Glenn Danzig
- Story by J. Bennett
Decibel has a power lunch with Evil Elvis
"They used to put mint in the iced tea here," Glenn Danzig is saying. "Now they don't … fuckin' assholes." We're at the Gumbo Pot, a New Orleans-style eatery at the outdoor Farmer's Market in West Hollywood. Danzig sips his iced tea and smiles. "Wait, no—there is mint in it." Then he carves into a slab of Cajun meatloaf and starts telling us about the time Bill Clinton sent the FBI after him. He's wearing a faded black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the logo of his comic book company, Verotik, on the back. His black leather jacket is draped over the back of his chair, but he doesn't remove his mirrored sunglasses during the entire 90-minute lunch. When he's finished eating, he picks at his corn muffin with shockingly long, pointy fingernails and starts feeding the birds. (He's really, really into the birds, by the way.) His publicist arrives, and Danzig shows her a finished copy of Black Aria II, his new album of neo-classical compositions. "What kind of stores do they have here?" she asks, "I haven't been here since I was a kid." Danzig immediately points to his right and says, "There's a great candle shop over there." Then he goes back to feeding the birds. Somewhere, Satan is weeping.
I know Danzig is the name of a Baltic port sacked by the Germans in World War II, but why'd you pick it as a stage name?
It's actually a family name. It's a long story that no one likes to hear because it talks about some of the injustices done to Germans and Italians in this country during World War II. People think the Japanese were the only people persecuted here, but there were internment camps for Germans and Italians, too, because at the beginning of the war, Italy was part of the Axis powers until Mussolini was killed by the people, and then Italy went to the side of the Allies. So, you know, it was a family name that I changed back to.
Last year, you said you weren't going to tour anymore, but you're about to head out on the next Blackest of the Black tour as we speak. Are you pulling an Ozzy?
No. I'm trying to experiment with flying home every two or three days. This tour is just West Coast—we're not going to the East Coast—so I agreed to try this to see if I can deal with it. I won't be bouncing around on a bus for a month or two, and any flight that I'll have to do is two hours, tops. So we'll see if it works. I'm not pulling an Ozzy, but I'll tell you, if could snap my fingers and just be onstage every night, I'd play forever—until I die. But that's not reality. [Laughs] At some point, I'm sure I'll just end up doing a show in New York and a show in LA every year.
Your bass player on this tour is Steve Zing. Are you thinking about playing some Samhain songs?
Yeah, we'll probably do a Samhain song. But that was something I even did back on the Lucifuge tour. The Soundgarden guys would wanna hear a Samhain song, so we'd pull out "To Walk the Night" or "Mother of Mercy"—so I'm sure we'll probably learn one or two just to have in case we do an encore.
Are you in touch with the original Danzig guys at all? I heard John Christ got into a really bad motorcycle accident recently.
Someone told me it was a car accident, but it might've been a motorcycle accident. I heard his arm almost got ripped off. I only heard about it a couple weeks ago, but I guess it happened a couple months ago. The other guys I don't really hear from. Chuck [Biscuits] called the office maybe two or three years ago, but that was the first time I'd heard from him in ages. You know, my attitude with that is that they made their choice; they said some fucked up things about me that weren't true just so they could get some money, and it all blew up in their faces. Here I am, all these years later, still doing music, and they're… wherever they are. Kinda lost, I guess. My attitude is that you make your own bed and then you lie in it. Since the Misfits, there've been so many musicians I've played with, and I don't keep in touch with any of them, really. Doyle and Steve, yeah, but that's it. I have no reason to talk to anyone else. We have nothing in common—we played in a band together for a while and that's it. People ask me about Chuck, but you know, Joey [Castillo], who's in Queens [of the Stone Age] now, was my drummer for seven years—much longer than Chuck. And actually, you know, I do talk to Joey once in a while.
We've been hearing about your movie, Ge Rouge, for a while now. What's the status of it?
I'm waiting to hear if it's green-lit or not. But I've written other movies, so I'm probably gonna just finance an indie movie myself and kick it around at festivals. That's the way I do my label, you know? Fuck everybody—I don't fuckin' care. People don't understand that the only thing you really need a major label for—or in this case, a production company—is distribution. If VOD [Video on Demand] becomes as big as everybody thinks it is, the movie studios might be out of business. If anybody can make a movie, have their own little VOD website, and sell it, the studios will be up shit's creek. I mean, you don't even have to manufacture anything.
You don't have to rewrite anything, either.
Oh, man—you don't even know what I've been going through with this Ge Rouge script. I've already told one production company to fuck off because there's been so many re-writes, and it's never enough. They're always asking you to add stupid scenes. They'll be like, "Can we have a girl in a bikini here?" It's like, "The movie is set in 1905. I don't think they had bikinis back then."
So you're working on another script?
