Naturally there were larger cultural factors that played into the birth of the Misfits. The principal band members belonged to one of the earliest American generations to mature in the warming glow of television. From the mid-1950s well into the late 1970s TV’s vast wasteland was dotted with weekend horror movie syndication packages, wherein classic monster films from years earlier were aired on the small screen, often with humorous commentary by some sort of otherworldly host. The earliest example of such programming was The Vampira Show, a critically acclaimed KABC-TV production in 1954 Los Angeles that was hosted by a slinky, sexy female creature of the same name.[23] Four years later, ABC’s New York station was invaded by the similarly droll ghoul Zacherley and his Shock Theater (which would later move to rival WPIX and become that station’s long-running Chiller Theater). Imitators sprung up across the country over the next decade like wildfire, and it was because of these creature features and their unusual hosts that cheap, B-grade horror movies became ingrained in American youth culture. If you lived in the so-called sticks and weren’t old enough to drive yet, all you could do on a Friday night was hang out at home and watch someone like Zacherley or Ohio’s beloved Ghoulardi try to creep you out with fare like Son of Kong or White Zombie.[24]
Not that you’d necessarily have to stay in your living room to see that kind of thing come the late 1960s or early 1970s. This was the period in which the cinematic practice of midnight movies flourished; movie theaters enticed patronage with late showings of controversial films both new and old, partially in an attempt to steal viewers away from the growing threat of those televised creature features. Similarly, this stretch of time saw drive-in theaters, desperate to retain business as the novelty of watching movies in your car wore off, begin to shift their hosting duties from normal Hollywood material to the seedy waters of exploitation. That seemingly catch-all genre included not only B- but Z-grade horror films, as well as violent outlaw biker epics, titillating flesh-heavy “nudies,” arty Italian suspense thrillers, the mondos or “shockumentaries” that attempted to tear the cover off boring everyday life, and wild chop socky kung fu masterpieces imported directly from China. Maximum weirdness was sometimes just a few dollars away.[25]
If there is one specific piece of fringe cinema to single out as most important to the following narrative, it is most definitely George Romero’s 1968 zombie nightmare Night of the Living Dead. The cult masterpiece follows the plight of five survivors of an unexplained viral disaster who attempt to safeguard themselves in a Pennsylvania farmhouse as legions of corpses rise from the grave, hungry for human flesh. Romero’s vision was a stark one, from the low-grade black-and-white visuals of the panicked survivors fighting off their lumbering attackers to the film’s semi-surprise ending that is void of hope or relief. Night of the Living Dead forever altered the DNA of the horror film, exorcising cheap thrills and camp in favor of complete dread. It eventually became a staple of Americana thanks in part to the film’s public domain status (NOTLD’s original distributor failed to place copyright notice on original prints of the film, allowing anyone and everyone to release it over the years).[26]
Similarly, the nation’s magazine racks were not as sanitized during this era as they are today. Sensational periodicals like The National Informer and The Exploiter sat next to Newsweek and Time, routinely splashing gory images on their covers underneath screaming headlines like “KILLER PLAYBOY DIES IN HAIL OF BULLETS!” and “MAN CUT IN HALF—HE LIVES!” Also mixed in with these tabloids were magazines like Cinefantastique and Famous Monsters of Filmland that were dedicated to fictional ghouls and murderers. The cult rag market would only grow as the years stretched on, birthing such forgotten classics of murder porn such as Violent World, The Godfathers (dedicated to mafioso killings), and True Sex Crimes.[27]
Popular musicians in the United States had been crafting material with varying supernatural themes since the Great Depression—the same period when Hollywood began offering classic horror movies such as Dracula and Frankenstein—though not with much regularity. Jazz titan Louis Armstrong famously crafted a spooky swinger called “Skeleton in the Closet” for the 1936 Bing Crosby film Pennies from Heaven (“Skeleton” is noted for a spoken word opening by Armstrong that ends on a humorous mispronunciation: “Boy, don’t you go in there . . . don’t you know that house is ha’nted?”)[28] One year later, Mississippi-bred blues guitarist Robert Johnson stoked the embers of a future legend by suggesting he once allowed Satan to tune his instrument at a dusty crossroads (in exchange for Johnson’s soul, of course) by recording “Me and the Devil Blues” for Columbia Records.[29] One of the biggest hits of the 1940s big-band era was the Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer-penned “That Old Black Magic,” which, despite being a love song, referenced to witchcraft and vividly described the frigid fingers of the protagonist’s paramour.[30]
No one artist fully embodied the term “horror,” though, until the sudden 1956 appearance of bellowing bluesman Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and his cathartic, unhinged bump “I Put a Spell on You.” Hawkins, a World War II vet who began his music career with dreams of conquering the opera world, displayed what many consider the first true shock rock persona. The wild-eyed singer was noted for accenting performances by wearing a fake bone through his nose, carrying around a skull-capped scepter he nicknamed Henry (Henry could often be seen with a lit cigarette clenched between his exposed teeth), and beginning numerous concerts by rising from a rickety coffin. Many fans bought Hawkins’s shtick hook, line, and sinker, believing the Ohio native was actually a foreign-born practitioner of voodoo.
