you read that correctly, GG Allin ate a laxative prior to the show, defecated onstage, and then proceeded to grab the waste with his hands and toss it into the audience. According to his fellow performer Bloody Mess (yeah, you read that right too), Allin actually took the laxative too long before the performance and had a difficult time holding it in long enough to give the audience a load of it.
As if this wasn’t shocking and frankly just disgusting enough, he also made the act a regular portion of his live shows.
And people continued to go.
That’s correct, people paid actual money to go to a show and have a mentally unhinged GG Allin throw his fecal matter onto them.
He then took a stab at country music. Heavily inspired by Hank Williams and David Allan Coe, he recorded a country and western album titled The Troubled Troubadour featuring tracks such as Scumfuc Tradition and Outlaw Scumfuc. He would record and release another country effort titled Carnival of Excess a few years down the road.
In the later eighties and early nineties, GG decided to also explore his fascination with serial killers, first writing to and then visiting John Wayne Gacy, who painted a portrait of his admirer that would later be used as the album cover to the film soundtrack of Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.
Around this time, Allin was charged multiple times with assault, battery, indecent exposure, and many other offenses. Due to the growing intensity of his live shows, in which he not only shat but also went out of his way to bodily harm himself, he also found himself being constantly admitted to the hospital for broken bones, blood poisoning, and a plethora of other injuries.
He also threatened to end his own life during concerts, once writing to Maximum RocknRoll stating that he would kill himself during an upcoming performance on Halloween of 1989. This prophecy would not be fulfilled however, seeing as he would wind up in jail on that particular day. The same thing would happen every year until the one he died; he threatened to commit suicide on Halloween and somehow wound up imprisoned each and every Halloween night.
As it turns out, GG was actually serving that jail time in 1989 due to being charged with “assault with the intent to do great bodily harm less than murder” of one of his former companions in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Contrary to his wild stage presence, the administrator of Allin’s psychological evaluation noted that his patient was “Courteous, cooperative, and candid.” However, while the evaluator stated he didn’t appear psychotic, he also admitted that Allin was an alcoholic and had a personality disorder with narcissistic, borderline, and masochistic features. Allin also admitted to burning, cutting and drinking the blood of his accuser, but insisted that she had been consenting and had done the same to him. In the end, he took a plea bargain to a reduced charge of felonious assault. His prison stay would last from Christmas of 1989 to March 26 of 1991 (Steven Tyler’s forty-third birthday on the off chance you were wondering). During this stay, he wrote The GG Allin Manifesto, which is absolutely glorious and should be on your reading list.
After his release, he would skip parole in order to resume touring, and later produced the aforementioned concert film Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.
Then, on June 27th of 1993, GG Allin performed his last show of only three tunes at a small club in Manhattan called The Gas Station. This performance ended early after a semi-riot broke out and Allin himself led some of his most loyal followers on a deranged run about the town. This walk outside came to an end in the apartment of Allin’s friend and fellow performer Johnny Puke, where his addiction finally got the best of him.
GG Allin did not take his own life as a staged spectacle; he died alone in a room in Johnny Puke’s apartment. No one even knew he was dead until the following day.
His funeral, where his bloated corpse was displayed wearing only a leather jacket and jock strap, would more than make up for the normalcy of his demise.
Marilyn Manson
Soon after the death of GG Allin, music’s newest villain arrived in the form of one Marilyn Manson.
Manson — once known as Brian Warner — has the distinction of not growing up in a dark filthy city like Detroit and of having perhaps the most normal childhood of any shock rock musician. He was born in Canton, Ohio and regularly went to his mother’s Episcopal church. He even attended the Heritage Christian School, where his instructors showed he and his classmates all the music they were never to listen to (which then led them to listen to that specific music). After he graduated from high school in 1987, the family relocated to the sunshine state of Florida. Originally aiming to become a journalist, Warner attended Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was at this time that he would begin writing articles for music magazine 25th Parallel, a venture that would lead to him meeting Nine Inch Nails frontman and his eventual mentor, Trent Reznor.
In 1989, a young Brian Warner formed the band and devised himself the moniker by combining the names of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe and serial killer Charles Manson.
