This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits

by James Greene Jr.

  Clark Gable would just barely survive filming The Misfits, suffering severe coronary thrombosis a day after production wrapped on November 4, 1960. The legendary actor died in the hospital eleven days later. The strain of the entire situation fractured Monroe’s marriage to Misfits screenwriter Arthur Miller; the two divorced right before the film’s February premiere. The following summer, Monroe herself died of a drug overdose in her Los Angeles home.[3] Putting a final stamp on the alleged curse of The Misfits was Clift’s 1966 death from a fatal heart attack mere hours after his personal secretary suggested the two watch a television broadcast of the movie (“Absolutely not,” was Clift’s alleged response).[4]

  Not surprisingly, Glenn Anzalone wasn’t the first musician who laid claim to the name Misfits (though he would ultimately prove the most successful with it). In 1964 a San Diego garage rock group under that moniker scored a minor hit with a reworking of the Coasters’ classic “I’m a Hog for You, Baby” called “This Little Piggy.” Said group boasted future Moby Grape singer/bassist Bob Mosley and garnered enough popularity to open for the Rolling Stones on that group’s first U.S. tour.[5] Meanwhile, another garage rock assembly in Houston calling itself the Misfits began making the scene around the same time, buddying up to Roky Erickson’s highly influential outfit 13th Floor Elevators. Unfortunately, a 1966 LSD bust sullied the reputation of Houston’s Misfits enough that the band eventually changed their name to Lost and Found.[6] Also in 1966, a one-off single was released in Scotland by yet another Misfits to support their local school charity campaign.[7] The Scottish Misfits are notable in the grander scheme of things only because one of their drummers, John Wilson, would go on to play in Van Morrison’s garage outfit Them.[8]

  Several years into the career of New Jersey’s Misfits, a female-fronted punk group from Albany, New York, began playing and releasing music under the same name. This upstate contingent, perhaps anticipating the litigious nature that in many ways would come to define Lodi’s most notorious sons, renamed themselves the Tragics and faded into history despite their strong 1981 clarion call “Mommi I’m a Misfit.”[9]

  Immediately after settling on the name, Glenn Anzalone began scouring his neighborhood for musicians willing to back up his fledgling punk rock dreams. Prostitutes drummer Manny Martinez was pulled into the fold and would prove the only musician Glenn deemed worth keeping from the virgin Misfits lineup, which also included a female bassist, Diane DiPiazza, and a mysterious guitarist known only as Jimmy Battle. Martinez, whose drumming style was more rooted in the jazz improv of 1940s big bander Gene Krupa than that of Tommy Ramone, hosted Misfits practices in his parents’ garage, the geographic location of which would help the band to acquire their permanent bass player and second-largest personality.

  “I used to hang out with friends at a park in town,” Gerald Caiafa remarked decades later. “It was like a local hangout, and Manny’s house happened to be next door to the park. . . . I would hear them playing and shit and I never thought much about it.”

  Caiafa, known to friends and family as Jerry, was born April 21, 1959, the eldest of three brothers being raised by a machinist father—Jerry Sr.’s own acclaim came from his founding of the Congruent Machine manufacturing company, creators of the successful X-Acto-style Proedge hobby knife—and his wife on the southern end of Lodi on sleepy Grove Street. A massive Bowie and Ramones fan also looking for a musical outlet, Jerry had asked for and received a bass guitar in February of 1977 as a belated Christmas gift (following the wisdom of a high school classmate who pointed out a four-string bass would be easier to play than a six-string guitar[10] ) but couldn’t find much immediate use for the instrument. Curiosity eventually got the better of newly minted rocker when he began dating a girl who lived next door to Manny Martinez; Jerry ventured over to Martinez’s garage one afternoon where he found the drummer and Glenn, who was hunched over an electric piano, running through a few numbers.

