DISGRACELAND - The Misfits: Robbing Graves, Night of the Living Dead and the Teenagers from Mars

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

The Misfits were truly unique. Scary. Violent. Angry. Nihilistic. These words can easily describe not only their music, but also the band as people, particularly frontman Glenn Danzig. Rumored to have been arrested for grave robbery, locked up abroad and inciting riots here in the States, the Misfits blazed a path of annihilation trading on fictional B-movie and scandal rag imagery to create one of the most enduring cult followings of all time and combating the very real sense of alienation that fueled Danzig’s creativity and violent behavior. This episode was originally published on October 27, 2020. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.

I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like, like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club from Hello Sunshine and IHeart Podcast, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off. Each week I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile. Listen to bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Brought to you by Cotton. of our lives.

Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. Happy Halloween, everybody. This is a Halloween episode. I tried to have a sense of humor about it. If you take yourself and you're punk rock too seriously, you might want to skip this episode and dive into your back issues of maximum rock and roll instead. But if you like to be entertained and find Glenn Danzig to be as unintentionally hysterical as he is talented, then strap yourselves in for this special Halloween episode of Disgraceland.

Melotron! The stories about the misfits are insane. They were rumored to have been arrested for grave robbing. They were locked up abroad for attacking skinheads, incited riots at their shows here in the States. Creatively driven by frontman Glenn Danzig, the misfits invented what has come to be known as horror core, coming up in a hardcore scene that was as violent as it was inspiring. Growing up, Glenn Danzig was obsessed with the weird, with the strange, with the horrific. Early comic books, heavy metal, scandal rags, and B-movies helped fill the void in him

created by an ever-present feeling of alienation. This inspiration fueled him, filled his imagination, and helped him create one of the most enduring musical cult followings of all time. It also inspired him and his bandmates to create great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Robo Penetration. MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Islands in the Stream by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. And why would I play you that specific slice of middle ear cheese

could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on October 31st, 1983, and that was the day the Misfits played their final show and all hell broke loose. On this episode, Teenagers from Mars, Robo Penetration, Glenn Danzig's Night of the Living Dead, and the Misfits. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. Because of the obvious threat to untold numbers of citizens, and because of the crisis which is even now developing, this radio station will remain on the air day and night. Raid, torture, and murder in Chicago, as eight student nurses at the South Chicago Community Hospital have been found dead overnight, The suspect in custody is one Richard Spack, who now stands accused of one of the most gruesome murder sprees of the 20th century.

Eleven-year-old Glenn Anzolone was barricading himself in, hammering nails into imaginary makeshift plywood barriers to keep the horror of the world out. 1966, Glenn was just a child, but he could tell the world was turning. From where he stood, stuck in Lodi, New Jersey, he could feel it. There was a darkness on the end. edge of town. And that darkness compelled Glenn. He knew as a young boy that he was different. The horror seeping in through radio and television broadcasts appealed to him more than so-called normal adolescent interests. Sports, school, television, the New York football Giants, good government, Andy Griffith's show. What did Glenn care? He found these things endlessly boring. How the rest

of the world did care about these things blew his mind. The fact that he couldn't relate, alienated him from nearly everyone he came in contact with at school or in his neighborhood. That was the scary part, not the horror show on the nightly news, but the alienation. Who got to say what was normal? The vicious irony was that Glenn found so-called normal to be scary as fuck. They'll leave it the beaver types at school with their high and tight boys' regular haircuts, their parents with their two cars, their garage, 5 o'clock martini hours, and Lawrence Welk show. The fucking hula hoop and sidewalk surfboards,

Glenn could not relate to any of it. And those who could, the fact that they could, scared the shit out of them. They were mindless in their adoption of every new fad, television program, or piece of pat's sentimental music, conformist zombies, they were downright bullish to Glenn. Whenever they were near, he'd feel his backbone tense up. He'd get that chill.

The one that told them, things weren't right. Because everything about them, these norms said to him, You're not right, Glenn. Glenn buried the feeling. It made him feel alone, empty. He felt the hole inside him grow, and he filled it in his young imagination with the kinds of things that seemed to only interest him.

At first, he barricaded himself in, retreating into the sanctity of his teenage bedroom, and devoured comic books, Magneto, and Tales from the Crypt, broadcast on local New Jersey television, Frankenstein conquers the world, Dracula versus Frankenstein, revenge of the zombies, and any and all nationally syndicated horror and adventure programming Glenn could get his eyes on. Pirate show, Dark Shadows with Barnabas Collins. Glenn didn't stop there.

