The Evilive EP the Misfits were touring in support of during their graveyard dustup was released that December. The disc culled seven live tracks from two raucous Googy-era performances by the Misfits, one in New York and another in San Francisco. The production values on Evilive were only vaguely better than any given third-party recording distributed at the time; instrument levels rise and fall, a strange distortion permeates the entire EP, and a long stretch where Doyle tunes his guitar one string at a time remains curiously unedited. Yet Evilive captures the Misfits live show as it was—raw, frantic, unrelenting. The tension spikes during “Horror Business”: taken from the New York gig, where a last-minute lineup change unexpectedly paired the Misfits with Bobby Steele’s Undead, Danzig firmly intones to an audience member and Undead supporter pelting him with ice, “One more fuckin’ time, you asshole, and you die!” (it should be noted the crowd was merely following the Misfits’ lead—this was the Ritz gig where Danzig and Only spent the Undead’s set hurling bottles at their former band mate).[18] Later, just before Evilive peaks with the swelling anthem “Hatebreeders,” Danzig angrily answers a heckler’s taunts with a vaguer threat: “You think you’ll get outta the hospital in time?” Even the EP’s cover photo managed to convey the Misfits’ singer’s ever-present rage: as Only, Googy, and Doyle mercilessly pound out a racket behind him, Danzig stands at the foot of the stage, hand outstretched as if reaching to strangle someone, ignoring the audience members cheering wildly for his band.[19]
Evilive was originally only available via the Fiend Club, the fan organization the Misfits started to reward their followers with promotional stickers, buttons, and news direct from Lodi. Listeners who wrote to the address on the back of Misfits records would receive mass quantities of such ephemera in envelopes and packages as ornately decorated as the record sleeves themselves. The average Fiend Club envelope boasted a close-up image of the Crimson Ghost underneath the Misfits logo, the return address stamped just underneath the Ghost’s eye sockets. During interviews, Danzig and his cronies would invite eager fans to pay the band back by mailing any bones, skulls, or dead animals they had lying around. Occasionally a dyed-in-the-wool fiend would comply, and the Misfits would open a package to discover a long-deceased rodent or bat rotting away in their hands.[20]
Seven months after the New Orleans arrest, at the aforementioned Santa Monica gig Robo slammed away with his usual aplomb, propelling the Misfits through a set of classics peppered with a handful of newer, darker compositions like the barren “Green Hell” and the ferocious “Hellhound.” The band played quickly, but each song was decipherable and things did not deteriorate into the cacophonous blur heard on so many other Misfits live recordings from this period. The catharsis can certainly be felt at the close of “Devilock,” the penultimate song that evening; the band bounces between the two final notes, rocking back and forth incessantly, as Danzig screams in pain before letting out a final exorcising exclaim of, “Oh my fucking God!” The song collapses and you can almost see the dust rising up from the devastation.[21]
As together as horror punk’s biggest act seemed on stage that night in Santa Monica, the end was nigh. In the hours following the “Everything Went Black” gig—where the Misfits had played before 3,000 rowdy punks, their biggest crowd to date—Danzig confided to Henry Rollins that he was planning to leave the band.[22] He was tired of dealing with the other members, whose lack of shared creative vision Glenn believed was holding him back. The singer felt Jerry and Doyle weren’t committed enough to punk rock and was fed up with the pair’s open worship of Van Halen and insistence on dramatically smashing their guitars in concert a la Pete Townshend. The Caiafas, according to Glenn, also spent too much time offstage draped in attire bearing the logo of their gridiron heroes the New York Giants as opposed to the leather-and-spikes Misfits uniform.
