With Doyle, Doomriders and Mutiny. Tickets $30 in advance, $35 day of show All ages to enter, 21 to drink New Jersey native Glenn Danzig is best known as the frontman for the Misfits, Samhain and Danzig. But he wears many hats.
He's a graphic designer and photographer who operates his own comic book company, Verotik, which recently released artist Simon Bizley's reworking of Milton's Paradise Lost. As a songwriter, he has caught the attention of Metallica, Guns N'Roses, Evan Dando and the late Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash. He is currently completing an erotic voodoo film, set in 1904 New Orleans, called "Gerouge.
" "I'm always writing new songs. I'm always working. I'm a workaholic," he said from his home in Los Angeles.
Danzig will perform at the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville on Tuesday. The band includes Glenn Danzig on vocals, former Samhain bandmate Steve King on bass, Type O Negative's Kenny Hickey on guitar and Johnny Kelly on drums. "We'll do a selection of songs from the first Danzig record all the way up until now," he said.
"Then we'll do stuff with Doyle from the Misfits. On our last run, we did some Samhain songs. I'm not sure if we'll do those this time, but we'll try to fit in a couple of them.
" Danzig formed in 1987 in the aftermath of the Misfits and Samhain. The band revisited its frontman's Black Sabbath-inspired roots on its eponymous debut CD that same year. Six years later, the band redefined its identity with a combination of heavy metal and goth romanticism on its CD "Danzig II: How the Gods Kill.
" MTV helped bring the band's early work to a larger audience, making way for the commercial success of "Danzig 4,""I Luciferi" and "Circle of Snakes." As a composer, Danzig expanded his horizons with a unique interpretation of Satan's rebellion in Milton's "Paradise Lost" on the band's 1993 CD, "Black Aria," and with his take on the mythological heroine Lilith on the group's latest CD, "Black Aria II." "I don't usually do a record until I get inspired to put it out and write it," he said.
"Actually, I had it written for a while, but it just finally came out in October." "New Jersey was not conducive to what I wanted to do," he said. "It was very close-minded.
Club owners didn't want to know about punk music. They only wanted cover bands. At that time, if you weren't in a cover band, you couldn't play.
That kind of thing. It was very tough. I think in many ways what I did and what a small handful of other bands tried to do back in the day really opened it up for a lot of bands.
Up until then, New Jersey, at least northern New Jersey, was a real wasteland for original music." He is an avid reader who has particularly shown interest in female mythological figures such as Lilith, Adam's wife before Eve. "Pretty much all the women I sing about are archetypes of Lilith," he said.
"It's the general information that's kept from the public kind of story. It's a great story." Over the years, Danzig has tried to track down additional information about Lilith through various books on pre-Christian mythology.
"I think in the '80s I became aware of a book that came out about Lilith," he said. "There was another book about it and then I found out that all these psychologists and theologians had been writing about this for a long time. It's not something that just popped up.
" According to Hebrew lore, Lilith was the original partner of Adam. Too proud to submit to his wishes, she was banished from Eden and succeeded by Eve. Danzig's interest in Lilith, though, lies more in her place as a demon or mother of demons and in her role as witch, vampire, Satan's paramour in other ancient legends.
Apart from Danzig's contemporary use of this rebellious female heroine in his "Black Aria II," she has served as a contemporary symbol of female empowerment and as the namesake for Sarah McLachlan's women's music festival, Lilith Fair. "I didn't want to gloss the Lilith character like so many new people do,"he said. "I wanted her to be everything.
I wanted her to be nice. I wanted her to be dark. I wanted her to be deadly.
I wanted her to be all the aspects of the character when theologians do studies and books on the character. I didn't just want to do one side of her. I wanted to try to depict all the different sides.
Her violent nature, sympathetic nature. That's really what I wanted to do.
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