"SO I
HEAR YOU'RE WRITING A BOOK ABOUT GG..."
Or: The Truth Is Kind Of Important When You're Destroying Rock'n’roll
By Joe Coughlin
It started with
the best intentions, but more on that later. As a wide-eyed, then-suburban spudboy, I'd kept loose tabs on GG Allin's,
uh, career since the late '70's via fanzines and
I
don't think I even heard his music until 1988, when “Expose Yourself To Kids” became a love-it-or-leave-it staple on the station
out of MIT. People were calling to request that it not be played...
like, ever again. I found the song, and the uproar, priceless. It was
classic, mid-tempo punk with droll, mock-Beach Boys backing vocals behind the
chorus. It rocked --- and disturbed --- with
conviction, and GG's performance raised genuine
chills. Of course, the party line quickly became, "He can't be
serious..."
Let's fuck some
kids -- they can't say no / molest them now before they grow
Threaten them with oral sex / expose yourself to incest / 'cause it's
[chorus:]
Alright to expose yourself to kids / do it now, before they grow up &
it's too late
Find an elementary school at recess time /
pull your pecker in front of them & masturbate
Suck a little
hairless crack / hold 'em down, they can't fight back
[laughter]
Watch 'em scream, and cry with fear / fuckin' cunt, don't tell nobody
dear
Say
I'm a pervert, it's OK -- hey / candy, little girl? Walk my way, ya fuckin' bitch
Child abuse is on my mind / little fuckin' kids I'm
soon to find
I
didn't think he was serious, not about this, but he did have a serious
gift. I hadn't seen seasoned rock fans so polarized since the New York Dolls. The
irony was all the more precious, since GG was easily (deliberately?) the least
articulate figure in the music's history. This guy made Jim Dandy Mangrum look like Michael Stipe.
Where the best acts always weed out the lightweights, where even the hardest
hardcore might offer wisdom or a hint of salvation, GG's
public image was simply: Asshole. Long
overdue for rock’n’roll, I reckoned, but his loudest
rhetoric was yet to come.
That
year, an outskirt
I
got there just in time. It was a summer Sunday afternoon, and the doors hadn’t
opened yet. The first thing I noticed was the kids. Not one of these little Mansonites would crack a grin; no one was here to have
“fun”. What few words they said were just versions of "GG's fuckin'
God, man," otherwise they just sat there and simmered. The manager
was a friend, so I was allowed to walk in the back door. "The show's off,"
he said right away. "Somone pissed on some
furniture during the sound check, so I told 'em to go
fuck themselves." He was aware that no one outside was planning to leave,
and was calling the cops. "Better me than the neighbors," he figured.
The
band and their stuff were still onstage. GG's brother
Merle and a few friends were waiting inside. I knew Merle peripherally from the
so-called scene. I ducked back out and saw GG, sallow and stymied, rallying the
kids to bumrush the place. Something about, "They
won't gimme a fuckin'
microphone, but I can just go around & yell the lyrics at everyone."
I
went back in the other way, and pretty soon the front door flew open. Of all
the days I should've had a camera...GG went right to the stage, and the kids
surrounded it. He yelled out that the club sucked, and the band kicked in. He
hit the floor and started bashing his face into it when the cops got there. Two
of them got onstage and just watched him squirm at their feet. They
motioned to the band to stop, which went ignored. Then GG rolled onto his back,
whipped it out and yanked it like Turkish Taffy, bucking his hips up at them.
The cops cracked up at each other and did nothing. Suddenly, more cops: the
ones onstage were needed outside. A bunch of kids followed. I watched from a
neutral spot down the block. There were paddy wagons galore, and anyone who
didn't start walking was thrown into one. A few kids tried to argue about
"free speech" before getting cuffed. When it was over, all I knew was
that GG had gotten away.
Not
long after, he left for
* * *
Cut
to 1992. GG has dropped from obscurity into prison. I'd stayed in touch with
Merle, who now lived in
"Oh,
that fuckin' guy," he drawls, "we
hate him." Deadpan. I know right then I'm gonna end up involved somehow. Merle yawns out a marvelous
tale of the dicksucker's slavish fan tactics and
ultimate humiliation by the band which has me in hysterics. "You wanna see a show?" He pops in a tape. "This is a
pretty good one." I see another drab dump of a club, another joyless bunch
ringing the stage. A countoff, and the band plods into a fairly ominous riff. GG emerges
in just boots, gloves, studded dog collar, a pitiless scowl and a shitload of long, ruddy scars. He's real fucked up and real
pissed off --- Punkenstein --- but focused. Prison
appears to have bolstered his resolve. The crowd visibly tenses at the sight of
him, and suddenly it's not so funny anymore. If only we'd listened to him all
those years ago, I wonder, maybe this wouldn't have happened. It's an older
song of his, I'd later learn, but the lyrics are perfect for what's about to
happen:
Well, you want me
--- to KISS YOUR ASS!
