GG Allin got naked on the Stache’s stage faster than a four-year-old home from preschool.
By the end of song one, he was bleeding from self-inflicted beer bottle gashes, had hurt our friend Liz with a mic stand, shattered an overhead light fixture and fan and chased all but nine of the 150 ticket-buyers outside to watch through the windows.
Five people hid behind the pool table, while local musician Bill Bruner and one other brave soul sat on the sidelines, within spitting distance.
I had booked them as a last minute fill-in on a Friday night. GG’s reputation was a scary one of self-mutilation, destruction, sexual and scatological antics and the claim that he would, at some unknown date and location, take his own life on stage. They had played Columbus before at a private party, and I had heard about the mayhem they unleashed.
I didn’t want to book them, but my bar needed the biz, and I knew that the voyeuristic appeal of GG’s performance would draw a crowd. When his bass player called and said that they just needed some gas money to get to Florida for a much more lucrative gig, he insisted and promised that they would keep it tame. Soundman Curt Tuckerman, who had seen them on their first time through, concurred that by comparison, it was.
I had thought, out loud, while standing back by the soundboard, that maybe I should stop the show, but Curt insisted it would end quickly, and it did. The whole thing might have lasted 17 minutes, with the last five spent on a cover of the Stones’ “Dead Flowers” by a lonely nude GG sitting on a table, having just given up on trying to poop on the microphone, complete with facial constipation.
During my first years at Stache’s, I took it personally that some (especially punk rock and jam band) musicians saw and treated me as “the man,” when I thought of myself as a member of the counterculture. I eventually (in most cases) accepted my role as the local ogre/promoter/cluboner.
To me, the most amazing aspect of this crazy experience was that GG’s anger was directed at the crowd and the support act (Razr), not at the bar or me. He yelled at the audience that they were poseurs and literally frightened them out of the room, hurling bodily fluids and gear. There was no protest when I deducted the cost of the damages (about 25 percent of their pay), but I did end up with an empty bar at midnight on a Friday.
Postscript: Several months after playing Stache’s, Allin was convicted of assaulting a female acquaintance and spent more than a year in prison. When he got out, he started making the rounds on talk show circuses like Jerry Springer and Geraldo. He died of a drug overdose in 1993.