In 1990, the band recorded their first demo tape as Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. By 1992, they shortened the name to Marilyn Manson and were signed to Reznor’s label, Nothing Records.
The first of the main character’s controversies would come in 1994, when he was arrested for urinating on a crowd during a performance in Jacksonville, Florida. He then continued with his outlandish and dark music and shows, garnering immense backlash from parents and most figures of authority within the US government. This all came to a head in 1999 following the Columbine school shooting.
Seemingly the second news of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s massacre hit national attention, the media jumped on not their underlying mental health issues, but the fact that they seemed to be Marilyn Manson fans. Unfortunately, politicizing horrific tragedies is nothing new. The hysteria began with the tabloids lining the check-out aisles of grocery stores: The Sun boasted “Killers Worshiped Rock Freak Manson” and The Daily Star claimed “Nutters Loved Evil Pop Hero.” Before long, the “reputable” news stations and more official press outlets joined the charge. The Guardian wondered, “Did goth culture turn two teenagers into killers?”
Then the Times made perhaps the most bold statement of all: “Cult Following Of Rock Star Who Aped Serial Killer.”
Within a week of the tragedy, ten senators of the US congress wrote to Seagrams, the parent company of Manson’s label, and demanded that they halt in the production of any of his music.
Now, this wasn’t the first time music and pop culture had been blamed for unrelated death and destruction. In 1985, Judas Priest found themselves under fire for supposedly driving two Nevada teens to commit suicide. AC/DC were cited by many to be an inspiration for serial killer Richard Ramirez’s heinous acts. And, of course, Ozzy and Alice both were made public enemies number one and two for anything and everything wrong with an entire generation.
But never before had there been such an intense and unrelenting insistence that a single man had caused two mentally ill people he had never met to commit such an atrocity.
Manson, initially a writer, made a considerably eloquent statement in the immediate aftermath denouncing the killers’ actions and the media’s blame of his music. Then, a month following, he drafted an entire article to be published by Rolling Stone titled Columbine: Who’s Fault Is It?
With this piece, Manson wished his condolences to the victims and dared point out the media’s stupidity. He also called attention to the fact that the various outlets had plastered the faces of the killers all over their front pages, effectively giving any future school shooters heroes to glorify.
A year after Columbine, Manson recorded and released his “declaration of war,” Holy Wood (In The Shadows Of The Valley Of Death). On a later cover of Kerrang! Magazine, he would wear a Columbine jersey gifted to him by a survivor of the tragedy to show that the sufferers of the violence themselves did not blame him nor his music for Harris and Klebold’s act. His first performance in the aftermath of the tragedy would be at 2001’s Ozzfest and was preceded by multiple death threats toward Manson.
While Manson ultimately would come out of the controversy relatively successful, he would find several more knocking on his door as the years went on. In 2004, he was charged with sexual assault and battery of a security guard, and he is in the courts at this very moment fighting out a sexual abuse case filed by his past girlfriend, Evan Rachel Wood. And that can of worms, my friends, is a completely different story for a separate time.
School’s Out!
While there are certainly more figures who have succeeded in terrifying legions of parents around America, I think I have given at least the gist. Shock rock, horror rock, whatever you wish to call it, is now the stuff of legend. Sure, you have Sam Smith parading around in a devil costume and Lil Nas X giving Satan a lap dance, but it isn’t at all the same as the sheer phenomenon of what the pioneers like Alice, Ozzy, and later Manson curated. We live in an era where people have, for the most part, become desensitized to violence and flashy references to the devil and hell. And since the death of GG Allin, you don’t usually see people paying money to have someone else’s shit thrown onto them. Truth be told, I’m actually fine with that last one.
And although I was never personally around for the spectacles these artists made, it feels nostalgic to watch unfold in ancient videos of concerts, televised freak-outs from ministers, and of course the fabled PMRC congressional hearings. That sentimentality is especially present in the midst of spooky season, a time of the year where Ozzy munching on bats, Mötley Crüe parading around in outlandish red and black costumes, and Alice Cooper beheading himself with a guillotine seem all too appropriate.
So, without further ado, have a wonderful October and go listen to some bloody rock ‘n roll.
