Malvern Books’ resident music expert and much loved staff member, Adam, very sadly passed away on Sunday night. His enthusiasm for music was remarkable and Adam’s contributions to the blog will be much missed by everyone at Malvern. He was working on this piece about punk rock singer-songwriter GG Allin, and we wanted to share it with you.
For this edition’s musical review I decided to write about someone that not many people may know about, but who has nonetheless left a searing permanent mark on the punk rock scene that will never be forgotten. GG Allin was a notorious punk rock singer who played in several bands, the most remembered being GG Allin And The Murder Junkies. GG Allin was a true rebel, if ever there was such a thing. He did not care in any way about what the majority of society thought of him. He was filled with an almost psychotic rage and hatred towards mainstream culture, the government, the police, and society in general. He made this clear in many of his highly controversial songs, such as “I Hate People,” “I’m A Rapist,” “I Kill Everything I Fuck,” and “My Prison Walls.” GG Allin spent three years in prison after he allegedly raped a girl, burned her with a lighter, and drank some of her blood after cutting her with a knife. GG always claimed that the act was consensual and that the girl had in fact also drunk some of his blood. Regardless, the court believed the woman’s testimony and Allin was sentenced to serve three years. During interviews with various reporters, GG Allin stated that his time in prison only made him even more spiteful and angry towards society and that he would not stop acting this way until he was dead.
During concerts, GG Allin would do things that earned him national notoriety and made many people afraid to attend his shows. He generally would strip naked during the first few songs, after which he would tend to take a beer bottle and smash it over his head, and then proceed to cut his flesh with the broken glass. After this, the drunk and bleeding GG Allin would run out into the audience and physically attack the people attending his show. GG Allin was once quoted in an interview as saying, “My mind is a machine gun, my body is the bullets, and my audience is the target.”
For the last several years of his life, GG Allin had told the public that he was planning on killing himself on stage during a concert and that he was going to shoot at the audience members as well before doing so. This brought a lot of attention to the underground punk rocker, and he soon became one of the most feared and disliked figures in music. GG Allin would go on talk shows such as Geraldo and Jerry Springer, where he would be confronted by the show’s host as well as many distraught and concerned audience members who were appalled by GG and everything he stood for. GG did not mince words with these people. He constantly insulted and criticized the parents who were telling him he was a sick man and that they didn’t want their children to have anything to do with him. On one show he was quoted as telling the audience that their children belonged to him and he was going to make them do anything he wanted to.
All this just bolstered GG’s name in the media and the music scene, but his antics also came at a cost. His notoriously violent behavior during performances, along with the threat he’d made about committing suicide on stage after shooting at random concert goers, meant that a significant number of clubs did not want him performing at their venues.
GG Allin died in 1993 at the age of thirty-six of an accidental heroin overdose.