Danzig: Live, House of Blues, 6/21/10 (Boston Phoenix)

Photo: EVILIVE/M. NUNEZ

“You motherfuckers are almost as crazy as I am!” Glenn Danzig is high-fiving fans in the front row, midway through Monday night’s set, and for a second, it is hard for this notoriously reticent performer to hide a huge beaming smile. After a five-year break from playing live, it’s clear that Danzig and Co. are relishing being back face-to-face with their adoring fans.

Let’s get the negatives of the show out of the way first: Danzig is no longer the young bantamweight of the 80’s and 90’s, and he starting to show signs that he is a man in his mid-50’s, what with the emerging paunch and bald spot, cracks in the facade of this hitherto ageless rock icon. And there are some who, I’m sure, are waiting for Danzig to give up the heavy metal, get a crew cut, stop dying his hair, and start doing acoustic tours so his whole schtick will begin to be more age-appropriate. It certainly doesn’t help that, as time marches on, Danzig (the band)’s 80’s based cock rock begins to seem more and more anachronistic, especially in a live setting with guitarist Tommy Victor’s absolutely merciless use of Zakk Wylde-esque string unison pick squeals, an irritating affect that he lays on thick in almost every second of every song.

But you know what? Fuck all that. Danzig’s entire career has been about sticking it to people who have attempted to impose their expectations upon him, and after tonight’s performance it seems clear that the man will probably be headbanging in a skintight mesh shirt until he needs a wheelchair. The set was a fan’s dream list, with hits like “Twist of Cain” and “Her Black Wings” being chucked out early– a drastic contrast to the last time he rolled through town five years ago, only playing then-new material that was largely unfamiliar to the audience. It also helps that this Danzig tour is supporting the new Deth Red Sabaoth, easily the band’s strongest album in a decade.

The same way that Dio invented the devil horn sign and Ozzy invented mindless headbanging, Danzig popularized “whoa” as a choral element in heavy music. And more than the dark imagery and pounding riffs, what fans come for when they see Danzig is to join in those huge “whoa”s with the man himself. Rock history will eventually put the man’s basso profundo voice up there with Hendrix’s guitar and Elvis’ hips, and tonight’s show soared every time Danzig hit each song’s “whoa” moment. Of particular note was the light-and-shade run through of “How The Gods Kill”: a tranquil start saw Danzig sensitively “whoa”ing, only to open the floodgates once the song ripped into full force.

For his fans, it essentially comes down to this: Danzig is not a man who is able to hide his displeasure, which makes the joy he exudes during a great show like tonight’s that much more meaningful and special to an audience. A bad show of his is bad, but a good show is great, as it is a reflection not just of the man’s mood but of his communion with his fans, and that communion is broadcast via wordless chants that transcend genre and ultimately celebrate music in a relatively pure form.

As the first encore ended with a run-through of “Mother”, an overly excitable fan found his way on stage and, inexplicably, planted a kiss on Danzig’s cheek right at the end of the tune. And while at the moment, Danzig’s irritation at this violation of his personal space was evident, I’m sure deep down he understands that when your music connects with fans on such a primal level, such random outbursts of adulation are a necessary consequence. For a man who, just a short while before, had run through a song called “Tired of Being Alive”, it was marvelous to see Danzig perform as someone who was anything but.

Interview: Glenn Danzig (Boston Phoenix, 6/17/10)

There was a moment, while I was on hold on the phone as Glenn Danzig was being summoned by his publicist, where I was a tad intimidated. And not just because I was about to talk about one of the more legendary and divisive figures in the history of punk and metal. No, it had more to do with the fact that, having seen and read numerous interviews with the man, I knew that he doesn’t suffer fools. In the end, was I a fool? Well, I probably should have known not to use the word “occult” to describe his lyrical bent (that is, unless I wanted to get a few awesome tirades to spew forth).

