The poster reads, “they said it would never happen,” which is a phrase that’s become less and less meaningful as more “never say never” reunions launch. The Replacements, Royal Trux, Axl and Slash, Pavement, the Pixies, Led Zeppelin, N.W.A, the Stone Roses, David Lee Roth and Van Halen—at this point, there are only a few bands left staunchly denying the possibility of a reunion. Even as the festival circuit cash grab and decades-belated reunion album has become a familiar trope, the revelation that Glenn Danzig will once again share a stage with Jerry Only comes as a legitimate, out-of-nowhere surprise. But it’s happening—this September at Riot Fest, Danzig is back in the Misfits.
Understandably, this is huge news for the band’s fans. Danzig was the aesthetic and creative powerhouse behindthe Misfits. He co-founded the band, wrote the songs, and fronted all of their records with an iconic, authoritative howl. Together with bassist Jerry Only and guitarist Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein (among other members of the band’s ever-rotating lineup), they made anthemic, shout-along pit music—punk records like 1982’s Walk Among Us that hold up to this day. What’s more, they became a symbol, crafting a horror punk aesthetic with an awesome logo that teenagers across the world aspired to mimic (more on that in a minute).
They had the songs, they had the look, and at the end of 1983, they were done. During a Detroit show, two nights before Halloween (appropriately enough), Danzig announced to the audience that it was the Misfits’ “last show ever.” The band parted ways, and the relationship between Danzig and Only seemed to fracture for good. While Danzig focused on his eponymous new band, Jerry Only and the other Misfits took legal action against Danzig. Lawsuits sprung up regarding songwriting royalties, and eventually in the 1990s, Only secured the “exclusive legal right to tour and record as the Misfits.”
While “the Misfits” stayed plenty active in the past two decades, their tenure post-Danzig has been chaotic. They’ve undergone tons of lineup changes, including Marky Ramone and Black Flag’s Dez Cadena. The band became honest-to-god wrestlers in a frankly embarrassing storyline during WCW’s downfall. Meanwhile, Danzig was cultivating a mythology of his own—as a notoriously prickly interview subject who didn’t always seem to love performing live. The two sides were suing each other as recently as two years ago over—but of course—Misfits merchandise rights. Meetings and rehearsals for a planned 2002 reunion fell apart, and three years later, Only’s Misfits Records label released a lounge tribute album to the Misfits. After Doyle revealed his plan to get Danzig and Only back on the same page in 2014, Only said he’d be up for it as long as Glenn doesn’t come back with “that dark, that real black stuff.”
Apparently, Danzig is leaving his real black dark stuff at home. The Misfits are coming back. It might only be for two nights before they part ways again, but it’s happening, and that’s worth getting excited about—so much so that a handful of Pitchfork staffers had remembrances from their own teenage Misfits fandom that they just needed to share.—Evan Minsker
Philip Sherburne
Our writer on the far left, with his short-lived Misfits cover band.
I was 16 when I spent the summer on a leafy college campus outside Boston, getting up to the usual 16-year-old things. I took gloomy black-and-white pictures in photography class; on humid afternoons, my friends and I would get lime rickeys and hang out in the town graveyard, swapping punk rock trivia. Occasionally we'd head into Harvard Square and load up on records at Newbury Comics or one of the stores around the corner that did a brisk business in Cure and Joy Division bootlegs. I have a dim recollection of catching Youth of Today with JFA at TT the Bears—surely one of the most mismatched bills in the history of hardcore.
Within our little summer-school society, we were the misfits, and we relished it. The normal kids wore tie-dye and went to prep school; we wore black and did gravity-defying things with Aquanet. (I have a distinct memory of giving myself theEraserheadhairdo while wearing an Eraserhead T-shirt.) So it's only fitting that when talent night came around, a few of us put together a Misfits cover band. I had dragged my Squier Stratocaster and a boxy little guitar amp all the way across the damned country, and in my dorm room, I worked out the chords to the songs we had decided to play. If memory serves me, it was "Hate Breeders" and "All Hell Breaks Loose," or maybe "Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight."
As for the show, we were truly terrible. In the middle of the chorus, I looked at my bandmates, and they were in another part of the song altogether. But our bassist managed to carry us pretty well on the strength of personality alone. He had one righteous devilock, and he made for an entirely convincing Jerry Only. (He was from the South, and he would regale us—with no small amount of pride—with tales of the conservative Christians who would come up to him on the street, begging him to choose a less Satanic hairdo.) It was all over in a three or four chaotic minutes of sloppy bar chords and out-of-time drums. Whatever everyone else thought of it, we walked off stage sweaty and aglow.
Looking back, I don't think any of us were quite the misfits we thought we were, or that we thought everyone else thought we were. Everybody feels like a freak at that age, no matter how outwardly well adjusted. That's probably a huge amount of the Misfits' own damn-near universal appeal. Songs like "Hate Breeders" may have scanned as fuck-off anthems, but as the title Walk Among Us made plain, everyone was welcome in the Misfits' B-movie freak show.
Jayson Greene
Our writer at 17, having a very Danzig Christmas.
