Short performances are nothing new for G.G. Allin and the Jabbers. The perpetually broke hard core punk band has had the plug pulled on them in clubs throughout the Northeast, and every short circuit added to the legend.
Allin's antics - tasteless and obscene are the adjectives that apply - have won him a fame, of sorts, both here and abroad, along with top billing everywhere on booker's blacklists. His records are sold in Sweden and Germany and some of his songs - most of the lyrics are unprintable - have the potential to become punk anthems.
But the plug was pulled for the last time two Sundays ago at the Casbah in Manchester, when club Manager Neil Schneider cut the act off after 20 chaotic minutes that saw Allin repeatedly hurl himself into the audience and appear to fondle himself onstage.
A few days later the Jabbers told Allin they were finished - they would no longer play for him. It was an ending both the Jabbers and Allin say they expected, and seem to welcome.
"It's good to let legends die," say Al Chapple, who's known Allin since the eighth grade and played bass with the Jabbers throughout the band's six years of life.
"We were all getting a little tired, sick of practicing for long hours and moving equipment and then playing for only 15 minutes."
Guitarist Chris Lamy quit the band over a year ago but rejoined for the last concert I the hope that Allin would behave himself. "We all know what it was coming to. We're all still friends, but it had to end," says Lamy.
"He'd (Allin) got to believe his own publicity, that he was a public animal. We'd saturated the area. Everyone knew what was going to happen at a show and G.G. had to do more and more. At one club they threw a garbage can full of broken glass on the stage and G.G. was rolling around in it. He was picking glass out of himself for weeks."
"G.G. was getting a little outrageous," says drummer Mike O'Donnell, in a statement of considerable understatement.
G.G. Allin and the Jabbers were always outrageous. They are, after all, punk rockers, and the role of punk is that there are no rules, but Allin's style changed in recent years. The emphasis was more on the outrage than on the music; he invited crowd hostility with his sexual taunts and strutting, and his songs became more diatribes than songs.
There was hostility is the early days, but it was a shared hostility - the crowds cheered Allin on his fights with club managers and the law. His best songs were tight and well crafted, with appealing hooks, but his new songs are rantings set to indifferent music, and his style encouraged a contempt between performer and audience.
He had already, in fact, parted with the Jabbers in the recording of his last album, an 11 song collection of raucous distortion that Allin feels is his best yet. He was disappointed the Jabbers showed little interest in playing his new songs, but has no grudges, or apologies.
"I feel like I'm possessed," say Allin. "There's nothing anyone can say to make me change. I can tell myself not to do it, but when I get onstage, I have to."
"I knew this was going to be the last gig. I told him (club manager Schneider) I would behave and I didn't. I figured the band was going to break up and I wanted a grand finale. It was getting to the point where it had to end. People were coming just to see me kill myself."
"I don't care what you do to me...you're nothing to me." That line from an Allin song sums up the attitude perfectly, and explains why Allin is now without a band - and perhaps and audience as well.
"We were just bodies playing for him," says guitarist Steve Spenard of the Jabbers. "He really didn't care anymore - the shows had nothing to do with music."
It is not likely the Jabbers will continue as a band. Chapple talks of trying England in the fall, playing rock from the 50s and 60s and while Lamy and O'Donnel may start their own band, nothing is definite. Allin himself is talking with two Boston bands, but says his reputation means he won't be fronting a band for a while.
Terry Parkleson
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