  The gregarious Caiafa, a high school footballer voted “Most Popular” by his fellow graduating classmates that year, quickly bonded with Glenn over the excitement of the burgeoning punk rock scene. They were both particularly enamored of the British punk bands yet to make much of an impact in the United States. There was the Damned, whose fuzz-drenched singles “New Rose” and “Neat Neat Neat” reveled in their own rowdiness; the Adverts, who offered a breathless teenage restlessness the Misfits would soon easily replicate; Generation X, whose singer Billy Idol gleefully conveyed a devil-may-care attitude in his addictive vocal cadence; and, of course, the Sex Pistols, the most notorious of the UK’s punk class who burst with the most zeal, color, danger, and playful bile. Glenn deemed the outgoing and personable Caiafa a good fit for the Misfits and invited him to join the band. The trio began regularly rehearsing together, bringing to life the powerful songs that Glenn had kicking around in his head.[11]

  The Misfits played their first gig less than a month after Jerry’s entry into the band at New York City’s on-the-rise Bowery bar CBGBs (Glenn, ever confident and embracing punk’s true spirit, is said to have booked the show before the Misfits had a concrete lineup). It was April 18, 1977, the same night President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation to outline his ten-point energy conservation plan to help reduce growing dependence on natural resources—the precursor to Carter’s infamous “Crisis of Confidence” speech three years later. There was also a solar eclipse that evening, but of more prescient concern to Glenn was his bassist’s choice of attire for their band’s public debut. Glenn found himself repulsed by the garish open-toed platform shoes and tight sequined pants glam fan Jerry adorned for this seminal CBGBs appearance, so much so that the singer nearly cancelled the performance. He didn’t want to be visually lumped in with the endless New York Dolls imitators clogging the Manhattan punk rock scene at the time. Glenn relented at the last minute, however, taking the stage with Jerry and chalking the episode up to miscommunication regarding the image he wanted the Misfits to put forward.[12]

  The irony was that soon Jerry would become the Misfit most entrenched in punk fashion, dying his dark brown hair electric blue, wearing a chain and padlock around his neck, and sporting a leather motorcycle jacket like Bowery favorites the Ramones (except that his had “THE MISFITS” emblazoned on the back; the Ramones weren’t quite as shameless in their advertising). In these early years Jerry often looked more countercultural than Glenn, who initially preferred a soft brown leather jacket over an open dress shirt accented by a shaggy just-below-the-ears mane, a look that made him seem like just another two-bit New Jersey street tough. But Jerry was more pedestrian than his bellowing band mate in some ways; immediately after he graduated from high school he started pulling twelve-hour shifts at his father’s machine shop in Paterson, New Jersey. Jerry later recalled the grind of staying out all night in Manhattan and then going directly to Paterson to wash his punk rock makeup off in the employee bathroom before the start of his day-long machine work. “It was tough,” he told interviewer Daniel Russell. “But if the people back in the day didn’t sacrifice, the scene would have never taken off.”[13]

  A month after their debut gig the Misfits put their costuming issues aside to record their first single, “Cough/Cool,” at Manhattan’s Rainbow Studio.[14] “Cough/Cool” paints the Misfits as anything but a sequin band—the music is centered around a pit of introversion, atmosphere, and drama. The stream-of-consciousness title track flows like a beat poet’s horrifying late night fever dream (“Drench your face in darkness, spit up blood when you cough, cool cool cool cough”) set to odd, incessant keyboard bleating and stuttering drums. Glenn’s strong vocal is unmistakable on the track; when he holds notes, they triumphantly rise above the rest of the lo-fi din. The two-minute track begins with a sparse arrangement but builds in such intensity that by the end the listener feels enveloped by this humid blanket of electric piano chords and jazzy surf percussion. The final seconds find the Misfits pounding out one chord in succession with Manny’s drums, tapping the night
mare right into your forehead until an abrupt stop accented by a tiny cymbal noise. Within an instant, “Cough/Cool” has faded away like a ghost.

  The single’s more straightforward B-side, “She,” retells the Patty Hearst kidnapping scandal with a sense of brimming urgency. Raw and affecting, “She” paints a picture of a girl who loved “naked sin” instead of passing judgment on “Daddy’s little girl” with the “machine gun in her hands.” The song further sexualizes an already sensational crime story with Jerry’s bleating bass and Glenn’s naked emotional screams during the chorus. There’s so much gusto in the singer’s voice you can hear he’s on the brink of natural distortion on this recording; luckily, the frequencies hold, keeping one of Glenn’s best performances completely intact.

