GG Allin's motto was "My mind is a machine gun, my body the bullets, and the audience is the target," and he wasn't kidding; Allin's showstopper involved his defecating onstage, rubbing the results on his usually naked body and throwing the rest at the audience. There was never any doubt about what hit the fans, who weren't really surprised either. After all, it was the fecal attraction that had brought them to Allin's performances in New York, along with his often-stated threat to kill himself onstage.
Ironically, when Allin died at the end of June at age 36, it was offstage and apparently an accident - a heroin overdose. His body was found in an East Village apartment he had fled to the night before when a show at the Gas Station club ended in chaos. Allin had been performing for about 10 minutes with his band, the Murder Junkies, and was in the middle of one of his staples, "Look Into My Eyes and Hate Me," when he began to fight with members of the audience, according to the Village Voice. Covered in blood and excrement, a naked Allin somehow managed to slip out as police were called in. Over the past decade, Allin had been arrested more than 50 times and imprisoned 10 times for his stage act. He was released from prison in April after serving a two-year sentence for assault, and it often seemed his tours had to be set up between jail terms.
Since his first album, 1978's "Always Was, Is, and Always Shall Be," Allin recorded 19 albums and Eps and recently finished another, "The Blood and the Brutality of It All." Due in September, it was plugged by Allin's bassist brother Merle in the Voice article. Allin was also the subject of a documentary by Todd Phillips titled "Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies." Phillips added about four minutes of footage from Allin's July 3 funeral in Littleton, N.H. Despite some band members, high school teachers and buddies and excepts from his "Geraldo" appearance - [it] is actually funnier than "Spinal Tap." It has just been released by Film Threat Video and will also be shown in theaters in a dozen cities. A soundtrack will be released by Performance/Awareness Records.
Richard Harrington
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