The voice is from hell. GG
hops off the stage, scrambles to the left, swings and BOWM!,
cracks some fucker square in the face with the microphone. The guy's neck snaps
back and he crumples to the floor. Stunned, his friends drag him away...
Well, bend over
buddy, here comes my foot!
GG's
twisting and spazzing all over the place as the crowd
presses itself tight against the back wall. Strangers are clutching each other
for safety. One lone guy is "singing" along, one lone chick gyrating
on all fours atop a half-wall...
I don't need that
cry-ass shit!
Somewhere in all this, he
takes a swipe and drags a girl by the hair to the front of the stage. She
flails, then goes limp like a marionette. People are
stuffing themselves through the exit like the Three Stooges. You can actually
hear screams over the music...
Temper's rising,
take a fit!
He dumps her ass on the floor,
straddles her head from behind, she buckles at the waist. He sticks out his
chest and glares in pride and revulsion at them. Someone runs
over, shoves him off her, pulls her away. GG goes
after him, punching and kicking. The band is on top of it, and joins in the
chorus:
Bite it -- you
scum!
Bite it -- you scum!
Bite it -- you scum!
Bite it -- you scum!
GG
owns the place. The hype, it turns out, was true all along. This is war...
Well, you want me
-- to CON-TRI-BUTE!
He
turns his back to them and squats. They seem to've
been expecting it...
All I got is
what's for you...
He
pumps out a chain of dark, runny turds, spins up
& around, drops to his knees...
All you want -- is
more and more
They
pray he's not gonna do it,
but everyone knows he will...
Gluttony -- you
pig, you whore...
He
feasts from the pile, spits mouthfuls at the crowd, barking out the chorus
between bites. The room is choking on its own dread. Then, of all things, a
fucking guitar solo. GG scoops his poop, takes a whiff, grunts,
drops the mike and smears his face with both hands, down his chest, around his
cock, runs back into the crowd, bangs his head against the wall a couple times.
Just before the third verse, the room all but empty now, he finds the mike:
One day when your
end is near
I'll be laughing at your fear
One day when there'll be no one
Who'll be fuckin' up my fun?
There's
another chorus, GG rolling in glass and shit, some bottles and furniture thrown
at the few remaining gawkers, and a big, empty
feeling. Two or three people applaud. Merle tells the band to start something
called "Cunt Sucking Cannibal" as GG
smashes his own skull with the mike, his face still caked with the brown stuff.
The song takes off, and GG roars, "I'm a filthy fuckin'
animal..my body stinks...I ain't got no teeth...I live alone in a dive..." He
hoists up into the ceiling fixtures and tries to yank them out before falling
on his back. He pulls a girl in a red leather mini onto the floor and jams his
head up her crotch. She pushes his face and breaks away; he rips the ass off
her fishnet hose and leaves her staring at her shit-covered palms. At one
point, GG tries to crack a whiskey bottle on his noggin. He's laid up on a
bench at the end, bellowing, "I seen all the people leave the room...what
the FUCK?!"
It
goes on like this. He intros the next song, "Kill
The Police," but the PA is shut down before the first verse is through. He
throws himself into convulsions on the floor, accompanied by a drum roll, and
they're outta there. Total time: about seven minutes.
A jump in the tape shows the cops weren't far behind. One fan is still yelling
out GG's name while a bouncer denies everything to
some very angry officers. The footage moves outside to a flabbergasted crowd.
The way they talk, you'd think some of them even stuck around to see what
happened. I ask Merle if GG got away again that night. "Oh, yeah," he
mutters. And the shows are all like this now? "Pretty
much. Sometimes we get to finish the set."
