I Love Glen Danzig
Samhain - Death...In It's Arms (1990 / Deathrock)
Hello internet pals of music. Today is a kind of cheap call: a revisit to a Halloween post that got shelved, featuring (my favorite) missing link in the Glen Danzig french onion chain.
To quote Ministry’s Al Jourgenson, everyday is Halloween.
How could it not be? We made it that way. Halloween is a gargantuan shit show, a get out of jail free card that has developed into a brief allowance for us all to visibly wear our mask; unlike the one we secretly don the rest of the year to signal to the outer world that everything is ok, we’re ok.
That’s the interpretation I get from that lyric. Who knows, maybe it’s more literal and is a goofy call to arms to those pale little goth freaks of the night.
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Glen Danzig is a man of many masks. Many masks to hide his insecurities about being what he truly is, a nerd.
There’s plenty of shitty quality video of The Misfits around 1982-’83. Prime stuff. When I was younger, stories about their live shows thrilled and scared me. Glen Danzig used to wear gloves with metal sewn into them and he smashed people in the head!
There’s the live footage from the unintentionally hilarious but important Detroit public access show, Why Be Something That You’re Not?. The TV show’s premise is simple: each episode a touring hardcore band is introduced and briefly interviewed in front of an audience of rowdy little punks, then said band play a live set. It’s a great documentation of the mid 80s punk rock landscape, featuring bands like The Crucifucks, The Necros and Negative Approach-shabbily thrown together in that 80s DIY way, played back on the VHS memory splice of immediacy dubbed over posterity.
Back to The Misfits, or really, back to Glen.
In the interview, he’s giddy, nervous, excited. It’s such a contrast to the brooding uber-man cartoon character he’d become in the 90s, or the grumpy diva shell he’d embody by the 2000s. Here, he overcompensates his macho appearance by making a comment about going out and “getting whores” to a pack of over-amped boys still wrenching their way through the nightmare chrysalis of puberty. It’s a comment wholly out of left field, and he chuckles naughtily saying it, and it’s the most perfect example of the mask that he sculpted to a great degree ( She Rides is a goth girl stripper anthem for all eternity), only to have it slip and fade with age, as evidenced in his hilariously unsexy violent erotica film Verotika. It all reminds me of Steve Carrell in The 40 Year Old Virgin relating the feel of a woman’s breasts to a bag of sand.
When really, Danzig should just have focused on what was actually the coolest part of him: being a fan. His love of Japanese manga like Captain Harlock and Devilman. His fascination with spooky shit like Lycanthropy, his comic books…all the American nightmare experience, Charles Starkweather chewing gum bloodlust cartoon. The Misfits were a great parody of Americana. Danzig could almost be seen as a great parody of rock n roll too, the slang term for sex that is forever tied up with music.
Samhain is different for me though. For quick background, they’re the band that would become Danzig, with a few lineup changes. Samhain is feral. The lyrics are less bizarre pulp horror than with The Misfits1, probing darker spookier things. Musically it’s more relaxed and open, yet maybe even more ferocious and unhinged (dare I say, more dangerous feeling?).
Samhain, by the 3rd album that this track comes from, is the band that would record the first Danzig album. So, really this doesn’t even count as a Samhain song compared to anything off Initium or November Coming Fire. But I never knew about this last patchy record until recently. It’s not very good overall. There are a few demos on this release that are all recorded by Danzig, including a keyboard solo.
Glen Danzig is apparently not a keyboard player. It’s bonkers that he would have even released that song on an album, but it’s also equally bonkers that he filmed a low budget, horrible late night cable blue movie about a woman with eyes for nipples that produce tears that bring an albino spider to life in order to kill all the men who’ve wronged her.
Until you realize that it’s actually perfect because Danzig is a total nerd.
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Example:
20 Eyes in my head
20 Eyes in my head
They're all the same, they're all the same
When you're seeing 20 things at a time
You just can't slow things down, baby
When you're seeing 20 things in your mind
Just can't slow things down
Then all those eyes
They're just crowding up your human face
Then all those eyes
Take an overload
(Misfits, Twenty Eyes)