With his constant grunting and dips into subject matter as unsavory as cannibalism and constipation, Screamin’ Jay ultimately proved too outrageous to sustain a healthy career. “I Put a Spell on You” endured nonetheless, covered over the following decades by a slew of popular and influential artists of varying genre. Artists as diverse as soul legend Ray Charles, jazz great Nina Simone, 1960s roots rockers Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Florida-bred goth shocker Marilyn Manson took on “Spell” in tribute to Hawkins’ genius.[31]
Seven years after the release of “I Put a Spell on You,” an aspiring actor from Massachusetts co-authored and recorded what is arguably the most popular horror rock anthem of all time. Bobby Pickett, desperately wanting to get in on the Twist dance craze, utilized the keen impression of Frankenstein star Boris Karloff he often did merely for his friends’ amusement to birth the poppy mad scientist lament “Monster Mash” in 1962. Released that August, Pickett’s “Monster Mash” featured an assembly of studio musicians to forever be known as the Crypt-Kickers and rode its goofy waltzing refrain into a number one hit by October, locking Pickett in to a profitable career as one of novelty music’s most beloved icons. Bobby “Boris” scored again in 1975 with the “Star Trek” spoof record “Star Drek”; less popular were Pickett’s assorted “Mash” sequels, such as the Christmas-themed “Monster’s Holiday” from December 1962, a 1985 hip-hop reworking called “Shock the Body,” and the 2005 global warming redux “Climate Mash.” Still, the original endured, so much so that it was adapted into a feature film in 1995 starring Pickett himself alongside the catch-all likes of Full House’s Candace Cameron, Jimmie “Dynomite” Walker, and John Waters accomplice Mink Stole.[32]
There was also, around this time, a spate of macabre pop songs revolving around grizzly automotive deaths of teenagers, a reflection of or reaction to the dangerous youth street racing trends of the period. Beginning with Mark Dinning’s 1959 “Teen Angel” and climaxing with the 1964’s “Dead Man’s Curve” by Jan & Dean and the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack,” these entries into the musical canon—which came to be affectionately known as “splatter platters”—dramatically detailed young love cut short by reckless driving (sometimes complete with stomach-churning car crash sound effects). The popularity of the splatter platters proved the American public, despite wanting to appear outwardly normal, had a remarkably wide morbid streak.[33]
Sc
reamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Monster Mash,” and the splatter platters all paved the way for raspy Detroit singer Vincent Furnier, who adopted the stage name Alice Cooper in 1968 and used his penchants for classically spooky theatrics to transform his rock music into the ultimate shock-laden stage show. By 1971 the Alice Cooper Group, responsible for such creepy entries as “Dead Babies” and “The Ballad of Dwight Fry,” were selling out venues across the country with a concert experience that included bloody doll parts, staged fights, and the shaggy-haired mascara-smeared singer’s own pretend electrocution. Yet it was a very real act of gore that propelled Alice Cooper into the national spotlight just a few years prior—a 1969 Toronto gig was punctuated by the unexpected arrival of a stray chicken to the stage, which Cooper, an urban youth who had no experience with barnyard fowl, scooped up and tossed into the air under the assumption the bird would simply fly away. It did not. Plummeting to the ground in front of the crowd, the chicken was instantly descended upon by angry fans who began savagely dismembering it (believing it was all part of the show). Newspapers embellished the story the following day by claiming Cooper murdered the chicken onstage and ritualistically drank its blood.
