in the doorway

Despite the misguided devotion of Hot-Topic-mall-punk kids that just like the theatrical look and campy lyrics of the Misfits, I’m still a big fan. But instead of feeling rebellious or counter to the norm singing along to the baby-killing and mother-raping lines of “Last Caress,” I just feel cool shaking to the simple rock.

The band’s sound is full of mirth and malice. Directly influenced by the simple chord progressions and vocal stylings of 1950s rock and pop but injected with a heady dose of doom and gloom, it ups the distortion and changes the lyrical content to something more sadistic than saccharine.

Though the Misfits’ contemporaries regarded them as KISS wannabes (New Jersey meatheads who wore weird costumes and makeup to make up for their lack of talent), audiences were a little more forgiving. While the mainstream ignored them, they soon gained a small but loyal following that was eventually dubbed the Fiend Club by singer and chief songwriter Glenn Danzig.

With a revolving cast of musicians, the band played shows in NYC and embarked on short tours around the Northeast. They recorded an album’s worth of material in 1978 that was sporadically released as a series of singles and EPs but didn’t see the light of day as an LP until 1997. Their first official album Walk Among Us was released in 1982 and made use of horror and sci-fi film-inspired themes and imagery. It’s the kind of music that might upset your parents if they heard you listening to it. With song titles like “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight” and lyrics like “hack the heads off little girls and put them on my wall,” it’s clear that the band was really trying to separate itself from the pack. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, nobody really took notice and the Misfits remained under the radar before Danzig left in the mid-1980s.

LISTEN TO THE STATIC AGE ALBUM. LISTEN TO THE SIMPLE COOLNESS OF THE ONE-NOTE GUITAR SOLO ON “WE ARE 138.” LISTEN TO DANZIG’S TRADEMARK BELLOWING CROON ON “SKULLS.” LISTEN TO THE POP SENSIBILITY OF “ANGELFUCK,” “HYBRID MOMENTS” AND “SOME KINDA HATE.”