The first guitar chords I ever learned—on my father's guitar, with its tie-dye strap, no less—were from the Misfits’ "Hybrid Moments.” I was 14 and played the violin, which did not require that you pressed down on the strings, so I was shocked at how much force a bar chord seemed to require. I printed out the chords from the only place that seemed to bother to offer tablature for a song that was essentially a finger painting, stood with the guitar around my shoulders and hesitantly practiced the very long-feeling distance from A back up to D. I crooned to myself, hesitantly, in falsetto.
The Misfits have been important to puerile teenagers since the moment they existed, and they probably always will be. They were about as scary as a Scooby-Doo cartoon, and half as intellectually challenging. Loving them was like binging on a box of Boo-Berry cereal that somehow never ran out, for two straight years. Finally I reeled away, slightly sickened by Danzig’s faux Elvis yowling about jackals and eagles and Martians, and didn't listen to the Misfits for 20 years. But they were a part of my DNA, now and forever, and I will always want to tell someone, somewhere, apropos of nothing: "The maggots in the iron lung won't copulate." (It seems a shame, really; the maggots should probably loosen up.)
Danzig and the members of the Misfits have spent a long, long time vigorously hating each other. God only knows how much money was dumped on each of them until they said, "OK, fine." I don't care, because kids don't care about stuff like that, and the Misfits are a kids band, now and forever.
Brandon Stosuy
I grew up in a small town in the New Jersey Pine Barrens (population: 800). It wasn’t a place you ran into other kids who liked punk or the Cure, or basically anything else I loved as a teenager. Besides my younger brother, I was a legit alienated loner. I had hair that fell over my face, mostly because it was good for hiding.
It’s a farming town where a lot of people worked at picking and processing blueberries and cranberries. I did for a time, too. One day, when I was deep into my teenage metal/punk/goth disaffection, and walking toward the town center—a motorcycle shop and a half-stocked corner store—I noticed that someone had spray-painted the Misfits’ crimson ghost skull on one of the cinderblock buildings near a blueberry field. I didn’t know who did it, and I never found out, but for years it kept me going when I felt most alone out there in the woods. That graffiti’ed Misfits logo became an important symbol of my desire to leave Chatsworth, in search of a bigger world where I wasn’t such a freak. I imagined the perpetrator as a kindred spirit wearing a torn Sonic Youth tee over ripped jeans and ratty sneakers—someone who, like me, stuck Reynolds Wrap on the end of their stereo's antenna to pick up the distant college station, rocking out as best they could to “Angelfuck.“
Once I got to high school, and made friends into the same stuff as me, I remember listening to the Legacy of Brutality compilation on cassette as my friend Josh and I drove to see the Ramones at City Gardens in Trenton. We played that tape over and over again; it was one of those moments—like when you’re driving through the mountains out West and suddenly find a barely-there radio station broadcasting some old punk favorite—where it seemed like somehow we’d created our own little world in his crappy Impala.
As I got older, the Misfits lost a lot of that original mystery and power. Danzig was gone, yet the group continued to play without him—and with increasingly watered-down lineups. The nadir was maybe when, in the early 2000s, Danzig started a fight with Danny Marianino of his opening act North Side Kings, and subsequently got knocked out. It was captured on video, and it felt a bit like watching a kid getting his assed kicked outside the lunchroom. You got a knot in your stomach, and you wanted to help. After awhile, it was hard for me to take anything Danzig did seriously, and I wasn’t alone: Even a basic trip to the pet store to buy cat food and kitty litter made him into anonline laughing stock.
But then, recently, something changed. My youngest son, Jake, is a huge Misfits fan. He’s three. He was first attracted to the band because of that skeleton logo and the song “Halloween.” He assumed the group's members actually were skeletons. To get an idea of Jake: He once told a barber he wanted his hair “black and back like a vampire,” and when we had a “family share” day at school, he asked us to play his classmates songs by the Misfits, Ramones, and Black Sabbath while we all ate homemade pumpkin bread (which he likes to imagine is made from jack-o-lanterns). The other day, his teacher very fondly said to me, “Every day is Halloween for Jake.”
We just celebrated the kid’s third birthday, which we put on in the back room of a friend’s bar that includes a small stage and big speakers. A dozen of his friends were there, some wearing super-hero masks. I put together a carefully edited soundtrack of Ramones and Misfits songs without cursing or too-scary images in them for the day, and it was amazing watching Jake strike up these very serious punk-rock poses in the middle of the room. It was maybe the proudest I’ve ever seen him: He was sharing “his” music with his friends and it clearly made him very happy. Jake is essentially drawn to the Misfits for the same reasons I was—just a lot earlier—and seeing them through his eyes has made them more interesting to me again. I’m honestly glad Jake got into punk before his teenage years— he’s shown me that you can love these bands and their imagery and also be a bubbly, smiling social butterfly. Who knows where he’ll be in 10 or 12 years, but for now, it’s great watching your kid own his eccentricities without being such a self-serious grump. I feel like Danzig could learn something from Jake, too.
These upcoming reunion shows will probably be terrible, but I feel like it's my duty to take Jake to one of them. That said, part of me wants to keep him away from it all. This way, the band can continue living in his imagination, where they're perfect punk-rock skeletons, and not just some old guys looking for a paycheck.