We are met to consider the Misfits’ Legacy Of Brutality, a canonical American punk record released 40 years ago this month, but Glenn Danzig has left us no choice but to address the sonnenradin the room.
Late last March, as Danzig was nearing the end of a brief American tour with his eponymous band, fan-captured photographs appeared online of two conspicuous items for sale at his official merch table: a poster ($80 USD) and t-shirt ($40) each bearing the runic “black sun” of Nazi occultism.
Fan sites and social media message boards roiled with disbelief, disappointment, disgust, indifference, and some of the predictable chortling approval. If this localised furore reached Danzig himself, neither the man nor his management proffered a response, much less a disavowal. The band went on to play two more nights at Coachella in April.
What to say, anymore, about this sort of thing? Whether the decision to include the black sun on tour merch was more the product of managerial ignorance on Danzig’s part; of knowing, juvenile edgelordismo; or of authentic fascist sympathy is of little matter. If you want to play with skeletons and Satan and body-snatching aliens, fine. If you want to “flirt” with “transgressive imagery” of this stripe in 2025, ICE is looking for a few good men. Exigency may yet compel them to enlist the very young and very old, as in the last days of the Reich. Then Hell awaits, one hopes.
This merchandise appears 40 years after another of Danzig’s ill-advised commercial offerings, Legacy Of Brutality. We could suppose some demonological moon cycle is to blame, but that would be to neglect a long record of prejudicial statements (mostly about gay men) and some deep rumination on the subject of race war. (“Hitler, hero or abomination?” an interviewer once asked Danzig, baitingly. His reply: “Depends on who you ask.” Well, that is one way to answer.) Danzig and his most uncritical admirers would surely dismiss these observations as the woke scoldings of an effete music journalist, but hark: your servant is a longstanding fan, deadlifts four plates, and has all our best interests at heart, including Danzig’s own.
All Misfits fans know Legacy Of Brutality. It is scripture. Yet no card-carrying member of the Fiend Club would reach for it first, or even fourth, among the records now available. It may hold the curious distinction of being the most important of the band’s LPs and also their least essential. It conveys much of what is magnificent about the Misfits and much of what is exasperating about Glenn Danzig.
The significance of Legacy lies in its having been the very first compilation of the band’s early recordings, which by 1985, two years after their last show, were the stuff of myth. If you didn’t already have copies of the 3 Hits From Hell EP or the ‘Horror Business’ single (1979), you weren’t likely to come by them easily in the mid-80s, especially if you belonged to the punk rock contingents of places like Dubuque or Doncaster.
By rights, of course, the Misfits should have been a serious going concern on record store shelves and in the music press before the 70s were even through. The debut album they recorded in early 1978, to be called Static Age, failed – unbelievably – to land with any label the band solicited. (Could this have been Seymour Stein’s greatest miss?) The impression the Misfits might have made in the UK, meanwhile, was dulled by a legendary series of cock-ups on their first visit in December 1979, to promote a British release that wasn’t finished in time on a series of dates opening for The Damned that turned out to not exist.
This helps to explain why, even if you had heard the band’s magnificent 1982 LP Walk Among Us, Legacy “proved akin to the Rosetta Stone for Misfits diehards who didn’t even know songs like the brilliant ‘Spinal Remains’ and ‘American Nightmare’ existed,” writes James Greene Jr in This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story Of The Misfits.
But if the hieroglyphs on this tablet were messages from the Misfits of the late 70s, the Napoleon who recovered them from antiquity was the Glenn Danzig of the mid-80s.
Legacy was exclusively Danzig’s effort to recover the Static Age sessions. As founder and proprietor of the Plan 9 label, which distributed the Misfits’ records as they were released, he made a deal with the Virgin subsidiary Caroline to give himself responsibility for the compilation’s mixing and production. This was his right, it might be argued, but Danzig hadn’t produced those early Misfits tracks; Jim Catania and Dave Achelis had. So vanity outweighed the imperative of thoughtful stewardship from the start.
The most audacious of Danzig’s choices was to overdub new guitar tracks over some of the band’s old songs. He hadn’t played guitar in the Misfits, though; Franché Coma, Bobby Steele, and Paul Caiafa (the devil-locked Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein) had. He was playing ably enough with his new band Samhain, but overwriting history? One simply shouldn’t do this, I don’t think – whether or not the listener notices or even cares – except as a lark, or in cases when the band is in unusual accord (as the surviving Beatles were with ‘Free As A Bird’). That was certainly not the case with the acrimonious Misfits in 1985. Mick Jagger liked to hold a Stratocaster now and again. After he made She’s The Boss in 1985, he didn’t think to insert himself beside Mick Taylor and Keith Richards on a new mix of Exile On Main St. It’s a matter of judgment.