  Five hundred copies of “Cough/Cool” were pressed by the Misfits and they released it on their own label, Blank Records, created specifically for the single’s release. On the back cover, Glenn accidentally misspelled Jerry’s last name as “Caifa.” This prompted the bass player to demand he be billed specifically as “Jerry, only Jerry.” Glenn wryly transformed this request into the nickname Jerry Only, a stage name that was brilliant in that it did not seem to have much connotation one way or the other (as opposed to those of the Misfits’ British heroes Johnny Rotten, Dave Vanian, or Gay Advert).[15] Similarly vague was the surname Glenn Anzalone adopted at this time—Danzig.

  The singer has long been cagey on the origin of his alias—for years he insisted Danzig was in fact his real birth name, and even now he will only say he carries some ancestral connection to the coastal Polish city of the same name (now known as Gdansk). The prevailing rumor among those close to the Anzalone family, however, is that Glenn was simply taken with the port of Danzig, a scenic destination comprised of elaborate gothic architecture dating back to the 1300s, during a post-high school trip overseas and decided to adopt its name as his own. Glenn eventually changed his last name legally from Anzalone to Danzig, apparently several years after the Misfits disbanded.

  By October of 1977, the Misfits had grown tired of the obtuse sound Glenn’s keyboard afforded them and were interested in pursuing a more aggressive punk sound. Danzig’s electric piano was abandoned, allowing the singer to focus on his vocals, and the trio invited Jerry’s childhood friend Frank LiCata to play guitar for the band. Another Lodi native (the youngest and only boy among his three siblings), LiCata had been playing guitar on and off since childhood and counted David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson, the Ramones, and blues legends Buddy Guy and Willie Dixon among his major influences. With a slicked back blond coif and wraparound shades, Frank—rechristened Franché Coma by Glenn, an apparent play on France’s eastern “Free Region” of Franche-Comté—looked the part of the throwback greaser ruffian, an anachronism in shaggy suburban 1970s America.

  LiCata’s choppy, violent style of down-stroking (copped from furious axeman Johnny Ramone) helped thrust the Misfits toward the angrier, more visceral area they were looking to inhabit. Despite a minimal equipment setup LiCata was able to pull a fierce gnawing sound out of his instrument, one that seemed to be continually growling as he churned out his chords. When it came to actual songwriting, however, the literal nuts and bolts of putting the music together, Danzig was the main force. The guitarist is firm in his assertion that “Glenn wrote everything, [all] the words and the melodies,” though he will admit the two would sometimes work together to hash out a harmony for a particularly tricky composition. “We did an early version of ‘Who Killed Marilyn?’ that was way different than the [solo] record he put out later,” Frank offers. “More background vocals, kinda tradin’ off . . . it was pretty wild. But he or we decided not to do anything with it at the time.”[16]

  Jerry Only remembers the songwriting situation a little differently. In 2003, the bassist stated—as he had many times before—that he and the other Misfits wrote a least a quarter to a third of the music, creating various introductory guitar riffs and arrangements for the songs, and that they merely ceded credit to Glenn to satisfy his fragile ego (“Glenn was real psyched on having everything in his name and all that kind of stuff”). Only would concede that Danzig, who he deems “an excellent songwriter,” composed the lion’s share of Misfits lyrics,[17] but not without a little coaching sometimes.

  “Every once in a while, I’d give him a line, because he would mumble shit,” Only said in 1998. “For example, in ‘Devil’s Whorehouse,’ ‘night time for midnight masses’—I thought that’s what he said during the practice, and I said, ‘What a cool line.’ He said, ‘Oh,” and he wrote it down.”[18]

  Aside from the requisite roadblocks a punk rock band faced in 1977—lack of money, lack of credibility, an underground network not yet as connected and fluid as it would one day be—the Misfits had other challenges. Toward the beginning of October 1977, a boiler in the Martinez garage exploded into flames between rehearsals, damaging Manny’s drum set and the various amplifiers the other band members stored there for practice. Later that month, just hours before his live debut with the band at Eddie’s Lounge in neighboring Teaneck, LiCata absent-mindedly placed his flashy Gibson Explorer guitar on one of the club’s active kitchen stoves. The instrument was thankfully still in its case, but the accident was frightening enough to the already nerve-racked LiCata, who had never performed publicly before.

