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HARD TIMES Vol. 1 #1, p.1-4, August 1984
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 SAMHAIN

 "WE DON'T WANT TO BE CALLED A HARDCORE BAND."

 LAST MINUTE: SAMHAIN will tour at the end of August.

NYC, March 31st, the Rock Hotel.  "From the ashes of the Misfits and Minor
Threat--Samhain", so the ads said.  It was a good show too, Lots of
excitement and enthusiasm, but one show then nothing-zippo.

What happened to Samhain?  We found out from Glenn Danzig and Eerie Von
(Pete and Steve were vacationing) in the confines of Glenn's basement
apartment in a suburban town in NJ.

His apartment is a menagerie of skulls, posters and other assorted Misfits
paraphenalia, along with a myriad of records, unfolded album jackets, comic
books, toy robots and submarines from Japanese cartoons, and what appeared
to be an air raid siren.

  Ron: Does that thing work?
Glenn: Yeah.  It's part of my stereo, to show you how rich I am.
Eerie: It's not bad for a hot item.
Glenn: I robbed it from a little league field.

  Ron: That's pretty low-robbing from little kids.
Eerie: Yeah, after that they couldn't make them do the Pledge of Allegiance
       or the National Anthem.
Glenn: The just take some more money from the old timers, who drink a little
       less beer, and they buy another one.  In town there's like a boy's
       club that the people pay dues to so they can buy equipment for the
       kids, but they buy booze and have parties instead, and they make the
       kids go home.

  Ron: So you're a Misfits fan?  I see you have posters and stuff.
Glenn: They were pretty good.

  Ron: I probably shouldn't ask this right off the bat because you said on
       the phone that you didn't want to talk about the Misfits and I don't
       want to start off on the the wrong foot, but-Why don't you want to
       talk about the Misfits?
Glenn: Because that's old business.  I could talk about Jerry and Doyle's drug
       habits.

  Ron: I'm just interested in what caused the break up.
Glenn: There's 20 million reasons.  The preoccupation with drugs was just
       one.  The fact that they didn't care about the live performance; what
       it sounded like.  Unprofessional attitude in general.  The way they
       were treating fans.  On the road you always meet people who are
       assholes and you put up with it, but some people are cool and they
       weren't making the distinction.  They treat everyone like shit.  "All
       you people get away from us," were Jerry and Doyle.

  Ron: What about the music?  Were there problems in where you were headed?
Glenn: A metal/punk thing is OK, but they wanted to get into a Van Halen kind
       of thing.  Their father would tell me that I had to write commercial
       songs.  They would give me this rap that if I didn't get the band
       lots of money, they wouldn't be able to do it anymore, but they would
       waste money on things like smashing guitars.  They wouldn't tour
       because they had to work on Monday.  They only wanted to play on
       Saturdays.  It got to the point that the Misfits were in demand but
       we couldn't do it.  It would have meant flying them back and forth to
       the shows, plus their equipment, which would be 4 or 4 Ampeg stacks-
       just for Doyle-then Jerry's stuff and the guitars.
Eerie: Yeah, but on the way back you could leave half of it there because it
       would be wrecked anyway.  You break one guitar, that's cool, but 3 or
       4 just for the hell of it?  It doesn't mean anything.  It loses the
       impact.
Glenn: I never thought it was cool.  The only time I thought it was cool was
       when I said to Doyle, "If you're going to break your guitar, do it
       originally", so he broke it with his bare hands.  He's the only one
       who could do it.  He did one around his neck one night too.
       I could see the Misfits becoming exactly the things that I got in a
       punk band to avoid.  It wasn't so much the music but the attitude.
       Jerry and Doyle got that rock star attitude.  It's funny because in
       the beginning when we were accused of that, they weren't like that at
       all.  Eventually, they did become that way.

  Ron: Did you see Spinal Tap?
Glenn: Yeah.  I thought it was pretty good.  It kind of epitomizes what was
       going on in the Misfits, with the amps that go up to 11.

 Mike: Are you into the "Omen" movies?
Glenn: I love the "Omen" movies.  Did you see "Omen III"?  You should read
       "Omen IV", that's even sicker.  That's the best.

