The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (155 page)

The singer – who had complained of stomach pains the previous week – was found unconscious on the floor of his tour bus and died later from an abdominal aneurysm. Conway Twitty’s estate shortly thereafter became the subject of a distasteful and very public dispute between members of the families of his three ex-wives.

Monday 28

G G Allin

(Kevin Michael Allin - Lancaster, New Hampshire, 29 August 1956)

The Murder Junkies

(Various acts)

A motley collection of punks, thrill-seekers and deadbeats gathered at East Village’s Gas Station venue on the night of 27 June, eagerly anticipating the return of the world’s most notorious underground rock act (after a three-year custodial sentence for the onstage stabbing of a female fan). The converted service-station venue was a fitting one for a unique ‘artist’ like Allin: vast sculptures of car parts stretched upwards towards the damp ceiling, the pervading odour was of sweat, alcohol and stale gasoline. Then, there he was – naked as a jaybird and aching to corrupt yet another gathering of onlookers. Once again, Allin – gnashing and reeling after consuming a bag of cocaine that afternoon – uttered his infamous promise of four years earlier that he would commit suicide by gunshot before them on stage, but repeated that his audience must wait until a suitable Halloween night for such a spectacle. No, tonight, they would just have to make do with a compilation of Allin’s greatest hits – obscenity, vomiting, self-mutilation, onstage nudity and defecation, and a no-holds-barred physical assault on those attending. Within twenty minutes, when the soundman pulled the plug on the show (as was standard procedure), several audience members had been attacked with the microphone, a photographer knocked unconscious and a woman smeared in Allin’s excrement. The show ended in pandemonium; Allin then threw himself at a door, shattering the glass, lacerating his body and sending shards everywhere. A riot ensued, patrons smashing furniture and windows, bouncers attacking the protagonists with rocks – and the soundman setting his pit bull on anyone and everyone within reach. Minutes later, armed police added to the chaos. A bloodied, messed-up Allin somehow skulked away unnoticed along with his entourage, none of whom batted an eyelid at this all-too-familiar scene. Back at the apartment of his pal Johnny Puke, Allin – thanks largely to a vast quantity of heroin – calmed down at last. Leaving him to sleep off the effects of the drugs and his injuries, Puke, his girlfriend and Liz Mankowski, Allin’s 17-year-old fiancée (yes, somehow he had one), left the singer to sleep. By morning his wretched body was very cold – and very dead.

‘He was all purple. He had snot coming out of his nose and blood coming out of his mouth - and a big fucking scowl on his face. Typical G G really.’

Merle Allin, G G’s brother, on discovering his corpse

A character who could almost have been contrived for this book’s rumination, G G Allin always claimed his shocking act was ‘situationist’ and not a result of his frankly bizarre upbringing. Originally christened Jesus Christ Allin by his over-zealously religious father, the future shock-rocker and his brother and mother were forbidden by Allin Sr to speak after dark – some rumours even suggesting that the man had dug graves for his family in the basement, threatening their execution and his suicide if they refused to comply with his pious order! Needless to say, Allin’s mother eventually filed for divorce and changed her son’s name (his brother had already shortened ‘Jesus’ to ‘G G’), but by then Allin was already behaving in a disturbed manner. He was to find some outlet for his anger in the primal rock ‘n’ roll of The Stooges and New York Dolls – though the performances of these bands were far from sufficiently extreme in Allin’s eyes. As a young adult, there appeared every chance he might revert to a normal life (Allin married and fathered a daughter) but by 1980 he left this domesticity behind, emulating early hero Jerry Lee Lewis by taking up with a girl of thirteen. Allin’s music at this stage still just about fitted the description: with The Jabbers, he performed a hybrid of early Stones and Sex Pistols-styled rock ‘n’ roll, though the singer learned before long that it was not his music that attracted attention but his snarling stage performance – which, accordingly, became more and more alarming (as would his deeply violent and misogynistic lyrics). Apart from a stint recording with former MC5 members Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson, Allin fronted more ludicrously offensive bands by the year, bearing names like Afterbirth, The Drugwhores, Sewer Sluts, Scumfucs and, finally, The Murder Junkies. Allin – whose motto was ‘My mind is a machine gun, my body the bullets and the audience my target’ – recorded some twenty albums in his lifetime, though none of these bears much revisiting. He’ll always be better remembered for countless performances such as the one described above – and a long history of incarceration, usually for drug possession, public obscenity, violent conduct or parole violation.

