GG ALLIN ROCK AND ROLL TERRORIST HOTLINE TO THE UNDERGROUND RETURNS

 

HOTLINE TO THE UNDERGROUND

JOE VIGLIONE RELIVES LIFE WITH GG

 

 GG ALLIN – Rock and Roll Terrorist

 The Graphic Life of Shock Rocker G G ALLIN

 + a second GG ALLIN Rock and Roll Terrorist Activity and Coloring Book – both written

 By Reid Chancellor

 

The Bizarre World of GG Allin resurrected in print, and here in the Hotline to the Underground which gave GG some of his very first ink!

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 Iggy Pop writes on the cover of the main book: “Reid Chancellor brings a Real America story to your eyeballs, one you can’t put down.  The key is the affection and respect he gives his subject.”

 

Funny for the Igg to use the word “respect” to the highly disrespectful G.G. Allin.   

 

When GG Allin walked into my kitchen in the early 1980s to give me his first 45 RPM from Destiny Studios, up the road in Wilmington, he was in his suit and tie to talk to me about his new release.  I was probably writing it up for Hotline to the Underground, this very column over forty years ago.  GG was not yet the character portrayed in  this book.  He was the politest rock and roller, in fact, because no one showed up to my office/home on Dragon Court in Woburn in a suit and tie. The paradox is stunning four decades later. 

 

The 192 pages from Microcosm Publishing, Portland, Oregon are both an enigma as well as a very logical extension of GG’s odd, bizarre and intentionally insane life.

 

Proverbs 23:7 In the King James Version, “… as a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

 

I never thought that the suit and tie guy in my kitchen REALLY BELIEVED he was Iggy Pop incarnate rolling around on broken glass. When GG performed with my band at The Paradise Theater, Boston’s Best Concert Club, he was still tame, taking a beer bottle, euphemistically self-abusing the bottle, and spraying the ale into the audience which included little old ladies and little old men watching their relatives in rock bands on stage.   It was a memorable and unexpected moment, but tame in comparison to what GG would become.

 

The book is humorous in that to me it is not the guy I knew who autographed his Always Was, Is and Always Shall Be and gave me two extra copies.  The black and white journey which the author claims is “Based on true events, hearsay and some of the weirdest things I’ve ever read” is something that GG’s sick mind must be appreciating down there somewhere in the depths of hell.   This is a true labor of love, with GG crucified somewhere towards the last 1/8^th of the book.  But Jim Morrison did it first on the cover of L.A. Woman…Jimbo as the savior on a telephone pole. GG – to this critic – was not as much an original as someone who took Morrison and Iggy antics as far as he could push such stage acts.  Would there be a Marilyn Manson without Alice Cooper?  A Lady Gaga without Madonna?    GG definitely had a need for infamy that led to inelegant decadence.  In bringing out of control to a new level his life is reflected upon in this black and white graphic novel,which is something for him to be proud of.  Seeing the “rumors” come to life naked, both middle fingers in the air and a big F.U. to the audience, is antiseptic, actually.  You can read it like an Archie or Daredevil comic in the safety of your home and not getting sprayed by the beer bottle at the Paradise. The emerging thoughts of taking the envelope and pushing it hard. 

 

Recently I helped Blood Orange Records, the label issuing GG music, with some promotion to college and internet radio.  My God the hostility I received from some DJ’s, absolutely refusing to play anything GG.   Through that experience I realize that some people will find these two books abhorrent.  They won’t even crack the covers in a book store. They will RUN from them which only adds to the GG Allin legend.  He got a response, like Howard Stern…whether positive or negative, GG Allin in wanting so much to be known, achieved his goal.  Problem is, dead and buried, unless he is watching from that very warm place down below, was the cost of fame worth the price?

 

Hey, William Shakespeare plagiarized the Bible with his “as a man thinketh in his heart so is he.”  Many rock and rollers idolize those who came before.  GG Allin was playing the part and suddenly, it stopped being play and became him. Scary.  So take out your blood red crayons and have some fun with his coloring book.