Glenn Danzig is a busy man, even as he works his way through his mid-50s and his fourth decade in music. He has a new Danzig album out this month, the band’s ninth, the oddly titled Deth Red Sabaoth (Evilive/The End), as well as a book of song lyrics titled Hidden Lyrics of the Left Hand, illustrated by UK comic-book legend Simon Bisley. He is also touring for the first time in six years, a quick nine-city jaunt that sees him coming to Boston’s House of Blues on the 21st. For such an active rock warrior, I kind of expected Danzig to be somewhat blustery and aggro. But Danzig was a lot more soft-spoken than I thought he’d be; he also tends to chuckle to himself quite a lot. This last part I was prepared for, having seen it in action in all the interview sections of the 1988 Danzig home video that came out on VHS around the time of his first solo album. In these segments, Danzig tends to come across as cagey and confrontational, but always laughing at the absurdity of other people’s opinions. Such it was with my conversation with him, which I hope comes across here — it’s not so much that he’s funny, as that he finds everything around him so absurd. It is clearly the driving force behind so much of his artistry: essaying human civilization and having an internal guffaw at how everyone is getting it wrong.

Oh, one last thing before I get to the interview: I talked to him for a bit about his book collection, which is a reference to a scene from the 1988 home video. In the scene, Danzig lets his guard down as he gives a tour of his personal book collection. Inexplicably lit as if next to an indoor swimming pool, Glenn walks the offscreen inquisitor through tome after tome, cracking himself up over the obscurity of such concepts as the lost books of the Bible and the existence of werewolves. Don’t laugh, folks: have you done the research Danzig has on these topics? I’m going to guess not.

BOSTON PHOENIX: OK, I’ll cut right to the chase: with your new album, it seems that you have a different approach, what with you playing bass and drums on a few tracks—
GLENN DANZIG: I do that on all the records.

Excuse me?
I do that on all the records. That’s nothing new.

So for these songs, what was the process like in creating them, how long did these songs gestate–
Did you say “gestate”?

Yeah.
Are you a journalist?

[Laughs] Um, I guess …
You’re a real journalist! Oh, okay.

I suppose, I dunno …
Well, no one uses that word ever, at least not the people I talk to. Okay, this is cool. Well, I go into the studio now, and I’ll do a couple tracks, sit back and listen, start laying overdubs, do a few more tracks later, and that’s how I did this one. I kind of like it better that way. It’s even how I did all the Black Arias [note: Glenn Danzig’s classical music series] and stuff.

Right! It’s interesting, because you do all sorts of stuff — classical albums, even. I’m just kind of curious how you approach each project, how you know “This is going to be a Danzig album” …
What happened was once I was done doing Lost Tracks— I’d been doing sporadic touring, but 2005, I stopped touring. So I just did some local shows — a few East Coast shows, fly home. In between, I experimented with trying to find some way to be happy on the road and still do it, and started doing it for longer periods of time, and in between I started doing this thing where I’d listen to some songs that I laid down, and that’s the way I did this record. It worked out pretty good.

I had a specific idea to do an old school early-’70s kind of record, but with a contemporary feel to it. That’s what I set out to do—I even got some old gear, old phase shifters, and when I wanted to use reverb or tremolo, I’d go and get old amps that had reverb and tremolo in them, instead of using a computer plug-in because those things don’t sound right. They never sound right, especially if you want some kind of chamber reverb, you know what I mean, or a real tremolo, you have to get the real stuff, because the computer just sounds like crap.

What was your ’70s influence? What were you going for?
Well, it comes back to what I always done with records, which is that I want to make records that people are going to listen to 20 years down the line, and that’s what I attempted to do. And so far everyone seems to be digging it, telling me how thick the sound is, how warm it sounds, and that’s good—I purposely went out and got these bass cabs to play through, even playing guitar through them: big old Kustom speakers with 15- and 18-inch speakers. And a lot of these new bands play bass through teeny speakers, 10-inch speakers, this tinny crap that sounds like guitar. I want a bass that, when you’re listening to those old songs, it rattles your dashboard — you know, the bass hits certain notes, and the whole dashboard goes “brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmm,” and that’s what I want! And I think a lot of people listen to music while they’re driving, anyway, you know?

When you work on a new album, do you feel like you have a lot of expectations? Is it a challenge?
I’ve been doing it so long that it’s a challenge just to write something exciting and try and top what you did before. Especially coming from the whole punk thing, which is like, you know, you don’t want to do the same record over and over. And you want to keep it exciting, keep it interesting, but you still want to improve what you do — yeah, after this many records, it’s a challenge, but I think I’m up for the challenge.