He tore into the tabloids and cult rags of the day as well. The national tattler and it's happening with headlines emblazoned across their covers like Dad Eats Baby and Sterilization May Free Killer Moll. M. Hush Magazine and Confidential gave way to admitted mainstream fascinations for Glenn with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, which Glenn justified by claiming additional knowledge of less popular versions of those 1950s icons. Roy Orbison, whose darkness was overstated yet did little to curtail his mainstream success, and Jane Mansfield, who died at a fiery car crash and was rumored, untrue, of course, but Glenn didn't know to have been decapitated.

Glenn took all of this in, and when he dared venture out into the world that offered him little beyond his bedroom walls, it was to catch whatever B-movies in fringe cinema he could find, Plan 9 from outer space, and George Romero's groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead. The outside scared him. Lodi, with its horrifying conformist jocks, feature frat boys with no tolerance for the weird olive-skinned Italian kid who was into all that quote-unquote weird shit. In the Jersey Devil lurking in the darkness, somewhere outside Glenn's suburban bedroom window, in the woods, the devil's own green hell. In the swamps of Jersey, the mafia's unofficial burial ground.

Who killed Maryland? Glenn didn't know. But he bet the men who utilized those swamps had an idea. Rotted corpse, sex decay, her breasts all full of slugs. The air at night around Glenn's home had a different feel than in the day. The smell from the refineries, toxins in the air mixing with the sound of the crickets, the peepers, whatever they were, disgusting insects, soundtracking his nighttime world. Glenn kept to the cracked sidewalk shuffling home.

He could feel their presence, whoever they were, neighborhood bullies, older kids, calling him names, heckling him, throwing rocks at him from behind. Coming up fast, Glenn kept his head down and kept walking. Even if he didn't know them, he knew. who they were. Ricky Nelson Squares, who were lucky they were born a couple years before Glenn and were thus bigger. Glenn couldn't do anything about his diminutive height, but he would morph his body eventually, make him unfuck with the bull, but back then, the morphing was done by the ghoulish

conformists on his tail. Glenn heard the local horror lore that the refinery toxins made their way into the topsoil. The bugs, those peepers, soaked the toxins up and transported the chemicals into the water supply. The result, a transmutation of some locals who grew extra body parts. From behind him, Glenn could hear the continued shit talk. Hey, Eddie Munster, where you going so late? Hey, Lurch, where's the rest of the family? They started humming the theme to the Adams family, snapping their fingers out of time like the soulless automaton's they were. Their voices were multiplying rapidly, a multiverse of tongue, spitting vile insults, and now Glenn could feel their eyes on him, burning into the back of his neck. This is the ghoul's night out. Glenn knew it.

All ghouls go to hell. In the back of his neck burned, humans hell bent on eating flesh. The flesh of his neck bubbling under the radiation gaze of conformists, bullying him back into his suburban dungeon, transformed radiated mutants, Ricky Nelson's no more. Now, with so many eyes, an overload. Somehow, Glenn made it home, alive. He went to his little electric piano and started picking out notes, humming melodies, Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath burbling up from his subconscious. Glenn, by the time he was in high school, had become obsessed with the album. Music made him feel less alone, less of a target. It was empowering. And Glenn knew it then. No more bullying at the hands of freakish ghouls. He'd make music and make himself into something, someone else,

someone they couldn't fuck with. And there was a neighborhood kid with a bass guitar. He was kind of a norm himself, football player, voted most popular. His old man was some kind of working class hero, but, but he was into the music Glenn was into, and not just Sabbath and the Stooges and Elvis, but this new type of loud, fast, anti-authority, non-conformist music that they were calling punk, the Ramones, Generation X, and the Sex Pistols. Plus, this kid knew a drummer, a drummer who had a garage where they could jam, and perhaps the single most important qualifier, was the fact that this kid, the bass player, had a van. He went by the name Jerry, just Jerry, only Jerry, Jerry only.

There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of The Girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man.

A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves.

Listen to the Girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an act or whatever.

My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do. You'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up, and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, Like he's about to attack me, like,

making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships, or religion, or sex, or addiction,

or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things.

Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video. rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie to Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another

film grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or or wherever you get your podcasts.