Then
he handed me a black binder, about an inch thick. "This is something he's
been working on in prison, says it's his life story." Indeed it was, in
the third person (from which he often spoke), with quotes in the first, and
starting at Day One. On the surface, it looked pretty thorough. There were
dates, towns, the lonely log-cabin childhood, tales of his fucked-up old man,
and being outcast through school, addresses of all the rooming houses, the day
jobs, recording sessions, long-lost band members' names, outrageous incidents
at parties and in dressing rooms, onstage blowjobs, and an everyday Russian
roulette that underpinned his fate. Who knew that GG's
actual given name was Jesus Christ Allin? That alone
said plenty. I couldn't believe it. It was all there, it seemed, but the
writing itself, which was pretty hokey. I asked Merle why no one was doing
anything with this. "No one wants to," he said. "One guy tried
and said Fuck It."
I
begged him to convince GG to give me a shot, to let me do a treatment on any
ten pages and see what he thought. I'd done a newsletter and various shitrag reviews, and figured I had a clue. I had it all
planned out: I'd do it on the computers
at work, take his calls from prison to compare notes, and track down all those
names for interviews. I could finish in a year if we were just embellishing
established facts. Merle hears a lot of shit, so it naturally took some
prodding, but soon the ten pages arrived. I fleshed 'em
out to about 30 and mailed it to GG. He called collect that weekend and said,
"You got the job." Merle would deliver the complete diaries on an
upcoming swing through
* * *
He was fairly cooperative at
first, for someone with nothing else to do. He sent lots of sensational mail,
bizarre drawings, and suggestions for titles nearly a paragraph long, never
once spelling my name right. It took him a while to accept that I wasn't out to
make money off him. The more we talked, the more he toned down his standard
PR-bits, and soon he was calling just to shoot the shit. More and more, he made
me laugh, long and hard. To this day, I swear he had no idea how funny he was.
(Ditto Merle, who also doesn't spell my name right, but he's another story.) I
stayed at work 'til 11:00 most nights for the next ten months & even came
in on weekends to write. I firmly believed (and still do) that this had huge
crossover potential, that average jerks could be moved to care about GG Allin. The tremendous documentary film "HATED,"
which opened during his jail time, proved it with stellar reviews and held-over
runs.
The
story grew more amazing each day, and I sank all my dough into a home PC. Any
one facet of his life (the drugs, the women, the personal hardship, the music)
was easily a book on its own. It was no idle boast when he said he lived ten
years to our one. But antics aside, the bottom line really was music.
Every song, and there were dozens, told a true story or heartfelt belief.
Virtually all the post-Jabbers stuff was about pain, mostly self-inflicted. As
he'd later say, "I put myself through tragedy every day, so I can face it
when it hits me." There was no stopping these songs from coming out.
Despite what his many detractors like to think, GG was a legitimate artist,
maybe more so than most. I was honored he would share so much with me.
On
the downside, he wouldn't bring our work to the phone. Reams of notes would go
unchecked, causing several major snags. He also wouldn't discuss certain songs
there, like "No Room For Nigger," for
obvious reasons. And he refused to talk about prison itself, preferring to
handle the story chronologically. He grew more concerned with the number
of pages I had, not what was on them. I'd sometimes play his own music to him
over the phone to verify a lyric, and he'd say, "I have no idea what the
fuck I'm saying there." Fewer and fewer things added up. The mail slowed
to almost nothing, and he assumed my research alone could fill all the holes. I
knew he couldn't completely trust me, and I understood that. But the biggest
disappointment was when he started suggesting I wing it, when the accuracy
ceased to matter. March, the end of his stint, was near, and he promised to
devote all his free time to our project. I had to believe. He just wanted out;
who could blame him?
I
was surprised, then, to be one of the first people he called when he walked. He
was thrilled to be eating McDonald's, for chrissake,
and I was happy for him. After fucking around a bit, he'd be off to
They
finished the record in no time, and all were ecstatic with it. The title would
be "Brutality And Bloodshed For All,"
despite my brilliant suggestion of "Number One With A Bullet." I was
sure this would be his year --- hell, he'd already been on "Geraldo,"
and the feds were onto him for writing Gacy and
* * *
We hooked up at the Hotel
Clermont lounge / titty bar, where GG was in great
spirits, buying rounds of Bud cans and tipping the faded dancers generously.
The long-rumored stench was nonexistent. His eyes were bright, and he glowed
with nervous energy. An absurd, six-inch tuft of dyed-red beard jutted from his
chin, and under his leather was a white smock with a rusty, abstract floral
print. A closer look revealed the "print" to be a hundred dried blood
spatters, accumulated in dabs over previous tours. He advised as to the prices
for under-the-table handjobs & the like. We spent
the first half-hour talking about a mutual fave of
ours, Tiny Tim. I mentioned the fan report and GG asked, "Really? What
songs did we do? Did he say how it ended?" He was serious. All too soon,
we had to leave for soundcheck.
