Well I Did Witness Something Awful and Horrific
Misfits - Come Back
Hello internet pals of music. Time to bite the face of Misfits’ death rock croon-pact with the witchy dark beyond.
Misfits is always going to be a cool band.
I started working on this with the intention of a short introduction where I tell the story of my grandma buying me Misfits Earth AD and GBH Midnight Madness and Beyond but then I had to research the name of the tape store that was in that mall (it was Hastings Music & Tapes, I am now recalling as I write this) but then the car went off the rails and I got lost looking at old news clippings about Houston’s now-dead Northwest Mall1
It’s not that great of a story anyway. Not like when she unknowingly bought me Slayer Live Undead for Christmas and then got very angry when we had to listen to it in the car driving back to Houston from our relatives’ in East Texas. She demanded an end to the blasphemy by the time The Antichrist came on, which is impressive that she lasted almost all the way to the end of side one.
Make it seem a suicide make it seem a suicide make it seem a suicide make it seem a suicide
She would have hated Misfits. I never made her listen. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have been smart enough at 13 to play her Come Back. I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to play her the above-quoted Who Killed Marilyn? but probably would’ve settled on Death Comes Ripping. This is because at my thirteen years of age Earth A.D. matched my energy. Legacy of Brutality just didn’t seem very…brutal. It was something to me, but I couldn’t figure out quite what. I loved songs like She and Where Eagles Dare but songs like American Nightmare felt corny to me.
Fuck, I love getting older and smarter.
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American Nightmare and Come Back both brilliantly display why Misfits will forever be cool. This is pulp horror, Charles Starkweather on a midnight drive through the badlands, all rat rods and she-devils and burning black candles. It’s EC comic books and clove cigarettes, hair slicked with blood. It’s a blackened Elvis, crooning for an undead Priscilla. It really is every little nook and cranny of the band’s obsessive static age trash-pop brains all rolled into a great driving track of unadulterated Americana. As usual, Danzig’s lyrics are great, spare and moody.
I’m so pleased that I’ve grown enough in my life to reflect on my boyish ineptitude and embrace this song.
Come back and bite my face.
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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”
If for some insane reason you need to know more about Northwest Mall, which is now a train station.