Approximately 30 young men and boys. It's the latest dark twist this year, with serial killer Ted Bundy finally under arrest and facing the death penalty in Florida after murdering and assaulting FSU sorority girls. The hillside strangler in Los Angeles remains at large. Just last month, the world was rattled by the Jonestown mass suicide,

and the month before that, the brutal murder of Nancy Spunge and by rock star Sid Fishes. It's the year that won't let up until the very last day, it seems, prompting many to dub it Psycho, Jerry only was making pasta for his friend Sid Vicious, infamous bass player for the sex pistols,

who was rumored to have killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungeon. Sid had just gotten out of jail that day. The word was he was going to fight the case. Mick Jagger was footing the bill for his lawyer, but Sid didn't care. All he cared about was getting high. He'd kicked his nasty heroin habit in Rikos, but within minutes of getting out,

all he could think of was jacking something hot into his fame. He didn't care about Jerry's pasta either. Little did he know it would be his last meal. Jerry had befriended Sid. He was a fan and he saw an opportunity. Sid had a hit, his version of Frank Sinatra's My Way. And Jerry knew a tour was in the works and wanted in on that action with his new band, The Misfits.

Jerry wanted the Misfits to back Sid. It's not clear where Jerry only singer, frontman for the Misfits, Glenn Anzolone, who was now going by the name Glenn Danzig, fit into his plan. It didn't matter. Sid would die that night of a heroin overdose. It was no skin off Glenn Danzig's back. He never knew what to make of Sid vicious. He understood Jerry's fascination with him, though. Sid was famous and punk, a very rare combination of the time. But Glenn would never understand Jerry's fascination with Sid's mom and Beverly. Anne was there the night Sid died with Jerry. The rumors were sickening.

Sid Vicious was pretty fucking far from alive after his mom left his room that night. Hot shot, they'd said. Glenn and Jerry hung with Sid and Nancy at the Chelsea Hotel where the couple was living. Glenn and Jerry got busted and ended up spending the night in jail. Not for heroin, which was everywhere at the Chelsea, especially on the first floor, but for throwing bottles off the fire escape down on the West 23rd Street. Nancy wouldn't get off that easy. The world thought Sid had been the one who put knife in Nancy.

Sid was so smacked out at the time of Nancy's deadly stabbing that even he didn't know if he killed her. Glenn Danzig didn't give a fuck what Sid Vicious thought. He thought he did it or at least thought enough of the bat-shick crazy incident to know that it would make for one hell of a song. So he put pen to paper, wrote out the lyrics to a new tune about Nancy Spongin's demise, called it horror business and headed into the studio with the misfits to get it on tape. Bassist Jerry Only, friend of Sid Vicious at the time, had taken to shepherding Sid's mom around town after Sid's death, making sure she was okay, making sure she had enough drugs, degenerate junkie that she was, just like her son, and in general showing her a good time, which is how Anne Beverly, Sid Vicious's mom, wound up at the recording session for horror business,

the misfit song written about her son murdering his girlfriend. Anne sat in the control room, either willfully ignorant or too high to care, while Glenn Danzig reimagined Alfred Hitchcock's psycho through song with vivid hardcore imagery. And there's a line in horror business, a lyric where Glenn says, My mirrors are black for you. What a fucking lyric. My mirrors are black for you. It was Glenn Danzig's worldview channeled through the murderous punk rocker Sid Vicious, A worldview that took the ghoulish conformity society offered him

and reflected back the blackness that drove him to alienation. The worldview, biting back, this alienation, this anger was at the core of the misfits' music. They were louder, faster, angrier, than all their punk rock contemporaries. The Ramones, the clashed, the pistols, when it came to pure nihilistic rage, none could hold a candle to the hardcore brutality Glenn Danzig and Jerry Only were imagining in recording. Bullet, the aforementioned horror business, Night of the Living Dead, and Halloween, scorching singles that blasted with inferno ferocity off the tape, telling tales of presidential assassination, zombie apocalypse, and riotous anarchy,

with dead cats hanging from poles. And B-sides, any other band at the time would have been lucky to count as lead singles, such was their hokey infectiousness and originality. Attitude, Hollywood Babylon, teenagers from Mars, last caress, ghoul's night out in a horror hotel. Lyrically, all were steeped in the prepubescent ooze of Glenn Danzig's childhood bedroom. You can hear the tabloid smut in Hollywood Babylon, the syndicated creature double features in horror hotel in Night of the Living Dead,

the cult rag exploitation of last caress, and of course the painful adolescent alienation and teenagers from Mars. Danzig's broadside at the ghoulish Lodi bullies and authority figures who tried unsuccessfully to bend. him to the conformist ways and shut him out as a child. Gibberish lyrics to parents and mainstream rock and roll gatekeepers, but the secret serum for 15-year-old kids out on the margins trying to find their way through the perils of teenage wasteland.

