The Open Mouth:

A Bi-Weekly Crash

of All Forms of Music Video

This Week:  GG Allin: Live And Pissed (1988)

ILV's exclusive column from Blake Carlisle of End of An Ear Records,

Austin's main source for eccentric, ecstatic, experimental & reckless outsider music & video.

GG Allin: Live And Pissed (1988)

(Live in San Francisco, shot on camcorder, director unknown)

                 Do you ever think that the world was a much better place with GG Allin in it? What would it have been like to watch someone as out of control as GG grow old? For some reason, I don’t feel like he would have slowed down. If he lived to be 60 and was still doing shows, shoving bananas up his butt and shitting on people, it would be great. But, he’s dead now, we’ll never know, fuck it.
                GG was actually a far more interesting person that most people know. He was a fanatic about musicians like Brian Jones and Hank Williams Sr., and was also into weird electronic experimental music and  modern composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Terry Riley. He once wrote a letter to Dan Plunkett when he was still publishing the experimental music magazine ND. GG had gotten ahold of an issue in prison, and wrote him to tell him how much he enjoyed reading it. You might not think that’s strange, but the most popular acts that magazine ever featured were names like Organum and Giancarlo Toniutti. Thinking about GG being into those kinds of things blew my mind. It kind of helped teach me a valuable life lesson about not assuming shit about anyone. Just because he liked to hang out by the railroad tracks with his pants unzipped drinking a bottle of whiskey didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate listening to amplified ant mounds or vibrating wire drone experiments. You could tell that GG was a creative guy just by the names of his first bands, Malpractice and Stripsearch. I don’t know about you, but I would love to be in any band with a name as cool as those. His third band, The Jabbers had a song called “Assface”, that’s almost like an early pop-punk song, and it’s really good. You can find a shitty video of it on you tube. One of the weirdest things I ever discovered about GG was that he co-produced an album by David Peel (an old hippie friend of John and Yoko, whose first album is on Apple Records). David Peel is a very weird dude himself, and it almost doesn’t surprise me.
    “Live And Pissed” is a VHS tape that I Luv Video on Airport has owned for a long time. I rented it there about 15 years ago. My friend Patrick (who saw GG suck a dog’s dick in front of Sound Exchange) and I watched it together. We really enjoyed it. It was funny, interesting, bizarre, horrific, wasted, and amazing. It was filmed in 1988 when GG still had long hair. To me, GG always looked scarier when he had long hair. That shit was all oily and held back in some sort of doo-rag or headband, and he was balding. The beginning of the video is awesome and has a long segment of GG hanging out backstage with all sorts of ass-out people. There’s these total Poison groupie looking girls, guys who look like Agnostic Front, stoners, all these weird people combined., it’s awesome. Then there’s the performance itself. There’s a lot of using the mic stand as a weapon in this one. About mid-set, someone bumps into the light switch and everything goes black. You don’t want that happening at a GG Allin concert. When they come back on, GG says- “Somebody better get me some drugs, or I’m fuckin’ leaving”. Future classics like “Bite It, You Scum” and “Eat My Fuck” are included in the set. One really hard -to-watch part is GG slashing up his thighs with a broken bottle, shit looks horrible.
    I saw Hated, and it’s really good, but I like this thing a little more. I recommend renting the old VHS version with GG screaming on the cover from I Luv on Airport.