 Mike: Did you ever think of doing a video?
Glenn: The Misfits have a bunch, you just don't see them on MTV.  We had a
       live video, a promo for "Skulls" and "Braineaters".
       MTV told us that they were too harsh, but then they play Kraut.  Slash
       is a bigger label than Faulty and they're distributed by Warner-Ammex
       which owns MTV.
       We (Misfits) were on Uncle Floyd.  Jerry pulled his hat off, and Floyd
       said (in character) "Oh, oh, uh Take me to your leader."  We were
       going wild.

  Ron: What's that Floyd guy like?
Glenn: I don't know, he's just weird.  They were afraid of us.  We were in
       this little room and everybody's going crazy.  Everything's smashed
       and cameras are flying.  The TV guys are going "Holy shit, Oh my god,
       keep going, keep going."  At the end of the song Floyd goes, "Whoa,
       hey, that was great!"

  Ron: It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun.  What finally made you give
       up on the Misfits?
Glenn: Robo left, and I had started talking to Eerie about drumming for us.
       Doyle and Jerry said they wanted Robo back and he agreed but only for
       big shows and we'd have to fly him back and forth to California so I
       said forget it.  Then they wanted Googy and I wanted Eerie and we
       couldn't agree.  They wanted someone who did drugs who would agree
       with everything they said.  By then I had had enough.  We did the
       Halloween show but I had already started with Eerie.  I started on a
       solo album last August which became Samhain's album.

  Ron: What does Samhain mean?
Glenn: It's the pagan Halloween.

  Ron: What's going on with Samhain?  Have you been playing anywhere?
Glenn: No.  We're waiting for the album to come out, another couple of weeks
       I guess.  We're working on the sleeve.  Some of the stuff is about
       religion because I hate organized religion.  I believe in God but I
       don't believe that God is this old man with a beard.  Most of the
       album is love songs.

  Ron: At the Rock Hotel show I really couldn't catch the words.
Glenn: The show we did at the Rock Hotel had only three rehearsals, and I was
       sick for the week before it.  Some of the words I made up as we went
       along.  It was pretty good that the people were singing along to songs
       that they never heard before.  Some of the lines are real catchy so
       anyone with half of a brain could pick them up.
Eerie: But that was tough for the New York crowd.  Between the whole audience
       there wasn't half a brain.
Glenn: We really wanted to make people hate us.  In order to do something new
       that would be around for a while, we feel that people really have to
       hate us because we're not playing what they expect.  The music is
       different but I don't think it's much different than if the Misfits
       evolved after "Walk Among Us."

  Ron: A lot of it has to do with your voice.
Glenn: Yeah, but don't forget that I wrote all the songs for the Misfits and
       I write all the songs for Samhain.

  Ron: Where do you see your music heading?
Glenn: We don't want to do hardcore music and we don't want to be called a
       hardcore band.  As far as I'm concerned there are enough hardcore
       bands and we don't need any more.  What I want to do is get back to
       the basic thing that made me want to do punk music in the first place,
       and as far as I'm concerned most of the new hardccre bands don't have
       it.

  Ron: What's that?
Glenn: Energy ... (after thinking) A reason to do it other than to become
       part of a scene.  You want to suport this music but not because it's
       something trendy to do until you're 19, but because you don't want to
       go to a club and hear a band doing covers of Billy Idol or Culture
       Club.
Eerie: (mockingly) Culture Club?
Glenn: Judas Priest, whoever.  The point is that by kids not supporting the
       scene that's all that's going to be left.  It used to be that people
       were willing to pay to see new bands, but a lot of the bands now---.
       I don't know how you feel but I wouldn't pay to see the bands because
       they all sounds the same, and they're all saying the same things.
       They're practically playing the same songs.
Eerie: There are some good bands but there's a lot of bad ones.
Glenn: Like the band that opened for Jerry's Kids.  They were the epitome of
       generic hardcore.  They could have been any band, any town USA.  They
       should have been doing that stuff three years ago.  We want to push
       the scene ahead.  Nothing much has happened since '81.
       After the Misfits I had to decided whether I wanted to keep doing
       music and whether I still had something to say.  I still had something
       to say.  The reasons why I want to continue with Eerie is that we feel
       the same way about a lot of things.  We're into power, that's basically
       what Samhain is about.  Killing people and things like that.

