HATED: GG ALLIN & THE MURDER JUNKIES. Produced and directed by Todd Phillips, Cinematography by Necculai Berghelea, Alex Crawford, and Michael Yetter. Sound by Wolfgang Botko, Peter Dorgan, Rennie Elliot, and Todd Shifflett. Edited by Alex Crawford. Sound editing by Huck Botko. Starring GG Allin and Dee Dee Ramone. At the Coolidge Corner.
When punk shock-rocker GG Allin died on June 28, it was hardly a surprise. Actually, it was amazing that the 36-year-old performer lived as long as he did. His shows were notoriously anarchic affairs that usually began with him baiting and lashing out at the audience - and usually ended in a riot. Off stage, Allin lived dangerously and paid the price, spending time in jail for charges ranging from aggravated assault to exposing himself to minors. Since at least 1986, he'd been promising to commit suicide on stage on Halloween and urging his fans to join him. So by the standards of his violent life, his death from an apparent heroin overdose on the morning after a show in New York City that lasted only a song and a half was rather peaceful.
It would be inaccurate to call Allin a performance artist, but he certainly wasn't just another punk-rock singer. Nonetheless, the dozen or so EPs and LPs he recorded with bands named the Jabbers, the Scumfucs, and the Holy Men don't deviate much from the basic, sloppy, metallic punk rock; even infamous songs like "I Wanna Kill You" capture only part of what he was about. Allin was primarily a spectacle, a sideshow freak who traveled with his own circus, and it's this side of him that Todd Phillips has preserved in the appropriately titled Hated: GG Allin & the Murder Junkies, a documentary that opens this weekend at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
Like The Decline of Western Civilization Parts I and II, Hated is disturbing, intriguing, and often darkly funny. Allin finished serving a three-year prison term in Michigan earlier this year, so Phillips had only a few months to work with him on the documentary. But by combining old and new concert footage with sometimes brutally candid interviews, Phillips managed to create a genuinely intriguing portrait of Allin that's neither damning nor apologetic. Even if you question the documentarian's decision to send Allin a bus ticket to New York, thereby encouraging him to break his parole, it's hard to fault Phillips's cool objectivity or his instincts for letting Allin's words and actions speak for themselves.
Allin's actions were typically brutal and deranged. One of the best things about Hated is that it gives you a chance to see him perform without actually being at a show. In his own words, "My mind is a machine gun, my body the bullets, and the audience is my target." He begins a spoken-word performance that Phillips set up at NYU by pushing a banana into his rear end and tossing the remains at the audience, effectively clearing the room.
In an older clip of a spoken-word performance in Boston, he grabs a woman from the audience by the hair and tosses her violently into a wall before several persons manage to restrain him. He lies on the floor at a party while a woman urinates into his mouth, and he drinks as much as he can before vomiting. On stage he attacks the audience with his fists, bodily fluids, and anything else he can get his hands on. He usually fronts the Murder Junkies nude, and at one show he pauses to defecate on the floor; he later eats some of his deposit before tossing the rest into the crowd. As Unk, Allin's self-appointed number one fan puts it, the key to enjoying the show "is knowing where to hide, and the best place is right behind GG."
The people who are literally behind GG, his band the Murder Junkies, provide some Spinal Tap-style comic relief along the way. Allin's brother Merle plays bass in the band, sports a Hitler-style moustache, and deadpans that most of the band's tours end prematurely via jail or the hospital. Dino "The Naked Drummer" launches into an explanation for his preferred lack of attire, citing his unusual sensitivity to itching and chafing. He later describes Allin as "God, Jesus, and Satan all rolled into one."
But the most illuminating interviews are the ones with Allin. Surprisingly calm and articulate, he never lets on that there's a method to his madness. He comes off as a punk-rocker who went too far and forgot the way back, someone who hates himself and his audience for what they've made of him, someone who's very alive yet really wants to die.
Whether Allin was an artist is nearly immaterial. Hated makes it clear that he was an outrageous, destructive, marginal character who at least died without taking anyone else with him. Even Merle seemed relieved and almost amused by GG's death when he described the scene to Spin magazine: "He had snot coming out of his nose and blood coming out of his mouth and a big fucking scowl on his face. It was typical GG."
Matt Ashare
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