At
the club, GG yelled over to us from a closed door: "Is this the men's
room?" We shrugged. "Well, it is now." While we laughed,
I had to remember that he'd ripped off lots of people who'd tried to work with
him, that he put his own fans in the hospital, that he might just as soon kill
me as drink with me. I also knew he spent an undue amount of time being
provoked, that he was as paranoid as he was audacious. For all the horrible
shit GG stood for, I couldn't help but be charmed by how utterly himself he
was. One thing seemed sure: If you just
treated him like a person, you'd get it back twice.
The
As
he paced around, I felt I was looking at either The Last Free Man, or someone
more trapped than any of us. He was ranting about going to prison for being an
individual when the music started, and the aura changed instantly. It was
"Bite It You Scum," jet-engine loud and precise, thick as the tension
it brought. GG was all movement and animal grace, his voice an icy shriek.
Right away, I saw a girl unconscious, her friends pulling her away by the feet.
A crying teenage boy ran for the door with his hand on his face, blood
streaming through his fingers. I thought about bolting, but couldn't look away.
Three nubiles up front whooped and made out with each
other for a cameraman. GG brawled with another guy, then
gave him grinning thumbs-up when they stopped. He yanked a clump of hair from
someone's head and stared at it while he sang. The new material was dynamite,
and during a later song, he skipped the last verse to eat out a local stripper
in front of the stage. An orange highway cone was being thrown around, and GG
tried to fuck the small end of it before whipping some heavy metal barstools at
us. I stood behind a wall of people, thinking someone could easily die here. I
have to admit, I found the prospect exhilarating.
In
a stark moment, I watched him standing under severe white light, his face
knotted in rage, a trickle of blood running into his eyes as he sang. I was sad
and drained to think he'd endured fifteen years of this. I thought of the
hundreds of bands I'd seen, and suddenly they meant nothing, a fluffy bunch of
notes. This was uncool, an honest threat, what rock'n'roll was meant to be, but it was more than that. GG
hit me as everything right and wrong with being alive at once: all the strength and all the sickness, but
working together, an obscenely accurate metaphor for the human condition. Every
last possible emotion was going down in that room. It was forbidding, real,
and raised a huge, glorious tangle of questions. The whole fucking world needed
to see this.
Clearly,
there was a message, but I wondered if it was being wasted on young white
trash, or if GG himself was even aware of it. I think he was. Before I could
blink, it was over. We were supposed to sit down afterwards, but backstage was off
limits while (I later heard) GG ate out the flasher chick. The next morning, it
all felt like a bad dream --- even though, for them, this was a really tame
show. I flew back home to my tedious life, forever changed.
* * *
I immediately bought plane tix for
Well
anyway, this time I was ready. I stayed up front the whole time and got hit in
the back with a lot of flying beer and debris. The show was devastating. GG did
a turkey-baster enema, and set fire to the place
before the first song was over, sliced himself up with a busted can, pissed on
the crowd, leaped over the barricades into several fights, the works. A total hate-fest. I was beaming.
We
were supposed to hang out all the next day and do book stuff, but GG wasn't
answering the phone. Granted, it was a rough show, but we'd just be talking. I
later found out that he and Merle watched sitcom reruns while a machine
screened my calls. Knowing they were going barhopping later that night was all
the more galling. I met them at the dives anyway. GG was noticeably suspicious
of me, watching when I talked to anyone else, yet was strangely courteous. Once
again, he said this wasn't the time or place to talk. They had one more show and then, he assured
me, he was all mine.
I
soon heard the last show was a bust, with most of the crowd keeping a safe
distance. GG was going to visit some friends down south, tape spots on the
Jerry Springer & Jane Whitney shows, then play a newly-scheduled
* * *
The show had ended in a
near-riot, with GG running naked and bloody in the streets, stopping traffic. A gaggle of kids had
followed him around, he eluded the cops and ended up at a party, where he did
some drugs and died sometime after sun-up. A slapdash autopsy would declare it
an OD, though his symptoms were more consistent with asphyxiation. There was
none of the organ trauma that goes with a drug death, plus he'd been alive for
hours after doing the drugs. Heroin kills now, not later. He almost certainly
rolled over and suffocated, too fucked up to know he couldn't breathe.