  Ron: I have trouble getting into that.
Glenn: You mean you've never wanted to kill someone?  You've never walked
       down a street in NYC with your girlfriend and there's these five
       drunken assholes from either Long Island or New Jersey and they start
       giving you shit.  It's only you and your girlfriend.  Don't you want
       to kill those people?
Eerie: Yeah!  Like take their face and smash it into the sidewalk until
       there's nothing left but your hand and the concrete.

  Ron: I'd rather not.
Eerie: There are people out there that think like us and those are the people
       we want.
Glenn: I want anyone who's into our music.  It should be available to
       everyone, and that's one thing that's wrong with the punk scene in New
       York.  If you're not wearing the right clothes or the right haircut,
       you're not accepted.  I look kind of normal now right?  But if I go to
       a mall I still get shit.  When I used to wear my hair down in front I
       would get in shouting fights with five or six guys.  They'd say "Hey
       punk rock, heh heh, can you see out of there, heh heh?" and I'd be
       like "Fuck you jerkoff, I'll beat the shit out of all of you."  But
       they'd never fight.  They'd say to each other "Oh shit, that guy is
       fucked up."  That's how this haircut came about.  It's still real
       long, but if I comb to the side I get a little less shit.

  Ron: I conciously started to dress down because I'm sick and tired of
       dealing with that.  Fashion shouldn't be that big an issue.
Eerie: But then you get these people who will say "Well really guys, I'll
       come down and I'll play and I'll dress this way but I've got a date
       later, and I'll have to change."
Glenn: Now this will blow a lot of peoples' image of Jerry, but you'll never
       see me go out on a date in a suit like Jerry.
       I'm a great believer in if you truly believe in something, you should
       do it all the wy.  Better to be too extreme than to be too
       conservative.  I might not agree with somebody but if they're
       wholehearted in what they're doing I can respect that.  The people who
       are really fucked up are the ones that can be changed.  If they
       realized that they were wrong that's cool, but if they change because
       of something else, like to get a girl, I have no respect for that.  I
       wouldn't respect someone who told me that they didn't believe in what
       they had done.

  Ron: Would you respect a Nazi that said that he believed in what he had
       done?
Glenn: Yes, because there have been dictators and tyrants through history,
       and that's never going to change.  To single out Hitler is ridiculous.
       People will always abuse power, from Hitler to Stalin, Khomeni, Idi
       Amin; name any US president that ever got us into a war because of
       economics.  Besides that, look at all these little guerilla wars
       going on in Afghanistan, El Salvador, the Middle East.  I don't really
       like to think about it and that's why I don't go for bands like MDC,
       because they're not solving anything.  They're just making everybody
       think about this stuff and it frustrates them because they can't do
       anything about it except go join a revolution and get shot.
       That's about it, and believe me you will get shot because for as many
       guns as you've got they've got twenty.  That's why I want the bomb.
       "You all fucked with me, BOOM!  You thought you had it all, but you've
       got nothing."  A revolution does nothing to a big power, it doesn't
       matter who wins.  What it does is that it helps the economy.  "You
       want American aid, and you guys need Russian aid, here's fifty million
       dollars because we believe in your cause."  The people fighting are
       going to have to pay that back one way or another whether its in
       money, land, raw materials, etc.

  Ron: But if you did press the button, wouldn't your soul burn in hell?  You
       said before that you believe in God.
Glenn: Somebody has to do it.  Armageddon has been foretold, not only in the
       Bible, but by practically every religion.  Besides, who says what I
       would do isn't merciful?
       Just watch the news for one hour, and that's just a small slice of
       what goes on every day.  A lot of people don't think about it because
       it doesn't happen to them, but it happens to someone every 24 seconds.
       I saw it last night.  In this country there is a violent assault every
       24 seconds.  Roughly three times a minute.  Multiply that by how many
       minutes in a day, times seven days a week, times fifty-two weeks a
       year.

  Ron: If you divide that bv 220 million you can figure out the odds of
       being attacked in the next 24 seconds.
 Mike: And every 24 seconds the odds get greater!  Now that's pretty
       mindboggling.
Glenn: Life sucks, the world sucks, I really hate this place. Anything is
       better than this.

  Ron: If you really feel that way, why don't you end it all?
Glenn; I don't want to just die, I want the whole world to end.