Hearing the misfits, for me at the age of 15, literally changed the course of my life. Nothing I heard to that point sounded like the misfits, and I would hear nothing else the same for as long as I had ears. Music wasn't supposed to sound like this, broken down, shredded, low-fi, at times even out of tune, messy but precise, filled with rage and an energy that I could uniquely identify with that was already coursing through my veins. But to this point, untapped, it had no outlet until I heard the misfits.

And when I first heard the band, I literally wanted to break things. It moved me to violence. My friends and I dawned Black Hooded champion sweatshirts and took to the streets of our neighborhood, a group of ten or more of us at a time and shouted out the game vocals to Misfit songs in the dead of night. Imagine sitting down in your lazy boy after a long, hard day of work, and turning on your magnin P.I. or your cheers to relax, and hearing a gang of 15-year-olds marching down your street singing in unison about hacking heads off little girls and putting them on our walls.

We called ourselves the hoods and huts in honor the Misfits logo. The Hood and Crimson Ghost. Go ahead. Fuck with us. Miss Fitz's music was imbued with violence, rage. We'd never seen them live. They were long broken up by the time we got turned on, but the influence of their recorded output and their live shows informed every Boston and New York hardcore band we saw back then. But still, as violent as the all-ages matinees were that we attended,

there were nothing like the shows the Misfits played, where Glenn Danzig was known not to only accost the crowd verbally from stage, but to also get into the crowd and physically assault fans for uninsed. known taunts and offenses. A growing audience of dedicated punk rockers did little to make Glenn Danzig feel less alienated. Sometimes, it seemed as though it only made his problems worse. But who the fuck were these kids? Didn't they get it?

Mixing it up with the crowd was no doubt seen as less of a risk given that Glenn knew he was backed by his bulky bass player Jerry only, and Jerry's little brother Doyle on guitar. Both were former high school football stars and both muscle bound, jacked. On stage, they aspired to look like the monsters they worshipped on television on Saturday mornings growing up. Bulging biceps and pecks augmented with dyed black hair combed down over their faces into the misfits patented devil lock, a reverse DA with two masquerade eyes peering up behind it, big platform heels, leather, spikes, skeleton shirts, and skulls strapping their amps. Sounds silly now, but at the time in the late 70s and early 80s, there was nothing like this in music. There was no horror core. The Misfits invented it, and there was hardly yet anything approaching

God. The closest thing to the Misfits was Kiss, but they were more schlock than shock, more comic than killer. Kiss were entertainers. The Misfits were nihilus. Which isn't to say that they were without ambition. In the late 70s, when they were starting out, Glenn and Jerry hustled their band all over Lower Manhattan, socializing inside and outside of CPGB's Maxis Kansas City and Hurrahs with other punk rockers trying to make their way. It was here at Haraz after a gig the misfits shared with Britain's The Dam, a gig that counted Iggy Pop and Blondie's Debbie Harry amongst those in attendance, that Jerry only somehow talked the Damned into allowing the misfits to open for them on their

European tour. Jerry was stoked. He talked his old man in financing the band's first foray across the pond. When they arrived and hooked up with the Dam, they were surprised to learn that they weren't actually booked onto any of the damn shows. Glenn was pissed. So was Jerry. What a fucking waste.

His old man was going to put his nuts in a vice. Three grand in travel expenses down the drain. Jerry and Glenn worked it out so they could play a couple shows opening for the opening band, but without pay. Total bullshit. And they bounced after a gig or two. But before heading home, the misfits hit up the Rainbow Club to see the jam. Outside and line, trying to scam their way into the show,

two skinheads started heckling them for the show. the way they looked. Glenn, Jerry, and then guitarist Bobby Steele murdered out in all black in a pre-gothed London skinheads giving them shit. Glenn couldn't believe it. Different side of the same ghoulish coin, supposed non-conformist skinhead shitting on him for dressing differently. Some things never changed. Alienation was one of them, but this wasn't like back in Lodai. Glenn now knew how to fight and frankly didn't give a shit about the outcome. Plus, Jerry had his back and Jerry was Jack. The skinheads lit into him some more. And Glenn took the bottle of soda he was drinking from,

smashed the bottom of it into a makeshift jagged glass dagger, and dove straight out the skins. A melee ensued, smashing, stabbing, Doc Martin's kicking, grabbing, wild Wolverine fury and men, nightsticks, fists, and more kicks from unholy living dead, cuffs, back of the wagon, and a free night stay in a British hell. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a trust.

