Rites of passage

Danzig's Samhain years

by Josh Kun

Samhain -- the Irish precursor of our Halloween, a night when the boundary between this world and all others dissolves -- provided both the inspiration and the name for Glenn Danzig's least-famous and least-rewarding band. It's hard to argue that Samhain were more than a way station on the road from the hardscrabble goth punk of Danzig's Misfits to the slicker heavy metal of the solo Danzig. Yet over the years it has become clear that they're Danzig's favorite version of himself. He's often talked about his attempts to undo Rick Rubin's civilizing influence on Danzig recordings in terms of making them sound "more like Samhain." You can see why on the video footage that's included in the new Box Set (Evilive/E-magine) that offers the four albums Danzig released under the Samhain name plus a disc of live performances and the video. Danzig's look in those days was fabulous -- not yet a weightlifting casualty, he was short and lean and compact, like a panther, his black hair sloping in front of his face in a kind of exaggerated art-deco swoop on the theme of Elvis's pompadour. He had not yet lost himself to paranoia and his own myth.

Samhain rose from the ashes of the Misfits when, in 1983, Danzig went to Washington, DC, to form a supergroup with former Minor Threat guitarists Brian Baker and Lyle Preslar. He already had a batch of songs, some of which he'd recorded for the final Misfits album, Earth A.D./Wolfsblood. But for the first and last time in his career, he was willing to engage in something approaching collaboration with equals. Preslar, though, didn't stay on past the first Samhain gig -- the supergroup was not to be. Danzig was headed for territory even more garish than the Misfits' mix of schlock and shock. Struggling, as he often did, for words to describe his music, he on occasion would say that Samhain were "more real" than the Misfits, whose songs filtered punk's misanthropy through the lens of horror b-movies. "We're into power," he told a 'zine called Hard Times in 1984. "That's basically what Samhain is about. Killing people and things like that." Of Initium, Samhain's full-length debut, he said, "Most of the album is love songs."

Love songs? Well, of a sort. One of the songs he was talking about is "Archangel," which he'd written in 1981 for Dave Vanian of the Damned. Like some of the best Misfits songs, it draws its melodic inspiration from doo-wop. The opening line plays off the conceit of cotton-candy courtship ballads -- "Heaven sent me here to you" -- and then casually rakes the convention over the coals: "And if you fear, you've reason to." That kind of cleverness, bordering on satire but not succumbing to it, summarizes what Danzig was after with the Misfits. The rest of "Archangel" offered a pretty clear distillation of what he wanted Samhain to do: "Open up the seven seals/The beast has come to claim the youth."

By 1987, Samhain had evolved from a blurrier, more claustrophobic version of the Misfits into a gloomy but muscular hard-rock band halfway between Bauhaus and AC/DC. That year, the producer Rick Rubin took an interest in the band and, with the exception of bassist Eerie Von, the entire line-up was ditched in favor of better musicians. Changing the name of the group to Danzig confirmed the obvious -- that Samhain, like the Misfits, was a one-man franchise.

Glenn Danzig, however, continued to tend the Samhain legacy. He was still recording under the Samhain name as late as 1990. The result, Final Descent, reflects a curious mix of financial self-interest and curatorial obsession: in addition to fresh material, it includes a new version of Samhain's 1985 mini-album Unholy Passion on which the guitar tracks have been re-recorded. This was nothing new: Danzig often reworked songs on Samhain albums even after their release, so that different pressings might have different versions of certain tracks.

And that's why it's so surprising to see so little new material on the Samhain box set. There are only four previously unreleased studio tracks, and we get nothing in the way of discographical detail. What's more, the live material is largely redundant, and not significantly superior to the bootlegs that've surfaced over the years. Two of the previously unissued rough demos -- "Twist of Cain" and "Possession" -- offer a preview of the first Danzig album, and they show just how much will Rubin would have to exert to trim the songs down to their stark, minimalist edges.

As for written revelations from Danzig, well, the Creator is mostly silent. His brief note at the end reads, in part: "Samhain was, for me, not just my `new beginning' or darker vision, but a darker, blacker understanding of the world." Or, as he told Hard Times back in 1984, "Life sucks. The world sucks. I really hate this place. Anything is better than this."