Archive for February 2011
GG Allin + The AIDS Brigade: Live in Boston 1989
A DVD review from Record Collector, February 2011
Given that GG Allin’s live shows were famous for their notorious anarchy, this supposedly legendary performance must be a rare example of the music upstaging the theatrics of the event. The main feature sees the band arrive on stage in drag (a disguise used as Allin was banned from the venue) to perform a brief set of competent if very generic punk ‘n’ roll; the lyrical taboos are hilarious for a nanosecond but their predictability is soon depressingly conservative. Jerkily shot from a single camera with heavily distorted sound, this is a bootleg bolstered only by adequate packaging.
The pre-show videos fail to fare any better. The rehearsal footage suffers from an even worse vantage point than the gig, while the tedious documentation of the band applying their make-up is entirely at odds with Allin’s provocative philosophy.
Two bonus performances stick in the mind like the time you accidentally ran over a fox. The first sees a naked Allin defecate on the stage, set light to it, force a lemon (!?) into his anus and generally cause chaos, almost all of which is replicated in the second.
GG Allin: live pointless, die young.