Yeah, I'm finishing up a script for a road rage movie about these stoner kids—all they listen to is stoner rock and heavy metal—and they just go around fucking people up. [Laughs] That's what the whole thing consists of—getting fucked up, driving around, listening to black metal, death metal, anything heavy, finding yuppies and fucking them up. Right now, I'm just calling it The Ragers, but it's funny because when you pitch it to studios, it's always some guy with an earpiece who drives like an asshole and goes, "I don't know if I like that one." It's like, "Yeah, because it's about you, motherfucker."
I read somewhere that one of your favorite movies is Cooley High. Is that true?
Yeah. That's more my experience growing up than, like, American Graffiti. Some of the stuff from American Graffiti are my experience—like when those guys jack the pinball machine—but the rest of it isn't. [Laughs] I can relate to Cooley High more because where I grew up was more of an urban area, and we were always getting in trouble. You know—you're from Boston. My grandmother lived in Revere Beach—I used to spend my summers up there. It's not "Beantown"—it's violent.
You can always tell people have no idea what they're talking about when they say "Beantown."
Yeah, I still hate people like John Kerry, these rich Cambridge fags. I can't stand them. When I saw him running, I thought, this is the kind of guy I grew up hating—a rich, spoiled, Boston dork. Everything he got in his life, he paid for.
Except for getting shot at in Vietnam…
Big deal. My best friend's brothers were all in Vietnam, and they didn't get anything for it. Look—Bush is a dummy, and everybody knows he tried to avoid the draft. But you know what? Every fuckin' person I knew when I was a kid tried to avoid the draft! I think that's fuckin' smart. My older brothers and all their friends were like, "Fuck that—I ain't going to war." And they'd do whatever they'd have to do—pretend they were fags, say they were drug addicts, whatever. So it's funny that the far left yells at Bush for not going to Vietnam when half of them didn't go, either.
Are you a Republican?
No, I'm in the middle. There's no party for people like me. I think women should have the right to have an abortion, but I also believe people should be killed for murdering indiscriminately. I believe in the gas chamber and the electric chair. I also believe in instant justice.
What do you mean by that?
I should be able to kill somebody if they fuck with me. [Laughs]
Do you mean in eye-for-an-eye kind of a way, or do you mean, like, if someone stole something of yours, you should be able to kill them?
No, not if they stole something. But you know what? If somebody broke into my house, they'd be dead. I don't care what anyone has to say. Because I'm originally from Boston, I grew up being a Democrat, you know, but I think the party has changed so much. People just can't relate to it anymore. I don't think people are really Republicans—but people who work nine-to-five and bust their asses are getting trampled on. That's why the Republicans are in office.
The Republicans are trampling on working people, too. Every tax cut Bush has made only helps Dick Cheney and ten of his friends.
The bottom line is that both parties are corrupt. Both parties should be killed. [Laughs] What happens is, you vote for somebody just because you want them to win, and that's retarded. One of the most annoying things I've ever heard, which both the Democrats and Republicans say, is "Don't vote for that person—you'd just be wasting your vote." It's not a wasted vote—you're casting your choice. Whether that person wins or not doesn't matter. You're letting your voice be heard.
Do you think votes really, count, though? With Diebold running all the elections, it seems unlikely.
When this country started, there used to be like four or five different parties, but the Democrats and Republicans conspired to get rid of the other parties. They're happy flipping Congress and the White House back and forth to each other. They might call each other names, but they're united on one thing: They don't want an indie party. And that's what the problem here is. They make the people who start these parties fight each other. It's like Sun Tsu's The Art Of War: Why fight your enemy when someone else can fight them for you? And that was the smart thing about Ronald Reagan. He let Saddam Hussein fight Iran, which was clearly a bigger threat than Iraq. You know I don't like organized religion, and Islam is the most barbaric, regressive, archaic religion of them all. So is Catholicism, by the way—and the Jewish religion is retarded also. They're all retarded. Any religion that tells you "Go kill someone else," is not a good religion. And I don't like the thing where you're not allowed to say anything bad about Allah or Islam. People talk shit in America and all over the world about God and Jesus every fucking day. Are we gonna kill all them? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You go to these countries, and people are getting killed for this stuff every day. The Taliban were fucking beheading people on a soccer field, dude. [Laughs] You could never do that in this country. People's perspective is so off-kilter. We shouldn't be upset with that, but we should be upset about something frivolous here. How can we have women's rights here but no women's rights in other countries? Oh, well, they have a different religion. Fuck their religion. It boggles my mind. I've always said that religion is a great thing if it gives people strength and gets 'em through the day. Believe what you want, you know? I see it my way, you see it your way, but I stay out of your face and you stay out of my face. But when it's organized, it becomes a business, it becomes a political power—and then it's like Iran, where no one's allowed to read what the state doesn't want you to read. That's a problem. Luckily, we have, you know, no mixing of church and state. If we didn't, we'd have some problems, because there're always some religious crazies trying to force their way of thinking.
