It's a case of art imitating death.
A new doucmentary called "HATED," focusing on two weeks in the life of Kevin (GG) Allin, a notorious punk rocker who actively courted his own demise, is opening three days after his death. Todd Phillips' film starts at the Anthology Film Archives tomorrow.
Allin's over-the-edge music and life - with on-stage violence, defecation and other outrages that cast a shadow over a basically talented songwriter - ended early Monday morning when he was found dead, apparently of a drug overdose, in a friend's East Village apartment.
Allin, 36, had performed Sunday afternoon at The Gas Station, an East Village club, smashing his head through a window, breaking four other windows with his fists and creating a mini-riot that spilled out onto the street.
"They pulled the plug on his show," says writer Tom DiNardo, who was at the club. "That happened a lot. So he led these 80 to 100 punks down the street, then tried to hail a cab, all covered with blood and fecal matter. The cabs just kept pulling away."
"He basically hated everyone and everything, and would not conform to anything," said the singer's brother Merle, a bass player in his band, GG Allin and the Murder Junkies. He said his brother had "been doing coke most of the day and snorting heroin most of the night" before his death.
"GG always promised an onstage suicide. For all his fans the big thing was they never knew if it was going to be the big night," he said. "Turns out he died pretty unglamorously."
DiNardo said that when he recently interviewed Allin, the rocker said he wasn't ready to die yet "because he was excited about his new album. Titled "Brutality and Bloodshed For All." It includes the pro-AIDS cut "I Kill Everything I F..."
"He was actively courting AIDS," said DiNardo. "He told me it turned him on to have sex with a girl with AIDS because that meant she was trying to kill him."
Allin's national fame came mostly from his feats of defecation and what happened next, mostly involuntary audience participation.
"He was an a-hole and a jerk and the pure embodiment of evil," said Gerard Cosloy, who put together several of Allin's albums, "but he was also a great performer and writer. In the history of trash rock he's up there with the Ramones, Sex Pistols, New York Dolls, Hank Williams and Charles Manson."
Allin's brother said that GG was just released in April from Jackson State Prison in Michigan, where he had served four years for assault.
Allin, who is also survived by his parents, Merle Sr. and Arleta Baird, will be buried in his hometown of Littleton, N.H.
Bob Kappstatter
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