ALL MURDER! ALL GUTS! ALL FUN!

As many of you have probably already heard, DANZIG has announced a brief string of U.S. tour dates featuring sets with original SAMHAIN members and original MISFITS guitarist Doyle! How do I feel about this? Scroll down and imagine a De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas shirt on Casper and that's how I feel. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that I'm a devoted disciple of very specific periods of Glenn Danzig's creative legacy, but those periods run roughly from 1977 through 1990 which is a respectable run by any standards. I saw DANZIG for the first time at The Ritz in NYC in December 1988 and, through a string of incredible coincidences and good fortune, was escorted backstage immediately after their performance where I had the privilege of meeting Glenn, Chuck Biscuits, Eerie Von and John Christ in a swampy room no bigger than a coffin. I was a 16 year old dork in a Tales From The Crypt t-shirt and had no real reason to find myself stammering in their dressing room. Glenn could've crushed my soul in his black leather grip and driven me back into the cold New York night like an acid-washed archangel cast out of the Kingdom. Instead he told me my shirt was cool and invited me to have a seat. He tried talking horror movies and comics but I was mostly speechless and dumb. I vividly recall a lady kneeling in front of Eerie Von, running her long red nails over his forearm as if it was a massive cock and whispering, "You have such beautiful veins..." Eerie's affect was decidedly flat. At some point Chuck Biscuits grabbed a promotional poster and started drawing one of his crazy cartoons on it while discussing the night's set in his distinctive self-effacing Canuck drawl. He passed it around and one by one the band signed this little relic and treated me like the very special and deserving dude that I most certainly was not. Ever since that evening I've fiercely defended Glenn from the non-believers and shit talkers. Did he take a few missteps? Sure. Until Deth Red Sabaoth was released in 2010 I hadn't paid much attention to anything he'd done since Danzig III: How The Gods Kill. Once he started wearing rubber shirts and praising bands like KORN I simply could no longer walk among him. The last time I saw him perform was on Halloween night in 1990 at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, New York. After having seen him in the frenzied intimate environs of a little club called Streets just a year earlier, this Halloween gig was a mandatory-seating bummer and he stubbornly refused to pull out the vintage treats that would've perfectly suited the occasion. So this LEGACY tour is a wonderful thing! The internet is proof enough that truly nothing is sacred- certainly not the brilliant MISFITS and SAMHAIN songs of my youth- and I would be delighted to witness these songs performed in a live setting no matter how questionable the motivations for reuniting in 2011. Problem is, Glenn unwisely neglected to schedule any dates in the fucking Northwest so there's really only one question: who's flying me to Los Angeles on Halloween???