In anticipation of negative responses to your obituary for GG Allin (GM #340) I would like to thank you for your unbiased and well researched writeup. Top billing, and a large (but outdated) photo in the Grapevine section were more than the "Geege" deserved, but is appreciated by the true die-hard followers.
To last 15 years in the music industry is no easy task, but to do it on the level that GG Allin did is unthinkable! Instead of slowing down, he became more intense and more aggressive. Since the mid-1980s, I had viewed a number of GG's performances via video cassette and corresponded and spoken with his brother Merle. However, no amount of homework was sufficient to prepare me for the first leg of his "Terror In America" tour in Youngstown, Ohio, immediately following his release from Jackson State Prison. The best way to describe it would be akin to the "Running of the Bulls" as described by Hemingway, with a charging bull tearing and goring everything in its path. It was an adrenaline-pumping event in which no one was safe.
Like it or not, GG Allin was the final frontier of performers who kept rock 'n' roll "dangerous," unlike the pseudo death-metal rockers half his age. He will not be missed by most of the people whose paths he crossed, but for a select few he personified the term, "As real as it gets."
Howard Snyder
Cleveland, OH
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