I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed, I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up, to me and they want to be an act or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in.

Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And the entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going. And the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and scrote.

I immediately know that I've been at sleepwalk. David O'Yellow. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that.

Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened.

His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seltering underground are Glenn and Bobby.

Glenn and Bobby. Glenn and Bobby teenagers who came after hearing an emergency broadcast about a series of brutal killings. Glenn and Bobby are securing themselves from angry zombie mutants dug in in the cellar, which they believe to be safer. Meanwhile, the ghouls are relentless and they're a lot of them. assault dead set on the siege of Glenn and Bobby Glenn, especially in ever-increasing numbers. Glenn Danzig came to the sound of banging, a remnant from his dream. The sound of barricading himself into his room away from his childhood fears. The reality he awoke to was much scarier.

The banging was replaced by the faint sound of wailing, moaning, someone in pain. Glenn was on the ground. Bobby lay next to whom Jerry was not there. His dumb luck must have prevailed again. And there were iron bars and Glenn and Bobby were obviously on the wrong side of them. Concrete walls that looked to have been chiseled out of a cave by disinterested slaves centuries ago. Within the walls, thick iron loops, no doubt where the chains went. The ones connected to the shackles, there were no windows. The wailing grew louder but remained faint as if it were there, but it wasn't. The must in the air was thick, and they were underground for sure, trapped in some sort of medieval torture chamber.

Europe, societies that were hundreds, if not thousands of years older than yours, and you were bound to run into some weird shit. And it appeared that Glenn Danzig and Bobby Steele had found themselves locked up for their assault on the skinheads inside of an actual dungeon, a London dungeon. Bobby knew immediately that their unfortunate circumstance would make for a great song. The two got down to it straight away, blocking out their fears and channeling them in a different.

music on the spot behind bars. Bobby banged out a beat with his hands on his thighs. The slap of his palms on his greasy jeans combined with the natural echo of the cell therein made for a hell of a makeshift backbeat. The faint moaning of painful cries imagined or real weaved through Glenn's imagination into a glorious bed of ghostly feedback

that lay on top of Bobby's beat. In a fear-induced blast of inspiration, Glenn's words came barreling out. The Misfit song London Dungeon written in jail was recorded upon the band's return to the States and released as the A-side on the band's EP, three hits from hell, in 1981. The song makes a brief appearance on the band's masterpiece LP Walk Among Us a year later as the live outro to the song, Mummy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight? The song, despite its inspired origin, played but a bit part on the band's fullest artistic statement to date.

Walk Among Us brought the band to a new level. of underground fame. The power of the album was undeniable. The band weren't selling out Madison Square Garden or charting on the Billboard top 40, but their shows were attracting more fans. Die-hard, committed fans, as well as fly-by-night fans who just wanted a gawk at the freaks on stage in black with the skulls and the eyeliner and the hair covering their faces. Glenn resented every last fucking one of them. Music, the misfits, it wasn't some novelty for him. Despite the imagery, the comic, and horror influence, the themes, alienation, and nihilism, they were real.

They came from a real place, and the aggression and violence they inspired to Glenn Danzig was very real. Treating it as anything less was an affront to his creative sensibilities, not to mention an affront to him personally. Increasingly, it was obvious to Glenn that his bandmates did not share the same passion, the same motivation, mutant conformist ghouls that they were. Nothing illustrated this more to Glenn than seeing Jerry and his little brother Doyle show up for band practice in their father's van with Van Halen's unchained blasting from their stereo while chugging cans of beer. The two of them muscle-bounded and sought off t-shirts and cut off jeans looking like nothing more than the couple of ex-mead jocks that they were.