The
New York Post even ran an old picture of him on the cover the next day,
hoping to sell a few copies. The wake and funeral would be in
Yep,
it was a freak show, as though everyone could have their way with him
for a change. Kids put stickers on the coffin. A girl draped her panties over
his face. Someone put pills in GG's mouth and
"washed them down" with beer. A goodbye-bottle of Jim Beam in his
arms was wrenched free and guzzled from. The band's drummer drew on GG's leg with a magic marker, and people took snapshots of
the deceased's bloated pud. The party line now
was, "He would have wanted it this way."
Merle
was blasting a rough dub of the new album at the funeral home, and it was a
motherfucker, easily GG's best. There was a paean to necrosodomy in "Anal Cunt,"
a rare address to the listener in "Take Aim & Fire," the
riotous "Shove That Warrant Up Your Ass,"
the pro-AIDS "I Kill Everything I Fuck," and the one that would title
his bio, "I Am The Highest Power." Merle was also playing country
music, and I was shocked to discover that GG had stolen the melody for his
"Outlaw Scumfuc" directly from David Allan
Coe's "Longhaired Redneck," and another from Hank Williams, Jr.
I
met a number of folks I hadn't been able to find. I'd mention a story about
them from the diaries, and always get the same response: "That's not how it happened at
all." Most of them didn't want to know about any book, particularly GG's ex-wife. At graveside, they all had wildly disparate
takes on GG and his "mission, " the one
constant being a blameless bewilderment with the whole thing, like he was just
trying to be zany or something. With huge hunks of the story still
missing and practically nowhere to go, I hung it up for the next several
months.
The
oft-anticipated media circus never happened. Aside from the expected zine coverage, there were six-line blurbs in SPIN
and Rolling Stone, but that was about it. Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh
are alleged to have discussed it, but I haven't heard proof. So where does it
stand? Well, things got worse. A girl in
In
January '95, I got the call to end 'em all. I found
out the "diaries" themselves were fake.
They're either the aborted bio Merle had mentioned (by a scenester
who solicited two years' worth of fan contributions & ran), or a
fictionalized account by a prison buddy I'd also heard about. Neither is
verifiable, but I was hardly the only person holding this document, as I'd been
so profoundly assured. If that weren't enough, I found out this year
that GG didn't even write a batch of songs from a pivotal period early on ---
songs for which he'd given me insanely detailed background histories so that
I'd dress them up nice.
His
"followers" will probably hate my take on it for admitting, among
other things, that GG loved his kid; that he thought about ditching rock'n'roll for country music later on (partly because he
liked it, partly to piss everyone off); that despite his I-hate-my-audience
rap, there are backstage videos of him saying, "We owe these people a
show." What, you mean he wasn't Satan? Too complicated.
I also get a special chuckle from people who say, "Well, he was mentally
ill." Like we show up for work every day and we're not.
One
last note for you ultra-correct types:
Much has been made of GG's claims to have
raped women (and men) on and offstage. Call it propaganda. None of this has been
substantiated in any way, and I've seen almost every gig ever taped. No one
took a worse beating at these shows than he did. As to his much-publicized
assault trial, all parties contacted so far agree that the acts in question
were consensual. The "victim" has changed her story repeatedly. You
can read all about it later. Meanwhile, check your facts before you spout off.
GG
always said he wanted to get beyond the common perceptions and tell his story
straight-up, but I wonder if he could even tell the difference at the end. His
public image had eaten him alive. He often defied his own intelligence and
worth, as though acceptance on any tangible level meant treason to his cause.
He might well have bagged it if he heard me now, trying to paint him as anything
more than... “baddest-ass rocker ever!” It was a no-winner from the word go.
The
book currently idles at around 300 pages before adding everyone's quotes,
dead-ending at the onset of prison, while I try to replace all the bad info
with something fathomable. People ask me, why even
bother at this point? Because it's still the greatest story in the world: Hilarious, cryptic, tragic, vile, infuriating. Because I know too much at this point not to
(what's proven to be true is better than all the bogus diary stuff anyway). Because there are still three or four dozen people who like, really
wanna read it. Because, for however
briefly and cautiously, he trusted me to try and get it right. And because I owe him one for kicking my ass back to reality.
Fuck what anybody thinks. The guy made a difference. I miss you, GG. And don't
worry, man... Whatever your reasons, no one's ever gonna
top what you did.
Author’s
note: Due to continued circumstances as
described here, I’m gonna try and go the straight Oral
History route with this thing. If you ever worked with GG, I’d like to hear
from you. Lisa T., are you still out there? Please write
© Copyright 1996, Joe
Coughlin
This article first
appeared in MetalFest magazine and Implosion
magazine.