Beyond the overdubs, Danzig’s remix doused the drums and vocals in reverb; everyone sounds like they’re playing in a different cell of the dungeon. The guitar that isn’t Danzig’s appendage sounds deburred, washed out, submerged. Since the proper release of Static Age in 1996, we’ve known what these tracks were supposed to sound like, and there’s no question that the greatest loss on Legacy is the buzz and bite of Jerry Only’s bass. Take the Legacy version of one of Danzig’s best showings with the Misfits, ‘Hybrid Moments,’ beside the superior, original Static Age cut: even Danzig sounds better with Only’s bass closer to the front of the mix.
‘Love Me Do’ heard through an iPhone at the bottom of a well is still The Beatles, to be sure. And no one knew what they weren’t hearing on these tracks in 1985. Still, Legacy was a disservice to the material and disrespectful to the band – whose names Danzig left off the credits of the official release, denying them royalties.
Seen in the long view, the core problem here was Danzig’s hubris in the studio throughout this entire period. He produced all the mid-80s records by Samhain and none of them, however underappreciated, sound good. (Long before ‘Mother’, ‘Archangel’ is the song that should have been huge, but they never quite landed it.) It’s no surprise, really, that his fortunes changed so dramatically the day he handed over the keys to Rick Rubin, who catalysed the transformation of Samhain into the platinum-selling band Danzig. Did Danzig’s insistence on producing his own records contribute significantly, even decisively, to the delay of his triumph by about five years? “Depends on who you ask,” as he might put it.
All this being said, no sense of the Misfits’ accomplishment would be complete without certain tracks on Legacy: ‘Where Eagles Dare,’ their ‘Eye Of The Tiger,’ with its outrageous chorus (“I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch”); ‘American Nightmare,’ their stab at a Sun Records 45; and ‘Who Killed Marilyn,’ which Danzig had initially released as a solo record after recording all or most of the instrumental parts himself. The song is a conspiracy theorist’s sequel to ‘Bullet,’ the band’s gauntlet thrown before patriotic deference and good taste. “It ain’t a mystery / baby, not to me,” Danzig sings of Marilyn’s alleged overdose. On that one, at least, I might be with him.
Another, better Misfits compilation (today known as Collection I) would come out just a year later, while the proper release of Static Age and Collection II in the 90s have made Legacy essential only for the couple of songs not included elsewhere. The Misfits’ greatness can be found on those other records, and on Walk Among Us, with its freakish, inspired union of punk and Italian-American street corner doo wop. To my ears, not much tops Danzig’s mounting, multi-tracked “Whoa-oahs” in the last 30 seconds of ‘Hate Breeders,’ like Dion And The Belmonts in Pandemonium. That was the Misfits.
What about Danzig’s own legacy?
Hasn’t it come to resemble that of another songwriter of uncommon wit and astringency in the 80s, who also loved the glamor and grotesquerie of old Hollywood and maintained a morbid fascination with the deaths of movie stars?
This peer, too, ascended as the frontman of a remarkable band, the force of his power as a crooner undeniable if unconventional by the standards of the era. Like Danzig, his hairstyle was highly distinctive and the fanbase he inspired, militant. Against the moral censoriousness and piety of the establishment he posed himself as a champion of the sublimated and repressed. For a time, he was resplendent: a culturally necessary artist as well as an exhilarating one, it seemed, and totally original.
There are serious limits to the comparison, of course, but Danzig’s legacy is starting to look like Morrissey’s in more ways than one. Maybe we should be more used to admitting about Danzig, as any thinking Smiths fan must admit about Morrissey, that the seeds of his moral putrefaction have been germinating for a long time. The genius of each of these men seems to have been underwritten by a terrible covenant, not with the Biblical Lord Of Flies, exactly, but with the devil who visits us in the guise of solipsism.
Danzig may never get his Hall Of Fame induction, but you want him to be remembered for the right reasons at least. If he keeps going at this rate, selling t-shirts with the Sonnenrad on them, he’ll be in the running with such luminaries as Kid Rock, The Undertaker, and Rob Schneider for a National Medal of Arts from the current president. No one wants him to be an angel, but for the sake of his legacy is it too much to hope that he keeps higher company than that?