A more serious issue was Only’s growing cocaine habit, something that tested the relatively clean-living Danzig’s mettle (although he sang of absolute horrors, the singer rarely touched anything harder than rum and coke). Glenn would later remark that he could “see the Misfits becoming exactly the things that [he] got in a punk band to avoid.”[23] “They would give me this rap that if I didn’t get the band lots of money [by writing commercial songs], they wouldn’t be able to do it anymore,” Danzig commented later to Hard Times. “But they would waste money on things like smashing guitars . . . [This Is Spinal Tap] kind of epitomizes what was going on . . . with the amps that go up to eleven.”[24]
Jerry Only would lay much blame for the Misfits deterioration with Danzig’s inability to comfortably coexist with his de facto roommate Robo. There was open resentment on both sides concerning the fact Robo spent his days working at the elder Caiafa’s knife factory with Jerry and Doyle, earning money for the band, while Glenn stayed at home running the Misfits’ Plan 9 record label. After a full day’s shift, all Robo wanted to do was drink beer and watch television. Glenn would chide the drummer, trying to force him into folding and glueing record sleeves. This cycle went on for some time; by August of 1983, Robo reached his limit and announced his departure from the band. He moved out of Danzig’s basement and back to Los Angeles.[25]
Danzig, seeing his opportunity to finally pull up his stakes, canceled three pending concert dates in Canada so he could fly to Washington, D.C., to meet with Minor Threat guitarists Lyle Preslar and Brian Baker about forming some kind of punk rock super group. Preslar later recalled: “[Glenn, Brian, and I] all decided that we would go after Chris Gates of the Big Boys for bass and Mark Stern of Youth Brigade for drums. . . . Those two guys had the good sense and foresight to back out without a note played, and Brian and I started trying to work with Glenn . . . from the earliest efforts it was obvious that we couldn’t work together in a million fucking years, and Brian bolted, but I accepted Glenn’s offer to play with him [later] in a new thing.”[26] With the punk super group on hold, Danzig began working on material for a darker horror band he intended to call Samhain with various friends around New Jersey and New York, including Al Pike from celebrated Queens peace punks Reagan Youth, Eric Stellmann, and Stellmann’s guitar-playing band mate from Rosemary’s Babies, Craig Richardson.[27]
There were a pair of important bookings on the horizon, though, that would keep the Misfits together until the end of 1983: their annual tent pole Halloween gig, which that year was scheduled for October 29 in Detroit, and a brief November tour of Germany to support the overseas release of Evilive. Walking away from the band at this point would potentially cost them all a great deal of money—the German tour alone allegedly boasted guarantees of $2,000 for every show (foreign promoters were eager to have the Misfits for their first gigs ever in continental Europe), so the horror punks decided to tough it out until the December release of Earth A.D.
The only immediate problem facing the band was, once again, the absence of a drummer. In September, Jerry Only got back in touch with Arthur Googy to see if the wayward drummer be up for at least playing the Halloween show. If things went well, Only told Googy, he would be welcome to come along for the German tour. Googy, now deeply entrenched in his new hardcore band Antidote, considered the offer but told Jerry he’d only play with the Misfits again if payment was received entirely upfront. Only figured this was fair and was ready to cut a check until Danzig caught wind of his bass player’s unsanctioned olive branch. Danzig curtly vetoed Googy’s participation as he feared the drummer would simply play drug buddy to the elder Caiafa brother (aside from Van Halen and New York Giants football, one of Jerry Only’s favorite pastimes was allegedly smoking Herculean amounts of marijuana).[28]
Danzig actually had his own drummer for the Misfits in mind, someone he had tried to audition for the band previously but the timing had just never worked out: Brian “Damage” Keats, a hard-hitting percussionist in his teens best known for his work with New Jersey sleaze punks Genocide. In the fall of 1983, Keats was living in San Francisco and playing with Verbal Abuse. A huge Misfits fan, Keats
remembered in a 2005 interview being sought out by his heroes: “I got a call from my New York roommate, saying that Glenn Danzig called, asking me to join [the Misfits]. At the time, I don’t think I’d ever actually met Glenn. I think he had just seen me play in bands or had heard about me through other people. Without hesitation, I dropped everything and moved back to New York. I took the bus out to Lodi and went to Glenn’s house for my audition . . . I didn’t know the band was about to fall apart or about the dysfunctional relationships within . . . I found out pretty quickly, though.”