How the fuck he wondered had he wound up in a band with these guys. On tour, the band's fans weren't much better. Their show, as violent as they still were, were now being populated by the band. the smart set and college kids who'd somehow gotten hip to the misfits and in general punk rock's growing popularity. Things were changing, and if Glenn Danzig wasn't careful, his band, their image, his image, his art would be co-opted by the very ghouls he'd made strides his whole life to avoid. They were everywhere, especially on tour, in strange Midwest and southern cities, creeping around every corner, peering, leering, looking for any opportunity to pounce, to sink their flesh-eating,

soul-sucking teeth into you and bleed you of whatever it was that made you special. Glenn wouldn't allow it to happen. Jerry and Doyle could have their Van Halen and football and whatever other mainstream rock star McDonald's eating crap they wanted, Glenn wanted out. And if he couldn't get out just yet, then he wanted darkness, destruction, wanted to fill the hole growing inside of him with something he could relate to, just like when he was a kid, but now as an adult, wasn't that easy. Comic books and creature double features weren't going to cut it when the occult, the afterlife, and real darkness were all possible. The gig in New Orleans that night went okay. Glenn was inspired by the city and the voodoo magic in the air. He could feel

Nola's ghost, the living, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, and the dead, mainly Marie LeVoe. Marie LeVoe, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, the powerful priestess died in the 19th century. but was rumored by locals to have continued her practice from beyond the grave. Marvel Comics based a character on her in the 1970s, a fact that was not lost on Glenn Danzig. Her grave was the exact type of connection Glenn needed at the time. After the gig, Glenn and the rest of the misfits set out to find Marie LeVos' ancient tomb and to conjure up some real darkness.

St. Louis No. 2 Cemetery is one of New Orleans' oldest Catholic cemeteries. Its graves are above ground. Valtz, tombs, and mini mausoleums all rest on top of the ground to avoid New Orleans' high water table that rises up near the ground's surface, making subterranean burials impossible. Glenn wondered about topsoil contamination. The night air stuck to their skin. Glenn, the rest of the band Jerry Doyle and drummer Robo, were accompanied by two strippers named Poison and Venom, who Robo was very pleased to learn, were more than happy to tease him

by pleasuring themselves with his drumsticks in the back of the band's van on the ride over. Glenn had no time for such bullshit. He'd just assume make his pilgrimage on his own without having to suffer the foolishness of his bandmates and their new groupies. They made their way on foot through the maze of the dead. The air hung heavier with every footfall.

Crickets, peepers, whatever they were, they were back for Glenn and chirping out their disapproval. snaking in and around their shrieking chorus. The sound of the wind soft, near dead, but there all the same. Heavy. On top of it hung the muffled sound of gnawing. The sound rode up behind Glenn. It rode up the back of Glenn's neck.

Where was Marie Laveau's grave? That gnawing sound got louder. It swirled up from behind him, and for a moment it blanketed him and then passed on. Nying, gnawing, gnawing. There, then gone, but not fully and not fully. fully demonic either. And there was a strange warmth to the sound of it, something inviting. It beckoned Glenn, pulled him toward it. He followed it, sought it out, knew in his heart it would lead to her tomb, and once there, Glenn knew he'd get answers. The priestess would provide.

He moved closer to the sound. The sound grew louder. He maneuvered over the tombs. The sound became more and more real. He heard laughing from the rear, demonic, ghoulish, hellhounds on his tail. Up ahead, the gnawing had given way to soft whispers, to a chorus of soft white noise, soft white noise that broke through into a vision of white flesh. Beckoning, he could see it now, he could. In his mind, he fought off the ghoulish normalcy following him. It was now a soundtrack by a different kind of gnawing sound. More hellish, carnivorous, cannibalistic. It was poison venomous. He focused, tried to block out the sensation the sound made him feel. But he could feel it burning up his back, singing the flesh of his neck. He kept stride, kept his two eyes up ahead, followed the

white noise, followed the vision of white flesh, went forward into the light. It grew more intense, more real, and there were voices, real voices, actual voices. He moved faster toward them, faster toward the light, and away from what lay behind him, his band, his past, the poison, the venom, toward the priestess, toward his future. He rounded the mausoleum, blocking the light, Around the backside toward the voices, the whispers, and ran straight into the arms of a New Orleans police officer. Where are you going, Eddie Munster? And was sunk. It was also under arrest.

Criminal trespassing. The next day, the New Orleans Times Picayune ran the headline. Punk rock musicians arrested in cemetery. Word around the punk scene spread. The misfits had been arrested for grave robbing. Because of the obvious threat to untold numbers of citizens and because of the crisis which is even now developing, this radio station will remain on the air day and night.

And this hour, as we repeat, these are the facts as we know. There is an epidemic of mass murder being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins. We have some descriptions of the assassins. My witnesses say they are ordinary. Some say they appear to be in a kind of. Early 80s hardcore shows were unlike any other musical experience before or since. These shows were distinguished by their extreme violence. Hardcore came after punk had its dalliance with the mainstream in the major labels.