  Ron: Did you ever do a song about it?
Glenn: Every song I ever wrote.  For instance "Astrozombies."  "Prime
       directive- exterminate the whole human race."  It's that simple.

  Ron: I would pick up meaning in simple lines of certain songs you wrote and
       think it was profound but then I'd wonder if I wasn't reading too much
       into it.  For example, "I Turned Into A Martian."  What were you
       trying to convey?
 Glenn: Nothing.

  Ron: I read a lot into that.
Glenn: Anything that's very simple can mean a lot.

  Ron: But you just said that song means nothing.
Glenn: You don't understand.  It's there for people who want it.  A lot of
       the lyrics are left up to the listener to figure out so the song
       becomes an individual song for each person.  If someone goes "This is
       just stupid", that just shows the limit of their intelligence.  Some
       of my songs have direct meanings, but I try to do the song so that if
       someone wants to listen to the record without thinking about it and
       just enjoy the music, they can.

  Ron: Does that hold true for your new stuff?
Glenn: Samhain is more real than the Misfits.

  Ron: Isn't your guitarist from Minor Threat?
Glenn: Our ex-guitarist was from Minor Threat.  We don't think too highly of
       Lyle, he's like Robo Jr.
Eerie: He just didn't fit in and he didn't put out.  He didn't want to do
       anything.  He'd always wear his Minor Threat shirt.  He made sure
       everyone knew who he was.  His idea of getting into a song was moving
       the neck of the guitar around.
       (Glenn and Eerie go into their imitation of Lyle)  "You guys are going
       to love me because I'm playing an A minor arpeggio.  Later you're
       going to say that I was amazing."
Glenn: We're not really into that.  Lyle was a really nice guy when you
       talked to him, but he'd get this attitude like, "Well I'm a star and
       I'm doing you guy a big favor."  The first rehearsal went well but the
       next time he came up from D.C. his attitude had changed.  By then we
       already had the Rock Hotel show booked so we just played it cool, did
       the show, and never called him again.  We got Pete from Mourning Noise
       on guitar now.  (To Eerie) Hey, Those weights are too heavy for the
       cat!  Be careful.
Eerie: They're too heavy for you.
Glenn: What are you talking about Mr. Scarecrow.  I can put my hand around
       your arm.
Eerie: Maybe I enjoy being skinny.
Glenn: When I get some time I want to get back into wrestling.  I wrestled in
       school.  I'd like to get some bulk and some professional training so I
       can do wrestling holds on people when we tour.  People who jump on
       stage and knock things over.

  Ron: You're not into stage diving?
Glenn: Stage diving is OK as long as they don't mess up the equipment.  I
       don't like slam dancing because too many people who'd rather not get
       involved end up getting hit.  With stage diving, no one can get hurt
       unless everybody moves.

  Ron: (To Eerie) What do you do in your spare time?
Eerie: I like the Mets.
Glenn: Who cares about the Mets?
Eerie: C'mon, the Mets are gods.  I love Star Trek.  I wait all day for it
       and if it's not on I get real mad.  It's on every day and on Saturday
       it's on at 5:30, not 6:00 anymore.

  Ron: I haven't watched it in about a year.  I have too much to do.
Eerie: Well I have nothing to do.  I went to get my permit today, finally.  I
       got 7 wrong instead of 5.
Glenn: You failed?  That test is so simple.
Eerie: No it's not.  You want me to bring one home?
Glenn: Yeah.  Even Robo passed that test.
Eerie: So what.  That was a couple of years ago.  It's harder now.  I asked
       my old man a couple of the questions and he didn't know them either.
Glenn: We'll have to put a dunce cap on him and sit him in the corner.
Eerie: I'm going to punch you in the balls.
Glenn: Are you recording all of this?
Eerie: He'll probably listen to it later and say "I can't use this shit."

  Ron: You'd be surprised at what you can get out of this once it's edited.
       Maybe we'll get into something like before.
 Mike: Maybe we should leave.
Glenn: Maybe I'll fall asleep.

  Ron: Ok, I guess we should get going.
_____________________________________________________________________________

 Below the article is a comic strip of three people heckling Glenn Danzig
 with the following captions:

 HOW MUCH CAN YOU TAKE?  Based on a true story

 "Hey Punk Rock!  Can you see outta there?"
 "Yo, Vinnie, check this guy out.  heh, heh"