Songs from the Abyss: The Story of GG Allin

Part 1 of a series about the darkest, most extreme, and most disturbing figures in music. These are not stories about fame, success, or life on the road. They are stories about obsession, violence, drugs, death, madness, self-destruction, and people who pushed the boundaries of what could be done in the name of music, and sometimes paid the ultimate price for it. If this series gets enough attention, I'll keep going deeper into the lives of the musicians, bands, and scenes that took music into places most people would never dare to go.

GG Allin was an American punk rock singer who became infamous not simply for his music, but for turning his entire existence into an act of apparent insanity. Born Jesus Christ Allin in 1956 - a name that, in hindsight, seems almost suspiciously appropriate - he built a reputation around increasingly violent, confrontational performances that blurred the line between concert and chaos. His shows could involve self-harm, physical attacks, nudity, bodily fluids, and deliberate destruction, making him one of the most notorious figures in underground music. Behind the spectacle was a life marked by addiction, crime, instability, and a relentless obsession with pushing himself and his audience past the limits of what was considered acceptable.

Early life

His early life was already far removed from anything resembling a normal childhood. Born in Lancaster, New Hampshire, in 1956, he was given the extraordinary name Jesus Christ Allin by his deeply religious father, who claimed to have received a vision predicting that his son would become a great man. The family lived in a remote log cabin with no electricity or running water, while his father imposed an increasingly oppressive and frightening environment on the household. According to accounts from Allin and his family, his father even dug graves in the cellar and threatened a murder-suicide.

When Allin was still young, his mother left his father and eventually had his legal name changed to Kevin Michael Allin, hoping to spare him the ridicule that came with being named Jesus Christ. His older brother Merle had trouble pronouncing "Jesus" and called him "Jeje", which eventually became GG. After the divorce, the brothers were raised by their mother and later moved to Vermont. At school, GG struggled academically, was placed in special education and was reportedly bullied for being different. By his teenage years, however, that outsider identity was becoming something he actively embraced. He began experimenting with cross-dressing, discovered glam rock and eventually punk, and started playing music with his brother.

Musical career

His musical career began in his teens, initially behind the drums. Together with his brother Merle, he formed Little Sister's Date, playing covers of bands such as Aerosmith and KISS. After graduating high school in 1975, the brothers formed Malpractice, where GG continued as the drummer until the band broke up in 1977. Around this time, his musical influences were shifting toward the rawer side of rock, particularly the Stooges, MC5, Alice Cooper and the emerging punk scene.

The real turning point came with the Jabbers. In 1977, GG moved from behind the drums to the microphone and began developing the persona that would eventually make him infamous. The early Jabbers were surprisingly conventional by GG's later standards. Their sound was a catchy mixture of punk and power pop, and their first album, Always Was, Is and Always Shall Be, was released in 1980. At this stage, there was still a considerable distance between the relatively straightforward punk musician GG Allin and the human wrecking ball he would eventually become.

Extreme live performances

The breakup of the Jabbers in 1984 marked the beginning of a much darker phase in Allin's career. He moved through a succession of increasingly unstable projects, including the Scumfucs and the Cedar Street Sluts, while his music became deliberately uglier, more aggressive and obscene. His 1984 album Eat My Fuc was a major turning point, both musically and lyrically. At the same time, his behavior on stage was becoming increasingly confrontational, and the distinction between performing and simply causing chaos was beginning to disappear.

Then, in 1985, Allin crossed a line that would become central to his legend. At a show in Creve Coeur, Illinois, he defecated on stage for the first time. It was not simply a shocking one-off stunt. He incorporated it into his performances, alongside nudity, self-mutilation, attacks on audience members and destruction of venues. Shows increasingly ended in fights, arrests and complete disorder. What had started as confrontational punk theatrics was evolving into something far more disturbing, with Allin treating his own body, the audience and the stage itself as material for the performance.

"I was with him when he bought the Ex-Lax. Unfortunately, he ate it hours before the show, so he constantly had to hold it in or he would've shit before he got onstage ... After he shit onstage, complete chaos broke out in the hall ... All of the old men in charge of the hall went fucking nuts!.. Hundreds of confused punk kids were flipping out, running out the door, because the smell was incredible."

- Eyewitness account from GG Allin's concert in Creve Coeur, Illinois

By the late 1980s, an Allin show had become less a concert than a controlled collapse into violence. He would routinely appear wearing little more than a jockstrap, then strip completely, attack audience members, provoke fights and deliberately injure himself with microphones, broken bottles and other objects. He could leave the stage covered in blood, only to continue performing as if nothing had happened. According to his brother Merle, some shows ended with the band barricaded backstage while furious spectators threw bottles, smashed windows and destroyed their vehicles.

The bodily side of the performances became even more grotesque. Allin began taking laxatives before shows so he could defecate onstage, after which he would smear himself with fecal matter or throw it into the crowd. He also urinated onstage and on spectators, and sometimes consumed his own excrement. At other shows, the violence became genuinely dangerous, with Allin attacking people in the audience and audience members retaliating. One particularly notorious incident involved a performance at the Space at Chase, where, according to his brother Merle, Allin broke the noses of two audience members. By this point, the music was almost secondary. People were coming to see what would happen when GG Allin walked onto the stage, and the answer was increasingly difficult to predict.

Perhaps the strangest part was that Allin seemed to regard the destruction itself as the performance. Clubs would cut the power, shows would last only minutes, police would arrive, and the audience would sometimes spill into the streets. His final performance in New York in June 1993 followed exactly this pattern: after only a few songs, a fight broke out, the show collapsed into chaos, and Allin left the venue before leading a group of followers through the streets.

Death and legacy

On June 27, 1993, Allin played what would become his final show at The Gas Station in Manhattan. The performance lasted only a few songs before the power was cut and a fight erupted. Covered in blood and excrement, Allin escaped the venue and wandered through the East Village before eventually ending up at a friend's apartment. Later that night, he drank and took heroin. In the early hours of June 28, he died from an overdose. He was only 36 years old.

Perhaps fittingly, even death could not separate GG Allin from the spectacle he had created around himself. His funeral in New Hampshire was held with an open casket, with Allin dressed in his trademark leather jacket and jockstrap. Accounts describe his body as bloated from the overdose, while his brother reportedly instructed the funeral director not to wash or apply makeup to the corpse. The result was a funeral that looked less like a dignified farewell and more like the final, grotesque chapter of GG Allin's life.

And then things became even stranger. After the family had left, the wake reportedly turned into a drunken celebration among Allin's friends and followers. People posed for photographs with his corpse, poured Jim Beam into his mouth and treated the funeral almost like one last GG Allin performance. The man who had spent his career turning his own body into a spectacle had, in death, become the spectacle itself.

GG Allin left behind one of the most disturbing legacies in the history of underground music. His recordings were never particularly successful, but his name became inseparable from the mythology surrounding his life, his performances and his relentless destruction of himself. To some, he was a fearless punk icon who refused every boundary. To others, he was little more than a deeply troubled man who turned his own collapse into entertainment. Whatever the interpretation, GG Allin succeeded in creating something that very few musicians ever have: a legend so grotesque that, decades after his death, people are still arguing over where the performance ended and the insanity began.