  But the band made some progress as well. LiCata recalls an early 1978 gig opening for fractured singer Richard Hell, he of Blank Generation and Destiny Street fame, at the Show Palace in Dover, New Jersey, wherein the Misfits went over like gangbusters (“The place was jam-packed,” the guitarist remembers, “And we blew ‘em away without a doubt. People were jumpin’ on tables . . . everybody was goin’ nuts!”).[19] Around the same time, the band were presented with an enormous opportunity thanks to an oversight made by one of the country’s most prestigious record labels. In November of 1977, Mercury Records—the Chicago label founded in 1945 renowned for releasing records across a wide variety of genres—was preparing to distribute the debut offering from Cleveland art punks Pere Ubu, whose dark experimental caterwaul had already spread itself across a handful of homemade singles. Entitled The Modern Dance, Pere Ubu’s record was scheduled to be pressed on a Mercury imprint called Blank. The company was completely oblivious to the existence of the Misfits or the fact the band had legally beat them to the name “Blank” by just a few months. When confronted by Danzig during an angry phone call, Mercury agreed to gift the Misfits thirty hours of studio time to record an album (with the option of release) in exchange for permanent ownership of the Blank name.

  Ecstatic, the Misfits booked their thirty free hours at New York’s C.I. Recording Studios for January.[20] Before the session, however, the band decided to fire Manny Martinez. Aside from accusations that the drummer didn’t take the band seriously enough and was often too drunk to play, the Misfits cited creative differences, claiming his love of Santana-style jam sessions interfered with their punk ethos. Brought in to replace Martinez was Koo-Dot graduate Jim Catania. A reserved, easygoing individual with shoulder-length hair and a permanently unaffected expression on his face, Catania’s forthright drumming style gave the Misfits the backbone they needed to stand up straight on two legs. Catania played with no frills and an unbreakable meter—though his percussion did have a distinctly loose feel, never crowding the music, simply moving it along. Initially, Catania (dubbed Mr. Jim) joined the Misfits as a lark, but he quickly realized the group’s potential. He was impressed by Glenn’s “amazing talent,” which in turn made the band “want to do as much as we could [and] take on whatever we could take on.”[21]

  The emboldened quartet entered C.I. that January and laid down seventeen songs (to save time, Jim Catania used the studio’s house drum set, an assembly also used at that time by legendary soul session drummer Bernard Purdie for various recordings). Aiding in the production was Mercury Records engineer Dave Achelis, whose previous production credits included work with the New York Dolls, jazz gre
at Dave Brubeck, and a litany of commercial radio jingles. Achelis jumped at the chance to work with the fledgling punk band that the other C.I. engineers had turned down as they seemed so different from the type of material he was used to recording. Any reservations about the unprofessional or rude nature of punk rockers went out the window almost immediately; Achelis found the Misfits to be fun, focused players who were not distracted by drugs and thus managed to get a great deal accomplished for their virgin album outing. He also took note of the band’s dynamic. “Glenn was the boss, no doubt about it, “ Achelis says. “But he and Jerry were very close . . . they had a Steven Tyler/Joe Perry type of thing. Jerry definitely had a lot of input, and his playing was driving a lot of the actual music itself. He was powering the sound with his bass playing. It was that typical punk rock bass sound, very fast and energetic.”[22]

  Much of the material the Misfits recorded for their proposed debut album wasn’t too far removed from “Cough/Cool,” despite their move toward a more conventional rock band instrumentation. Songs like “Static Age” and the pounding “TV Casualty,” two tales of cathode tube–based complacency, not to mention the dreary murder narrative “Theme for a Jackal,” are brooding drones in the style of the preceding single, built around one or two chords and Danzig’s non-rhyming lyrical schemes. Yet the Misfits were also transitioning to a more straightforward songwriting approach at this time. “Some Kinda Hate” (an apparent response to the Velvet Underground’s “Some Kinda Love”) slams ahead on a firm seesawing riff, tightly moving between its brief verses and syrupy refrains of infectious but non-distinct crooning. Pulse-quickening “Hybrid Moments” owes much of its romantic drama to the touch of Roy Orbison but serves up a swinging rock bravado all its own, finding a great middle ground between a vintage 1950s melodic approach with the weighty sensibilities of Black Sabbath. Similarly, the five-minute ballad “Come Back” props its Elvisy longing on a typical chord progression from the nascent days of the King’s given genre.