Fellow rocker Frank Zappa, who had signed Cooper’s group to his Straight Music record label, immediately phoned the shell-shocked singer regarding the blood-drinking tale and offered the following expert career advice: “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone you didn’t do it.” The strategy appears to have worked: Of the six albums Alice Cooper released in the succeeding half decade, five went platinum. The singer’s raucous 1972 anti-education rant “School’s Out” also became a top five hit in several countries despite (or maybe because of) its depiction of an exploding schoolhouse.[34]
A back-to-basics movement happening within the general rock n’ roll scene at approximately the same time would simultaneously help set the stage and create a template for the style of music the Misfits would ultimately produce. A handful of bands during this period, eventually to be known as the proto-punks, pushed aggressively against the bloat that was decaying (or at least dulling) the genre into extended instrumental solos and drug-fueled conceptual nightmares; the proto-punks yearned for the brevity and liveliness that encapsulated rock n’ roll as it was birthed a decade before and attempted to resuscitate that musical strain before it flatlined. From Detroit came the raucous MC5, whose hard rhythm and blues was based around their pledge to “kick out the jams, motherfuckers”; also from Detroit was the MC5’s “little brother” band, the Stooges, who wrote two chord stomps that singer Iggy Pop yelped and groaned over;[35] California offered psychedelic blues pioneers Blue Cheer, who managed to score a Top 20 hit in 1967 with their cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues”;[36] and in New York City, the aforementioned Velvet Underground experimented with moody guitar jangles[37] while neighboring act the New York Dolls kept their material glittery and upbeat.[38] All of these bands would flame out long before their time but would manage to make their mark of influence on a select and important cross section of minds.
Right in the northeastern corner of New Jersey sits Bergen County, the most populous county in the entire state. In the county’s southwest corner, nestled between the more recognized cities of Passaic and Hackensack, is Lodi, a borough of only two-and-a-half square miles comprised of the same serene residential neighborhoods and tiny shopping plazas you’d find so many other places in the state. Long before such bucolic charms existed, Lodi (and most surrounding areas) were inhabited by an Algonquin nation of thousands. Known as the Lenape tribe,[39] these Native Americans were eventually ousted by European settlers in the 1600s. The invading Europeans redubbed the land New Netherland in 1664 before settling later on the moniker New Barbadoes.[40] A couple hundred years went by before New Barbadoes (which gained notoriety in the eighteenth century as a major centerpiece in the lucrative fur trade) was rechristened Lodi Township in the 1820s, in honor of Lodi, Italy.[41] The industrial revolution quickly took hold, and Lodi became a manufacturing hub of grist mills, salt mills, bleaching and dyeing factories, and noxious chemical plants.
This working-class atmosphere stuck with the town into the twentieth century as its numbers grew steadily. The population seemed to quadruple with each passing decade, and the predominant ethnicity was in fact Italian—neighboring areas would come to dismissively joke that Lodi was a mere abbreviation for “Lots of Dumb Italians.” Lodi was just like any other small American town, though, in that the men went out and busted their humps at their jobs, the women stayed home to raise the kids, everyone went to church on Sunday, and everyone pulled for the local sports team. By 1950 a cozy community of just over 15,000 resided in Lodi, which, at the time, was probably best known for being the home of WABC-TV’s 648-foot-tall transmitting tower (powerful enough to allegedly send its signal across “thirty-eight states and half of Canada”[42] ).