So, instead of the dramatic spectacle he had envisaged, G G Allin’s passing was more a pitiful echo of so many rock ‘n’ roll deaths of the past. That he ever managed to impress respected names in US alternative music is frankly remarkable, yet among his supporters can be found Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore – both of whom claimed they’d wanted to work with the lunatic vocalist – as well as older-schoolers like Dee Dee Ramone
(
June 2002)
and Allin’s shock-rock contemporary Wendy O Williams
(
April 1998),
both of whom have also since died.

JULY

Saturday 3

Dave Insurgent

(David Rubinstein - Queens, New York, 5 September 1964 )

Reagan Youth

An even grimmer tale would affect New York’s punk scene soon after. Influential punk band Reagan Youth had been formed by Jewish-American singer David Rubinstein (who later became Dave Insurgent) and his guitarist friend Paul Bakija (Paul Cripple) while the pair were still at high school in Rego Park. The band never made it big, but they were for many years a hot live attraction on Manhattan’s punk scene. Their ironic use of Nazi/Ku Klux Klan get-up notwithstanding, Reagan Youth graduated to regular appearances at CBGB’s with their songs about peace politics. A lack of commercial acceptance was frustrating to Reagan Youth, who appropriately disbanded at the end of President Reagan’s term of office. The group – mainly Insurgent – actively dealt in smack, but more serious was the fact that the singer’s fiancée, Tiffany Bresciani, had moved into prostitution to fund her own addiction.

On the evening of 24 June, she and Insurgent made their usual trip to Houston Street to meet a regular client, the singer waiting near by until Bresciani reappeared. On this occasion, however, she did not return. Four days of apprehension were finally ended when Bresciani’s body was found in the back of a truck that had been pulled over by police. The driver was Joel Rifkin – Long Island’s most notorious serial killer, whose prime target was prostitutes, of whom he murdered seventeen. For Dave Insurgent, the horror and despair proved too much. Just one month before, his mother had died in a car accident; now the atrocity that befell his lover (and his own spiralling heroin problem) pushed the singer over the edge. Insurgent died from a deliberate overdose of antidepressants just days later.

Wednesday 7

Mia Zapata

(Louisville, Kentucky, 25 August 1965)

The Gits

All she wanted from life was ‘a cabin in which to live, a Jeep to drive and a sheepdog to ride shotgun’. Mia Zapata’s was a powerful voice of conscience break-ing out of an increasingly indulgent Seattle underground scene; many thought she had the stamina to make it big – but, as the above suggests, her aspirations tended more to the spiritual. The figurehead of bluesy punk-rockers The Gits – alongside Matt Fred Dresdner (with whom she formed the band in 1986 at college in Ohio, bass), Joe Spleen (guitar) and Steve Moriarty (drums) – Zapata was frequently categorized as a part of the burgeoning grunge and Riot Grrl (or ‘Foxcore’) movements, though the singer was always quick to distance herself from what she considered a fad. But, regardless of her dismissal of the music business, in 1993 – with a strong debut album,
Frenching the Bully
(1992), released on C/Z and a second,
Enter the Conquering Chicken
(1993), near completion – The Gits seemed on the verge of a major breakthrough anyway.

The socially adept Zapata enjoyed frequent nights out with friends and fellow musicians, and on the evening of 6 July 1993, she spent some hours doing what she enjoyed most – drinking into the night at Seattle’s Comet Tavern. At around 2.30 am, Zapata bade farewell to a friend she had briefly visited on Capitol Hill and went in search of a cab home. Mia Zapata’s body was discovered dumped in a dead-end street about an hour later by a streetwalker named Charity, who described the singer as lying in a cross formation with arms splayed. Zapata, it transpired, had been viciously assaulted, raped and then strangled with the drawstrings of her own sweatshirt.