I thought it would be fun to talk about bands that I will likely never see live, either because band members have passed away, interpersonal feuds, or just lack of interest given by the band members to get back together. Now I’d love to see any of these bands get back together or start touring again, but with many of them it’s either absolutely impossible or just extremely unlikely. I’d be interested to see if any of these bands get back together in the future, and I do eventually get to see them. Without further adieu, here’s my list:
Category: Music
Let’s Talk About the Misfits, and the Lost Misfits Album: 12 Hits From Hell
If you’ve already seen my my 22 favorite albums of all time list, then you know that I included Walk Among Us by the Misfits, and I also claimed in that list that the Misfits are one of my favorite bands. The Misfits were active from 1977 to 1983, when lead singer and band leader Glenn Danzig left the band and formed Samhain, which changed its name to Danzig in 1987. Of course, in 1995 a legal settlement was reached that allowed Misfits band mates Jerry Only and Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein to record and perform under the band’s name. They first reformed with singer Michale Graves and released two albums with this lineup. Graves and Doyle both left the band in 2001. Jerry Only continued releasing music under the Misfits name and is still cashing in on it today.
I like to pretend that the Misfits didn’t exist after 1983, as the Danzig era is almost universally recognized as the classic era. We’ll just be talking about the Danzig era today and then we’ll take a look at the Misfits’ lost album: 12 Hits From Hell.
My 22 Favorite Albums of All Time
This was a very hard list to put together. I keep feeling like I’m forgetting something whenever I do lists like this, but I suppose I can always come back and edit this later if I did.
I’m setting a couple of rules here: only one album per artist, and no compilation albums (so no “greatest hits” releases or anything else). Why 22? Because I had a huge list and once I separated a few into the honorable mentions category, I found that I wouldn’t be comfortable with any of the 22 albums not being there. If I could pick 22 albums to listen to for the rest of my life, it would be these 22, and if I could have the ten honorable mentions on top of that it would be even better.
Anyhow, let’s touch on the honorable mentions first. Also both on the honorable mentions and the real list, these are all in no particular order. Picking the albums was hard enough, and rating them is so much more difficult and pretty pointless in my mind. Here we go:
What We Do Is Secret (2007) and the Importance of The Germs
If you know anything about the Germs, you know that Darby Crash committed suicide in 1980 and that their guitarist, Pat Smear, went on to play with Nirvana and Foo Fighters. If you’re into film at all, especially documentaries, you’ve most likely seen the first part of Penelope Spheeris’s excellent documentary series The Decline of Western Civilization, which features a performance from the Germs and interviews with Crash and Smear. In that performance, Crash comes out on stage drawing on his face and body with a permanent marker before handing it to someone else who continues to draw on his body throughout the show. He’s clearly very high, his words are barely distinguishable, and he’s barely singing into the microphone. It’s almost humorous watching the words appear on the screen during their performance of “Manimal,” as the word “panther” turns into something that sounds like “Paaaaayyuuuunnn…”
My Favorite Albums of the Year (2016)
Another year has come and gone and it’s been a crazy one. The general consensus is that 2016 was a terrible year. We lost so many beloved actors like Carrie Fisher and Alan Rickman, musicians like David Bowie, Sharon Jones, Prince, and George Michael, add to that an extremely tense and exhausting presidential race resulting in a pissed off pumpkin being elected president and the public becoming more aware (and brazen) about their racial biases and beliefs, and throw in a lot of police brutality, terrorist attacks, and senseless violence, I’m sure that most people are hoping to close this chapter and start a new one. But let’s be real, 2017 has as much or more potential to suck as last year.
It seems like when the years are tough, art still prevails. Not that art comes before violence or racism in importance, but it is at least something good that we can say about 2016, that there were a lot of great albums this year. I kept up with it as well as I could (still couldn’t keep up though), so now that’s out of the way, here are my 14 favorite albums of the year in no particular order.
Seventh Opinion 