What The Players Play - Danzig

Musician Magazine - March 1997

Glenn Danzig's guitar must be awfully happy to see him leave town. On the concert trail, the Danzig frontman concentrates on his singing, leaving the guitar work to new bandmate Tommy Victor. But in studio during the making of the latest Danzig album, Blackacidevil, the well-muscled bandleader treated his solid-body Gibson Les Paul with malice aforethought.

"I like to take a guitar and bang it and make it scream," Danzig chuckles. "Make it feel like it's dying. That's what it's there for--to make noise. And whatever I have to do to get the sounds out of it, I'm gonna do. To my Les Paul's credit, it puts up with everything I do and just doesn't ever break. I've actually had past bandmembers walk out of the studio because I wasn't treating my guitar with respect. But with Tommy, not only is he a great player, he beats up his guitars even more than I do."

Victor's assault is helping to recreate live the dark charge of the album, which sets such Danzig staples as blood, sex, and unholy reptiles against a newly tooled blend of fierce guitar and industrial clamor. That sonic blend began to turn up on 1994's Danzig 4p, but the singer says the sound is an older idea that's now receiving state-of-the-art execution. "The new stuff uses a lot of elements I was trying to use in the Misfits and Samhain--but the technology's gotten better. We're light years ahead, and if you can think something up, you can find a way to make it work. On our last two albums, the band has been really free to play with its sound."

And Danzig feels he's found a way to make that freedom work in concert. "It can be tough to mix live and programmed sounds on stage, but I approach this differently than most people. A lot of performers use click tracks or play with headphones on, and to me it seems they're just kind of making it hard on themselves trying to redo what's on the record. My attitude is, just put the programming through the monitors like another instrument. You keep a live feel that way. It's like having one more musician onstage--although it's a musician who's unable to stop."

As for the humans he leads, Danzig--who also played the lion's share of bass and keyboards on Blackacidevil--says his band pumps up his demonic visions in admirable fashion. "The songs don't change that much live--they're just more instense and exciting. And a lot of that really comes from the people in front of us. When people are going crazy, and you know they can't get enough, it's a real payoff. With the new songs and the new lineup, people are not only really shocked by the music, they really like it. That's very cool."

Can the dark sounds ever shock Danzig himself? "My music make happy," he say with a laugh. "But the fact that I'm still here--that's shocking."

-Chuck Crisafulli