I imagine that once you’ve been around for a while, it must be a pain because people want the new stuff to sound like this old song or that old song–
I don’t want it to sound like one of the old records, that’s for sure. I want it to be better, so I’m actually kind of happy. When this record came out, I didn’t know how people would — well, I knew the fans would be digging it, but of course the press are so weird anyway, what they’re gonna like and all. And I don’t really care, so much, but I’m just curious to see, and so far everyone’s really digging it, so maybe I did what I was supposed to do. [Laughs]

I’m curious what inspires you, song-wise — because I think a lot of people don’t realize that you’re a songwriter, right?
Yeah, totally. I get questions all the time, like, “Why don’t you let other people write the songs?” Uh, because it’s my fucking band and I’ve written all the songs since the Misfits, you know, and I’m not going to change now. And it’s — I dunno, I lost my train of thought …

What inspires you as a songwriter …
Right. It’s always just frustration with people, the government, all that kind of stuff. All those things but on a sociological level — all the things that our fucked up government makes happen, and how people then react to each other because they’re so frustrated with the government. I don’t think anyone thought it could be any worse than Bush, and yet here we are, 10 times worse than Bush! An oil spill that no one has clogged up in a month and a half, right? Just sitting there spewing jillions of gallons of oil a day, and people are just sitting there going, “Oh no, what do we do?” But the bigger thing — and I don’t want to get too political — but all these people’s lives are now destroyed who rely on that coast, you know what I mean? That, and it’s probably just some ploy to raise the price of gas. “Oh, we can’t rely on offshore drilling,” and that now that all this oil is wasted now, they’re going to jack the price of oil up. So, you know, it’s probably the Bilderbergs are making tons of money now, and Obama wants to get in with them — and there you go, he’s in!

It’s interesting that when you talk about this frustration as being the inspiration of your music, you tend to couch these frustrations within a lyrical framework that’s kind of, well, occult—
Well, Christianity and Islam, that’s the real occult to me. I mean, look how many people those people kill. I mean, any other religion here in the States, if they even killed 100 people, they’d shut ‘em down. Killing hundreds of thousands, millions of people, over, you know, and nothing happens to ‘em, just a slap on the wrist. People have been talking about this priest-abuse scandal thing since the ’80s, and nothing’s happened to them. If that was a Scientology church, they’d be shut down in a second. Do you know what I mean?

Totally.
Yeah, so it’s a double standard, it’s a load of shit, but will people call that a cult? I mean, do you believe Jesus walked on water? Do you even believe Jesus existed?

Do I? Not really.
Yeah, so there you go. That’s far-fetched, to me; that’s a fucking story. I think in one of my records I put a quote from Celsus in there that says that they worship a dead man. I mean, Jesus! That is somebody who’s dead and came back to life, which in everyone else’s terminology is a zombie. [Laughs] If he dies and comes back to life, he’s a zombie, so you’re worshipping a zombie! Whatever. I mean, you don’t even know if he existed or not; it’s a regurgitated story from pre-Egyptian times, and it’s just crazy. So whenever people say, “Oh, you’re singing about the occult,” I’m like [laughs] “Well, let’s get that term straightened out: the occult, what’s that?” I think it’s a catch-all phrase that people have used to discredit stuff.

I can agree with that.
Yeah, and so — and it’s like other stuff too, like when the drug companies conspired with our government to put natural homeopathic cures out of business at the turn of the century, and bang, they started calling it “snake oil,” and this and that. And it’s really just a disinformation campaign to discredit this stuff so that people will stop using it. The government has gone so far as to create phony homeopathic remedies so when people use them and they don’t work, people lose interest in them.

I read somewhere recently that you said that when you go on tour, you go to a lot of bookstores; so I’m curious what you’ve been reading lately.
Hmm … I read so much — and of course I read tons of different stuff which some people would call the occult. But of course, not only have I always been interested in the families that run the world forever, that people know now as the Bilderberg Group. But there’s an older book called The Committee of 300 which tells you all about it. I mean, I got in trouble for this back in the ’90s, talking about this kind of stuff — how the United States is based on a Freemason thing, and I got so many government files on me from that one.

And now it’s the basis of National Treasure 2 …
And all this stuff on A&E and Biography, but they always change stuff so it’s like a disinformation campaign. “You know what, we’ll do a show about this, but we’ll change this and that, and then people will think this is the real thing—and they won’t know any better, because they’re never gonna read a book.” [Laughs] Cuz, you know, that’s how everyone gets their information now.