I think that's already happening here. The religious right obviously has influence on Republican public policy.
It's not just Christianity—it's Islam, it's the Jewish religion, too. Look at what's going on in the Middle East. The Muslims hate the Jews and the Jews hate the Muslims. And we back both of them. That's the problem. And it's not just recently. We've been there for centuries now. You can go back to the British—they colonized all of it before it was called Iran and Iraq, back when it was still called Persia. As much as people wanna talk shit about the United States, there is definitely more tolerance here for other nationalities and religions than in other countries. People aren't walking around here killing Christians, but they do that in Middle Eastern countries. People aren't walking around killing Muslims here, either. People get upset about the 3,000 soldiers that have died in Iraq, but do you know how many people die here every month from gang violence? Thousands—all over the country—and no one says anything. Because it's gangs, and it's people getting caught in the crossfire. The attitude here is similar to the Japanese attitude, which is, well, if you're involved with these people and you get hurt, it's your own fault. And people think, you know, we don't need these people anyway, so let them kill themselves. If a couple of innocent people get caught in the crossfire, no one cares. It infuriates me. We give billions of dollars to other countries to help feed starving people, but we've got starving people here who actually contribute to the infrastructure of this country, who maybe right now are down on their luck and they can't eat. We feed people across the world, but not our own people. I care more about the people here in this country than I do about the people in other countries, and if people don't like that, they can go fuck themselves... We're talking politics, though, and I'd rather talk about music. The government doesn't like it when I talk politics, anyway. [Laughs]
What do you mean by that?
Bill Clinton sent the FBI after me. I was playing Roseland in New York City around '92, and Bill Clinton had just won the election. I was on my friend's radio show that afternoon, and he was talking about how REM and all these bands were playing the inauguration. As a joke, he asked me if I was going, and I said, 'Not unless I can bring a machine gun.' And then I started talking about how Al Gore's wife started the PMRC and how they want to destroy music. I was like, fuck that. But somebody called the FBI and said I threatened the president. So they raided the radio station. Then they broke down my friend's—the radio station guy's—apartment while he was sleeping and put him in handcuffs. Then they raided the offices of Def American while I was on tour. My security guy at the time was Jesse James from West Coast Choppers—he was my security guy since the first Danzig tour. I forget where we were, but he came backstage and goes, 'Guess what? The FBI's looking for you.' I was like, 'Bullshit.' Then the girl from my label called and said the FBI wanted to me to turn myself in. They followed us from city to city on that tour and came after us with guns. After a month or two of going back and forth, they realized it was going to become this big public thing and finally figured it wasn't worth it. Clinton was trying to have me killed. A friend of mine knows a lot of people in the government and said there was like 14 files on me, six of which can only be accessed by upper-echelon people. People talk about the government having files on John Lennon—they've got files on everybody. Everybody. Even before the Clinton thing, the FBI would follow us around on the Lucifuge tour and tape all our shows. We weren't allowed to touch 'em.
Why'd they do that?
I don't know. I guess I say some wild stuff sometimes.
But, to them, you're just a guy in a rock band.
No. To them, I'm a guy in a rock band, so I have a voice.
How much pleasure do you derive from the fact that you wrote one of the most popular stripper songs ever in "She Rides"?
Actually, I don't really go to strip clubs. Usually, one day per tour I'll take the crew—the techs and the light guys—out and treat them to a strip club, and that's really the only time I go. Plus, you know, I hate rap music. Or at least, I hate new rap music. But yeah, I've seen girls use a bunch of the songs—"Mother" I've seen a lot. It's cool. When Danzig first started, that's where rock bands would hang out, but now it's all rap music.
So you're not the kind of dude who has a stripper pole in his house?
No. [Laughs] That's a good idea, though.
When I interviewed you many years ago-probably during the height of your legal wrangling with Rick Rubin-you said, "I don't even wanna tell you what I wanna do to Rick Rubin." Do you still feel that way?
Eventually, you know, my life being what it is, and my attitude toward karma as an instructive force—and harnessing that, and turning and unleashing it on people is a force of reckoning that's bound to do some damage. When I bring it back and pull the reins in on it, it's not out of weakness, it's out of, "Okay, here's you're chance to take a breath and do what's right. If not, I'm letting ago of the reins again." And so Rick is in a great situation right now. He needs to atone.
Do you anticipate any atonement on his part?
We'll see. If someone truly wants to make amends, that's great. If not, forces can be very destructive. [Laughs]
How much stock do you personally put into those forces?
I don't know. [Laughs] What do you think? What do you believe?