It was into this environment that Glenn Allen Anzalone was born on June 23, 1955, the third of four brothers raised in a bucolic neighborhood on MacArthur Avenue near Lodi’s easternmost border. Glenn’s Protestant father, Richard, was the third of four children himself and grew up in neighboring Hackensack to become a military man, serving his country as a Marine in both World War II and the Korean conflict. Richard Anzalone settled into civilian life thereafter, supporting his family through television repair (with so many sons in his brood, it should come as no surprise that Richard also became active in the Boy Scouts, at one point leading Lodi Troop 117 as well as Cub Scout Pack 102).[43] Glenn’s mother, Maretta, was a Catholic two years Richard’s junior who had one full sister and several half-siblings from her mother Maretta Mae’s second and third marriages. In general Maretta was a homemaker, and early on she realized it was perhaps her job to instill in her four sons the fundamental importance of religion. Mrs. Anzalone dutifully took her brood to church every Sunday, though Glenn would later remark he never felt Catholicism had been “forc[ed] . . . down [his] throat.” (“My dad didn’t really care [if I went to church],” he said in 1992.)[44]
Later in Glenn’s youth, Maretta took a job as a clerk at Stern’s department store (the anchor of the then-new Bergen County Mall in nearby Paramus),[45] a job from which she would bring home Beatles and Rolling Stones albums for her sons to enjoy. Glenn, an artistically curious youth, especially appreciated this and eventually discovered more incredible artists via the record collection his elder brothers Bruce and Chris amassed. Although the future singer would take both piano and clarinet lessons during his formative years, his primary interest at this time was comic books. Glenn kept up with all the requisite heroes—Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America—but would later cite loner “anti-heroes” such as bitter Holocaust refugee Magneto and oceanic mutant Namor the Sub-Mariner as his true favorites. He also gravitated toward dinosaurs, spending hours sketching various thunder lizards for his own amusement.[46]
Adolescence for Glenn coincided with the discovery of macabre entries both old (EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt) and new (Night of the Living Dead). By this time the third Anzalone child had already developed a reputation for being outspoken and difficult despite his diminutive, seemingly nonthreatening physical stature. Steve Linder was a year behind Glenn at Thomas Jefferson Middle School and remembers being acutely afraid of this “short [Anzalone] kid” who had a “big mouth.” “I was kinda petrified of him,” Linder says. “He was a wise guy. He was more this tough metal shop guy than a drama or music club guy. Y’know, typical short Italian guy from Lodi with a temper.”
Regardless, Glenn’s fascination with music was growing. Through his brothers he was turned on to the mournful wailing of Roy Orbison, who scored a string of Top 40 hits in the early 1960s like “Oh, Pretty Woman” and “Only the Lonely”; the dramatic touch of the Righteous Brothers, whose driving 1965 smash “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” would become a heartbreak standard; the weary poetic genius of Bob Dylan’s introverted folk anthems; and the strange mystery of psychedelic blues rockers the Doors,
led by swaggering baritone sex symbol Jim Morrison. The dalliances of Bruce and Chris in local bands also played a factor in Glenn’s development. The younger Anzalone would act as a roadie for his brothers’ gigs and subsequently got his first tastes of the raw live rock n’ roll scene. He loved it, and it rubbed off on him in more ways than one—Glenn’s hair soon became an unruly thicket that hung down far past his shoulders, the standard style of rockers at the time. The wavy locks may have annoyed his conservative ex-Marine father but they also framed Glenn’s steely gaze and prominent jaw rather nicely.
Comic book art remained Glenn’s top priority, however, and following his graduation from Lodi High School in 1973 the aspiring artist began focusing on making that dream come true. He dutifully attended art classes in Manhattan, to which Maretta drove her son (who lacked a driver’s license for decades).[47] Eventually, Glenn worked up the courage to send drawing samples to his heroes in the bullpen at Marvel Comics. Though he possessed a clear talent for rendering, two years went by with no job offers or advancements. In hindsight this is not surprising: the mid-1970s for the comic book industry was a time marked by shifting economics. Newsstand sales were sliding downward, and companies such as Marvel and DC were canceling more books than they were creating so as to streamline their titles and corresponding revenues. (Marvel even discontinued one of Glenn’s favorite, Namor the Sub-Mariner, to try experimenting with less specific pulp genre tales.)[48] Frustrated by his stalled artistic dreams and growing restless in his hometown, Glenn Anzalone took his mind off professional woes by joining a cover band put together by some old high school friends that bore the very 1970s-sounding hard rock name Talus.
This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits Page 2