But to get back to the question: when I’m on the road, I’m hitting all these bookstores — and I’m not hitting Barnes & Noble or any of that bullshit. I’m going to the old bookstores and walking through all these places and looking for all these books and cool books, whatever interests me. There was this one place I stumbled upon in Detroit the last time, this guy I knew was like “You’ve got to go here”, and this place is crazy, like a gigantic warehouse—

Oh yeah, I’ve been there! I know exactly what you mean.
Yeah, this place is gigantic, and it’s like four floors of a warehouse that they converted into this bookstore, with aisles of books. I found for my friend Russ, the guy who does security for me, this biker book that’s really hard to get on the Warlocks, really hard to get. On eBay it’s like two or three hundred bucks, I think I found it for three bucks. It’s cool finding these books, and I like digging through stuff and finding stuff. I’m really good at that.

Do you find that it’s a solitary activity that really suits your disposition?
[Laughs] Maybe! I never heard it that way, but that’s a really good point to bring up that no one ever brings up — yeah, I think it does suit me really well. I would always like to hope that people would be smart, but unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t. It’s one of the things I like about my fans: they seem pretty intelligent, you know, and they’re really cool, and I’m pretty lucky in that aspect, because it’s not that they’re dopey mindless people — they’re really cool and smart, and they get into stuff, and it’s pretty wild. Yeah.

Yeah, I was curious about your book-buying also because of that scene in the home video for your first solo album, which has that scene where you show your book collection …
It’s much bigger now. [Laughs]

I can imagine — that’s such a great scene in that film. I’m also curious if you’re still a big comic book fan. I know you were kind of involved in making them —
I’m not “kind of” involved, I’ve had my own comic line since 1993, the first book was out in ’94, but — yeah, I put a lyric book out along with my record label and my comic company just put out a new Verotika, which is pretty wild. Yeah, so Bisley and I are getting ready to do a Jaguar God if he ever … answers his phone!

Simon Bisley?
Yeah, it took forever to get him to do the lyric book illustration. He does a really good job — he’s out of his mind, but he’s really talented — and the fans are digging the book. So I’m happy, he’s happy. He actually called to tell me, “Wow, this came out great!”

DANZIG | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | June 21 | 7 pm | $25 | 888.693.2583 or www.houseofblues.com.

Lady Sovereign: The Down Low (Boston Phoenix, 4/28/09)

Lady Sovereign’s first EP was namedVertically Challenged, she named her imprint Midget Records, and she’s repeatedly proclaimed herself “officially the biggest midget in the game.” At a towering 5’1″, the S-O-V joins a long line of famous popular musicians who would probably have a hard time getting on a roller-coaster. Below are five of the more renowned Napoleonic frontpersons in recent history (in descending order, from tallest to shortest):

UDO DIRKSCHNEIDER OF ACCEPT (5’5″) | This feisty German fireplug had, in his prime, the powder-keg lunacy of a man at least 5’8″. Best known for the guttural adenoid bursts of the not-at-all-homo-erotic ’84 hit “Balls to the Wall.”

GLENN ANZALONE a/k/a GLENN DANZIG (5’4″) | From his fronting the Misfits and Samhain to his solo work, the pissed-off Joisey lunkhead with the basso profundo that launched a thousand “whoa”s is living proof that you can make up in attitude what you lack in stature.

RONALD JAMES PADAVONA a/k/a RONNIE JAMES DIO (5’4″) | Just as Napoleon Bonaparte (5’6″) was able to crown himself emperor in an age when there weren’t even phone books to sit on, so did Dio elevate himself onto the highest pedestal in metal history with not much more than a stunning voice, a wicked cackle, and a limitless ability to come up with ways to call women evil.

KYLIE MINOGUE (5’0″) | Kylie proves once and for all that being a diva ain’t about being tall. When the whole world is on a first-name basis with you and your hotness, you probably have a coterie of servants to get that bag of crisps off the top shelf for you.

RICHARD SHAW a/k/a BUSHWICK BILL OF GETO BOYS (3’8″) | Bill and the Boys were easily the most aggressively vicious of the late-’80s gangster-rap crews, and some might speculate that Bill’s nasty streak was his way of compensating for his stubbiness. Nevertheless, the venomous flow on cuts like “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” truly belies his size.