Hardcore in its infancy was the more extreme version of punk and its sound, its fans, its name, and its live shows. Norms could hang at punk shows. Norms could not hang at hardcore shows. They would be beat, stabbed, or worse. Hell, band members performing on stage would be beaten, stabbed, or worse. But the hardcore scene didn't just leave behind a legacy of brutality. Marginalized teens, outcast, literal misfits who couldn't find their way through adolescence, found a home in hardcore that proved to be its own island of misfit toys for wayward teens and young adults.

It was a place where you could truly be yourself, where individualism was encouraged, where going against the grain was celebrated. Your identity didn't matter. You were whatever the fuck you were and nobody could say shit because if they did they get beat down. Intolerance was not tolerated and neither was tribalism. You could be who you wanted, dance how you wanted, dress how you wanted, fuck who you wanted, fight who you wanted, and none of it mattered because Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were going to blow the world up imminently anyway. That spirit of individuality, nihilism, and destruction manifest on hardcore dance floors with a far more aggressive form of slam dancing than what came

before in the punk scene. Bodies pummeled into one another with vicious abandon. The pit not only housed fists and steel-toed kicks from heavy engineer boots, but also brass knuckles, knives, and chains. The violence was legit and inspired. Early 80s hardcore bands, Black Flag, TSOL, circle jerks, bad brains, and minor threat pummeled their audiences with blasting beats and anvil swinging riffs and their audiences were not afraid to pummel them right back. In hardcore, there was no separation between band and audience. There were no bouncers, there was no security, no protecting the sanctity of the rock star. Unlike punk, in hardcore, there were no rock stars, and that shit didn't fly.

These were the shows the misfits played, and they didn't know it then, but on Halloween of 1983, they were walking on stage to play their last show ever. By 83, the worm had started to turn in the hardcore scene. Tribes were taking root. Subsets of the larger scenes, skinheads, gangbangers, straight-edge kids, college kids, horror-core kids, goss, even Rastafarians, you name it. The spirit of hardcore allowed entry for one and all, provided you had the steel in an open mind. The irony, however, was that the tribalism was demolishing the hardcore spirit,

extinguishing its flame of individuality. Glenn Danzig didn't know about all that. He could just sense that things were different. And when he looked out onto the audience from the stage, things were starting to look a lot more like high school than they were the hardcore scene. This dude didn't like that dude because that dude rocked his hair this way, and then the other dude wore the wrong colored laces in his boots.

But that dude had the wrong braces holding up his levies, and those dudes over there from the suburbs didn't drink, but the drug dealers were owed money from the gangbangers who hated the Rastafarians, who were now hanging out with the Harry Krishna's who nobody liked, Not even the Goths who were disliked by nearly everyone and blah, blah, fucking blah. They looked up at Glenn, anxious for the band to start their much-anticipated annual Halloween show in Detroit at Greystone Hall. One thousand strong in the crowd. Glenn could feel their eyes, all them eyes, on overload.

Staring him down, burning into him, ghouls, fucking ghouls, he thought. Behind him, his bandmates, Jerry Only, and his big little bro, Doyle, The two of them hulking goth versions of Paul Newman's Hanson brothers, jacked on schnapps, Eddie Van Halen riffs, and Jean Simmons' correspondence courses, too dumb to see the irony in the comic book characters they'd turned themselves into or too jacked on the crowd to care. And their new drummer, Brian Damaged Keats,

drunk behind the kit for his first gig. This was now too much for Glenn. What the hell had happened? How had he ended up here? In the beginning, the misfits were supposed to be a rallying oral assault for all the kids who, like Glenn, couldn't fit in. My mirrors are black for you. Glenn wore black and created the Misfits in his image

to reflect back onto the world the alienation that the world made him feel. The Misfits as a band and Misfits fans were supposed to feel the same thing, but now this, this was something else. Bigger, stranger, monstrous, an abomination, a monster of his own creation, not by design, by mistake.

