Who the fuck is that guy with the ZZ Top beard, Glenn Danzig pondered, and what’s he doing going crazy backstage at MY show? It was a sweltering night in July of 1986 in lower Manhattan, and Danzig had just stormed the stage of the Ritz with his beloved goth rock band Samhain. (The show was part of industry conference New Music Seminar.) You’d think the pasty-faced prince of darkness would be in higher spirits, happy to soak up all of Samhain’s hard-won praises, just as he’d done with earsplitting horror-punk progenitors Misfits earlier in the decade. Instead, lurking backstage just three years after launching his supposedly definitive project, the erstwhile horror punk found himself feeling restless and insatiable.
That’s when Danzig got around to talking with the mysterious beardo he spotted backstage earlier in the night. This much-hyped rap producer and label owner was one Rick Rubin. He’d come to the Ritz in search of talent for his Def American label; at the previous year’s conference, he’d discovered his inaugural signees, Slayer. He saw immense potential in Danzig and offered to sign him—provided the frontman cleaned house. “I don’t want any of these old guys,” Danzig recalls Rubin telling him. To Rubin’s ears, “[bassist] Eerie [Von Danzig] can’t play; the drummer can’t play.” His interests were pointed: “I never liked the Misfits,” he said. “All I want to do is sign you.”
Remarkably, Rubin’s backhanded compliments resonated. Danzig was up for pressing the reset button on Samhain—but only if bassist Eerie remained, and only if Rubin could convince drummer Chuck Biscuits (D.O.A., Black Flag) to sit behind the kit. The producer honored both requests, but insisted Danzig fire guitarist Pete “Damien” Marshall; John Christ eventually took his place. In 1988, Samhain 2.0 staged their triumphant return under a new name—the frontman’s own, so as to avoid royalty lawsuits—and released a self-titled album. Danzig is a thunderous debut that sharpened and streamlined the preceding project’s moody, blues-rock aesthetic without dialing back the darkness. Consider it the pinnacle of goth populism.
Danzig’s strength stems from his devilish voice: a deep, coarse, serpentine croon that fills the space from the bottom up, like a deluge of poisoned honey. Rubin rightly establishes the frontman’s vocals as Danzig’s true north, alongside pared-down arrangements that treat guitar riffs like samples. It makes Danzig’s primal energy all the more fearsome by contrast. Consider the wailing lick Christ doles out on the chorus to “Soul on Fire,” just after Danzig vows revenge on a cold-hearted “devil girl”—it’s not so much a performance as it is an aural exclamation point, a clever instrumental extension of the frontman’s not-so-subtle gravitas.
For the most part, Danzig functions as a monument—or rather, a haunted monolith—to raw power. Most of its grandiosity stems from the bandleader’s idealistic pivot away from Misfits’ acrid pulp fiction: his emergent lyrical obsession with Teutonic literature and the Bible, rather than the pillars of low-brow Americana such as comic books and monster movies. The Old Testament-inspired opener “Twist of Cain” lays bare the blueprint for Danzig as a whole: sultry blues licks, ostentatiously violent imagery, wry innuendos, and of course, that Evil Elvis swagger, all sneered syllables and swooping phrases.
When he’s not singing about ancient acts of fratricide or heartbreaking she-devils, Danzig conjures apocalyptic sex scenes. Much like Jim Morrison before him, he assumes the role of a corrupted avatar for the debauched fantasies woven into humanity’s DNA. Importantly, he maintains a level playing field between genders, exploring the power dynamics of coitus from the perspective of the dominant as well as the submissive. For every sadistic alpha-male control fantasy—“And I will worm inside your skull/Make you beg to be my whore,” crows Danzig on “Possession”—there’s a moment of emasculation. “She will make you scream/She’s death,” he sings on “She Rides,” trembling in awe before his lover. By forgoing the boneheaded locker-room-talk endemic to the hard rock world in favor of dynamic fluidity, Danzig doesn’t just challenge the canon—it transcends it.
“Mother,” the album’s centerpiece, and the biggest hit of Danzig’s career, is a soundtrack for the battle of the ages. It is a war waged not between God and Satan, but between rock’n’roll and Tipper Gore—the silent majority’s messiah, who sought to shield America’s youth from explicit music in the late ’80s, lest Prince, 2 Live Crew, and Twisted Sister drive Generation X to degeneracy. Danzig wrote the five-chord anthem as a rhetorical challenge to Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center, the committee who gave us the Parental Advisory sticker. “Al Gore wanted to tell people what they could listen to and what they couldn’t,” the musician later said of the organization, whom he went on to label as fascist, in 2013.
What better way to lure these people to the dark side than with a siren song inviting mom and dad to the party for an evening of bleeding and headbanging—and informing them, proudly and lustfully, that you’ll be taking their daughter on a nocturnal, presumably X-rated sojourn to your world? (Ironically, despite its lack of four-letter words, PMRC eventually slapped a sticker on Danzig anyway.) You can’t convert them all, but you can scare them shitless, and have fun doing it.
Nearly 30 years after its release, Danzig—the man, the band, the album—has become synonymous not only with “Mother,” but with heavy metal itself. That the jokes of a pair of dorky, animated heshers (“Beavis and Butthead”) were later key catalysts in Danzig’s ascent to icondom hardly scans as a coincidence. After all, though his legendary yowl gives his portraits their distinctive, shadowy form, it’s Danzig’s character—the transgressive machismo, the sullen hip-swinging, the overwhelming vampiric energy—that keeps us coming back for more. Danzig, then, is less an album than a countercultural idea. It is the sonic conduit by which we feeble mortals may commune with a resurrected, vengeful rock god and walk away with ears ringing, enlightened.