Speaking volumes, perhaps, about these dysfunctional relationships—or at least speaking to Danzig’s claims that Jerry and Doyle were completely obsessed with mainstream heavy metal at this point—is Keats’s memory of the Caiafa brothers arriving at the Misfits practice space in “a monster truck, blasting Van Halen’s ‘Unchained’ on their way home from working out at the gym—not the exact image of [these guys] I had in my head.” Keats rehearsed with the band that October afternoon, running through as much material as possible, before he was invited to play with them in Detroit. This would be the only instance prior to the Halloween gig in which the Misfits would attempt to rehearse with their brand-new teenage drummer (the Caiafas were working double shifts to ensure they’d have enough money to cover their pending German tour expenses). On the morning of October 25, Brian Keats met up with the Misfits again in Lodi to make the grueling ten-hour drive west to Detroit for the Halloween performance.[29]
The show itself was booked at Graystone Hall, a palatial showroom space that held at least 1,000 people. Drummer Todd Swalla, whose band the Necros were also on the bill that night, was excited for the show but was also curious regarding the future of the Misfits. It was no secret there were tensions within the band over creative direction: Jerry was happy turning the Misfits into a punk reflection of Kiss while Glenn desperately wanted something more akin to Australian blues-based post-punk upstarts the Birthday Party (who used gothic and horror themes in a less ham-fisted way than mainstream groups like Kiss or Iron Maiden . . . or, sometimes, even the Misfits). The family bond between the Caiafas also presented problems. “Glenn did not want Doyle on guitar,” Swalla remembers. “And, of course, Jerry was not going to fire his little brother . . . Jerry and Glenn were increasingly at odds, yeah, [but] no one knew this [Detroit gig] would be their final show.”[30]
Keats, a good friend of Swalla and the other Necros, began drinking with the opening act after the Misfits soundcheck that evening. When it was time to play, Keats realized he was “seriously buzzed,” making an already difficult situation even worse. With no written set list and unable to discern from the deafening roar of the amps exactly what song he was supposed to be playing, Keats stumbled. After two botched songs an angry Doyle physically ejected Keats from the stage with one forceful forearm motion in favor of Swalla (who had already sat in with the band numerous times).[31]
The Misfits continued their blaring aural assault on Graystone Hall. However, for Danzig (who that evening was adorned in a sadomasochist’s dog mask with a large pentagram painted on his chest), Doyle’s physical removal of Keats proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. After the fourth song in the set, “Death Comes Ripping,” Glenn made a firm, faithful announcement that no one bothered to challenge: “This is our last show—ever.”
The Misfits then played for over an hour, one of their longest sets on record, frustration and apathy painted on their faces. Doyle and Jerry eventually sat down on their amps as they joylessly hammered everything out. The only one who seemed to be having any fun on stage was Swalla, who always thrilled to play with his favorite contemporary punk band. The crowd also seemed to be unaffected by the Misfits’ onstage implosion—they surged as one giant mass, chanting along to their favorite songs and more or less luxuriating in the anarchic revelry.
The endless stream of stage divers and stage dancers, however, only served to further fray Danzig’s nerves. Following “London Dungeon,” the singer addressed the Graystone crowd with the following irritated rant: “If you guys come up here, then come up here and stage dive or do whatever the fuck you wanna do. But don’t stand in the way of, like, so if we go crazy and you get hit and then you start cryin’ to your mama or somethin’ . . . like, if you’re gonna jump, jump! If you’re gonna go crazy, go crazy! But don’t stand up here and, y’know, [makes jerking off motion] ‘bluh, bluh,’ pull your dick off . . . alright? ‘Cause we’re tryin’ to play up here, and it’s fucked up.” Naturally, the crowd began cheering loudly as soon as the singer started feigning masturbation. Later, in lieu of water, Danzig requested that someone bring him a glass of schnapps.[32]
The unfortunate truth concerning this disastrous final performance was the Misfits could not simply go their separate ways once it was over (for the record, the absolute last song Glenn Danzig sang with the Misfits was “Night of the Living Dead,” the same song they began their set with that evening). They were still a good half a day away from their home base of New Jersey. That evening, the seething band members—none of whom were speaking to one another—were invited to spend the night at the home of Detroit punk promoter Russ Gibb. Gibb stumbled into a strange kind of worldwide pop culture notoriety on October 12, 1969, when, as a radio deejay for Michigan’s WKNR-FM, he took a call from a listener who put forth the creepy theory that Paul McCartney had died in a car accident in 1966 and the remaining Beatles had hired a McCartney doppelganger as a cover-up; this notion endures today as one of music’s greatest conspiracy theories. In the early 1980s Gibb ran a fledgling punk rock video production company out of his house called Back Porch.