If of Night of the Living Dead, more than just dancing, bottles were thrown at the band, and the audience spat up on stage, rushed the stage, overtook the stage, slamming into Glenn, Jerry and Doyle before diving off into the pit. On the dance floor, the audience swirled themselves into a massive cyclone of a pit, fury. Glenn was outside of himself. He could taste it, fear, and Jerry was loving it. Doyle couldn't decide if he was more into playing and throwing shoulders into unsuspecting stage

divers who had the misfortune of coming his way. The new drummer Brian Damage couldn't keep up such was the furious energy and pace of the band's set. He dropped the beat one too many times in those first few songs. And Doyle made an executive decision on the fly, dropped his guitar, rushed the drum kit, grabbed Brian and literally threw him offstage. He pointed to Necro's drummer and Fred, Todd Swala, who had opened the show, was standing on the side of the stage. You're up. Swala got behind the kit and the misfits continued with a midset lineup change without missing a beat. It was the last straw for Glenn. This was a circus. This wasn't nihilism. The crowd, the different

sex warring amongst themselves stupidly, sheep, wasted, and endless parade of stage dyers and slam dancers avoiding the coming apocalypse instead of taking it head on. The song the band was playing broke down unceremoniously. Glenn knew it then. He was done. He grabbed his mic and shouted, This is our last show ever. The band then launched into the next song of the set, but Glenn was gone. Onstage, sure, still there, yes, but purely going. through the motions, mechanical, soul as good, he thought, just like the crowd. He floated. He looked down at the crowd. He could see them now, morphing, changing, shape-shifting into an amorphous blob. The sound of the band slowed in his head to a dirge. Swala's hi-hat was replaced by the

chirping peepers. Doyle's feedback swirled itself from the sharp Hitchcockian staccato psycho strands. Jerry's bass plotted, big, thick, heavy-souled Frankenstein steps, rhythm to the beat of the slow-moving crowd now pushing its way onto the stage. Ghouls, soulless, conformist ghouls, all wanting him to play the part of the birding punk rock frontman. Clad in black, hardcore Elvis cast a star in their own private Halloween party. The fear flooded back, but there was no barricading himself in up there, no bedroom to hide in, just an open stage that was now being flooded by ghoulish, conformist zombies. The death in their eyes was evident.

They grabbed Doyle first. He swung his axe with precision, braining them back off at the stage, but they kept coming. More of them with every swing. They grabbed at his biceps, pulled at his thighs. One grabbed him by the back of his head with both hands and tore into his teeth with his teeth, ripping the flesh from the young guitarist's face, consuming it on the spot, with the blood dripping from the ghoul's mouth.

The other ghoul smelled the feet and pulled Doyle down off the stage into the pit and tore him limb from limb. On the other end of the stage, Brother Jerry was in shock. The ghouls took advantage of his state and pummeled him from all angles, ripping into his skin and tearing out his innards, feasting on him on all Hallows Eve right out in the open in this punk rock public square. Todd Swala dropped his sticks and made for the exit backstage, but was tripped up immediately and dragged off into the dark. His screams could be heard throughout the entire concert hall, sheer terror.

The ghouls did not stop coming for the stage, coming from Glenn, like entranced soldiers. taken to a hill, zombies crawling over one another, moving slow like molasses toward their feast, fighting their way to the top of the heap. The ghouls, conformists, all marching through to once and for all exterminate he who shall not be conformed to this world. He who shall not be transformed by the renewing of his mind, the mind. He knew it all long.

The damn conformist! Is what the bodies of men from earth? Is what the faces of the ones he loved? Glenn grabbed Doyle's axe and hacked his way through the coming ghoul. to the backstage, he swung with wild violence, braining one, decapitating another. And once inside the backstage, alone with that familiar alienation, he began the familiar routine of barricading himself in, stacking furniture against the door, hacking nails and a ripped-up plywood across the doorway. And the ghouls did not stop. He could hear them

outside. He could also hear sirens. And the growing sound of gunfire, a blaze of bullets from outside, no doubt authorities there to save the day. And more than, he could hear the sirens. And more, more guns, the sound of bullets flying everywhere, and soon the sound of the nine ghouls trailed off. Now he could hear men, humans, coming for him, to help, to save him. He began ripping apart the makeshift barricade, wanting with every fiber of his being to be out of that room and amongst humans, to connect, to be safe. The men on the other side rattled the door and attempt to get into whatever was on the other side making its own rattle. To them, another ghoulish death rattle, and Glenn finally got the door open. there they stood. The authorities, cops, riot gear, shotguns raised, pointed straight at glen dancing,

dressed head to toe in black, devil lock, heavy eyeliner, skin tight shirt with a pentagram drawn on his chest, looking every part the ghoulish zombie. The authorities took one look at him, pulled their triggers, and blasted him away. Does, and who but him could write this book of cruel. Such disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan. In this. is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found

on the show notes page at disgracelampod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free.

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He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? You'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gait and Moderato from Stranger Things. Tena Mongeau.

Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iPhone. Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder.

If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.