I think karma can be a bitch when it wants to be, but I don't think it necessarily comes down on every person it should come down on.
It always does. If we're talking about someone like Rick, there's a lot that can happen there.
Because he has his fingers in so many pies.
Well, just because of what he's done to so many artists. [Laughs] At the end of the day, you have to live with yourself. I'm comfortable with where I'm at. I might not have made the best monetary decisions. I could've written "Mother" for another 20 years after the original, but I didn't wanna flog a dead horse. To me, music is still an art, it's a craft. I love it, and I won't destroy it by only doing it for money. Of course, money is great, because it helps you be free, but there's really not that much money in music anymore. Not many people are getting rich off it. Not anymore, anyway. That's why I do my own comic book company, too, you know? We don't do superhero comics, so we're not selling a jillion copies. We're doing crazy, wild stuff for people that are disenfranchised. They don't see that kind of stuff in other comic books or art books. And I'm one of the disenfranchised—that's why I started the company. And that's why I do music. That's why I started a punk band. I hated radio bands. Back in the day, when you listened to FM radio, they would never play Black Sabbath. They were selling all kinds of records and playing arenas, but FM radio wouldn't play Black Sabbath. We were talking about politics earlier—I'm disenfranchised. And there're a lot of people who are—they're not catered to by political parties or radio stations or big comic book companies. They're disenfranchised—throwaways. That's my frame of reference.
What happened with Tommy Victor?
Tommy's a great guy, but he had a lot of little demons that we tried to… You know, I still like Tommy, and he's a great guitar player, and we tried to make it work, but it's just not gonna work until he gets his thing together…
Is it true that you were actively trying to recruit Justin Broadrick as your guitar player at one point?
Yeah, but I'm glad it didn't work out, because he won't get on the plane for tour. I like a lot of Godflesh's earlier releases, but then it started getting really…strange. I couldn't listen to it.
Do you have a release date for The Lost Tracks of Danzig?
It was supposed to be November 28th, but I'm threatening to leave the label, so we'll see.
There's a Germs cover on Lost Tracks, but I was kinda surprised to see that it has David Bowie and T. Rex covers, too. I would have never figured you were into those dudes.
T. Rex is one of my favorites. When I was a kid, the stuff that I listened to was the New York Dolls, Slade, T. Rex—all that stuff. I liked Lou Reed more than I liked Bowie, but Bowie wrote a great song with Giorgio Moroder called "Cat People" that people kinda don't really know. It's one of my favorite songs. I think we recorded "Cat People" at a session between Danzig 6 and Danzig 7. The Germs song was done during the Satan's Child sessions, and the T. Rex cover was done during How the Gods Kill.
Word is, you're planning to do a record with Jerry Cantrell and Hank Williams III.
Yeah, that's a blues record I wanna do—it probably won't be a Danzig record. I don't know if it's going to happen, though, because Cantrell is busy doing Alice In Chains. I did a thing with Hank on 6.06.06 [at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood]—I came out for like five songs. We did a song that Hank wrote; I rearranged one of Hank's granddad's songs—"Angel of Death"—in a bluesy, Danzig-kinda style; we did "Killer Wolf"; we did "Twist of Cain." Then two of the Alkaline Trio guys came out with us and we did a rockabilly version of the Misfits' "American Nightmare." It was pretty cool. I'm already working on a song with Hank—it sounds like serial killer music, really dark and creepy. [Laughs]
It's been two years since the North Side Kings video hit the Internet. How do you think it's affected your fans' perception of you?
I don't know—you'd have to talk to [North Side Kings vocalist Danny Marianinho] about that. You know, you're trying to sign autographs for your fans, and someone comes up and sucker-punches you. But that guy's in the hospital now, dying.
Is that true? What happened?
I don't know. [Laughs]
OK, let's say you get hit by a bus tomorrow. Are you happy with everything as it stands?
Yeah. I wouldn't be happy about getting hit by a bus, though. There are a lot of other ways I'd rather go out—more violent, more rebellious. But other than that, yeah, I'm fine. No regrets. I've paid my dues and I put in a lot of hard years—I mean, the Misfits never made any money when we were around—but it paid off. The Misfits were bigger in death than life. Although we were considered one of the biggest American punk bands—along with Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys—there just wasn't a lot of money involved in it at the time. I remember we did a show at the Santa Monica Civic Center with Black Flag and the Vandals. It was a pretty big fuckin' show—like 3500 or 4000 people—but we didn't get paid that much for doing it. But Black Flag didn't get paid that much for doing it, either, and they were the headliners. Back then, we did it because we loved it. But it all started catching up, and later on, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I think the songs I wrote with the Misfits were ahead of their time, but people didn't really get it. But yeah, I'm happy with where my life is. I have my own label, my own comic book company, I don't owe anybody any money, and I'm doing what I love.