Mat Hunt recorded the Graystone Hall performance for Back Porch that night and recounted in a 2009 blog post the scene the following morning at the Gibb homestead: “I walked in . . . and handed Russ the tape of the Misfits show from the night before. I went into the kitchen and saw [the band] eating breakfast around a tiny table. From around the corner, [Russ’s mother], holding a spatula and wearing an apron, said with a thick Scottish accent, ‘Would you boys like some more scrambled eggs and sausage?’ To me, it seemed like Anywhere, USA, but it was the fucking Misfits. The guys, hung over, exhausted, pissed, with long black sexy hair in their face[s], barely raised their head[s] and said, ‘Yeaaaaaa, I’d like some more eggs please, Mrs. Gibb.’ It was the ‘please’ that got me . . . the expectation was that they were rock stars, but here it was grandma with some regular boys.”[33]
This same morning found Brian Keats apologizing profusely for his blunder to no avail (“I was so fucking sunk by the whole thing. . . . like I’d just probably caused the breakup of my favorite band”). The Misfits refused to acknowledge him, even during the ten-hour drive back to Lodi. Keats would never speak to any of the Misfits again but did manage to carve out a career as an in-demand session drummer. In the ensuing decades he racked up credits with a who’s who of punk and new wave musicians, including members of the Dead Boys, Devo, the Damned, Blondie, the Bangles, the New York Dolls, and Gang of Four. The drummer would later credit his Misfits gaffe as something of a professional awakening, saying it lead him to “take the responsibilities of performing . . . way more seriously from that point on.”
Sadly, Keats would be the first Misfit to die, succumbing to colon cancer in 2010 at the age of 46.[34] To their credit, the Misfits—or Jerry Only, at least—never directly blamed Keats for their Detroit meltdown. Only would eventually state that Keats was “a nice kid” who “did try” but ultimately “sucked.” The bassist blamed Danzig for “pick[ing] [Keats] up . . . because of his haircut,” apparently misinformed or unaware of Brian’s work with Genocide and Verbal Abuse. “Glenn forgot the first rule: the music comes first and all the bullshit is for later,” Jerry told Jersey Beat in 1990. “You don’t sacrifice your music for a look. . . . [After Detroit], that was that. We said, ‘Cancel the German tour.’ It was then that I realized he wasn’t competent enough to run things. He just wants to be on the cover of some magazine.
”[35]
After seven years, the Misfits had come to a crashing halt. Their saga was far from over, though.
Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood, the second and final original Misfits album, was released on December 12, 1983, on the band’s Plan 9 label. Recorded the previous October in Santa Monica, California, this stark nine-song document is a complete departure into the subgenre of hardcore punk that leaves behind nearly all vestiges of the 1950s-style rock n’ roll that characterize the band’s prior recordings. The album’s general mood of raw, heartless terror is set by the title track, which opens things up with a storm-like squall of guitars feeding back for roughly thirteen seconds; then, without warning, Robo’s drums accelerate to an incredible pace while Danzig simultaneously lets out a massive carnal bellow. “You bet your life there’s gonna be a fight,” Danzig curtly warns moments later over the band’s furious thrashing. After two minutes, “Earth A.D.” collapses back into a wave of feedback that immediately crashes into the demented insect lust tribute “Queen Wasp.” The pace is just slow enough to groove ever so slightly as the Misfits repeatedly shout the vague command “Go!” when Danzig isn’t rhapsodizing about his hybrid lover’s thorax.
The next three songs offer the most transparent blueprint for the heavy metal subgenres that would later claim Earth A.D. as a cornerstone. You can hear thrash metal’s birth in the hard-charging “Devilock” wherein Doyle hammers a low E chord endlessly, each brief note change accented by a hard cymbal smash. There’s more suspense in “Death Comes Ripping,” a song that sounds carefully assembled with its slow introduction, against-the-beat verses, sparse vocals, and bookends of busy drum patterns. An obtuse arrangement, at least compared to the wild crunching abandon of “Green Hell” (a tribute to the 1940 James Whale film starring Vincent Price and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Although the speed of the album’s material forces Danzig’s voice into a hoarser territory, he still manages to maintain his prowess, that trademark howl cutting through the rest of the band’s thick din.
This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits Page 11