G.G. lives on.
There's no denying that G.G. Allin was the real king of punk rock. More than Sid, more than Darby, G.G. actually took all the big nasty talk seriously and put it up on stage (and in the audience) night after night.
It's been 10 years now since that final show and that final dose-and in that time, along with being the king, he's also become the V.C. Andrews of punk rock. Every few months it seemed (with the help of his brother Merle), another new album would appear. In fact, almost as many "new" albums have been released since his death as were released while he was alive.
Brutality and Bloodshed for All (which contains Allin's final studio recordings) was, I believe, the first of the posthumous albums to be released-which may be why Alive records is calling attention to it again on this 10th anniversary.
As with all great artists, there were several distinct periods to Allin's career. On his earliest studio recordings with the Jabbers (and later the Cedar Street Sluts and the Scumfucs) he was punk rock, sure-but there was a brighter, poppier element to the music. While the lyrics were angry, they were nothing compared to what they would become in his later career. The musicianship was much tighter than what you found in most fledgling hardcore bands, and Allin's vocals at the time-on songs like "I'm a Fuck-Up," "You Hate Me and I Hate You," and the innocuous but fun "NYC Tonight"-leave him sounding like a snotty kid from New Hampshire with an attitude.
Already by the time those first albums came out, word of his onstage antics-the shit-eating, the bloodletting, the attacks on audience members-began to spread. With his growing reputation as a madman, more emphasis was put into the performance-related abuse than into the music. In the mid to late 80s, G.G. "toured" by Greyhound, playing with pick-up bands at any club that dared book him. Often these bands hadn't had much of a chance to rehearse (if they learned the songs at all), but that didn't seem to matter. They'd make some noise, G.G. would sing a song or two, scream a lot, then proceed to beat the shit out of himself and everyone around him.
The new songs he was writing around the time were becoming much more brutal. Instead of songs written by a misunderstood, angry kid, these were songs written by a potentially dangerous sociopath. All the new songs, it seemed, were about murder, rape or a combination of the two. When El Duce wrote songs like that for the Mentors, you could always hear the twinkle in his eye. You knew it was a put-on. In G.G.'s case, it always sounded a little too real.
Then, partially as a result of that, came the 18-month stint in Michigan, during which time he made some surprisingly good acoustic recordings. When he got out, he hooked up with Merle's band, and they began touring as the Murder Junkies. The mayhem continued. And while the playing was much better than it had been with those pick-up bands (leaning more toward metal now than hardcore), G.G.'s voice had been reduced to a croak. Not that he was ever renowned for his singing ability, but it was clear that all the years of abuse had taken their toll. Maybe that was the point.
On these final 15 tracks-including "Anal Cunt" (about sodomizing a corpse), "I Kill Everything I Fuck" and "I'll Slice Yer Fuckin' Throat" (both of which are pretty self-explanatory, I think)-G.G. creaks and shouts, with a lot of help from the roughshod chorus backing him up. Sometime his voice disappears completely in the mix, and in other cases, he clearly should've been told to back off the mic a few inches.
None of these are necessarily bad things, considering what you're dealing with-and there is quite a bit of good stuff on the record. "Shove That Warrant Up Your Ass" almost has a Johnny Cash quality about it, as the band shouts out the chorus while G.G. chants the names of the towns that have warrants out for his arrest. And the closing title track-I don't know if it was recorded last or not-comes to an end with G.G. almost sounding as if he knew it would be the last thing he would ever record. Or maybe I'm just reading into it.