Featured photograph: Singer Glenn Danzig performing with the reunited Samhain at Riot Fest, 2014. Photo: Randy Blythe / official Danzig website.
In 1977, singer and songwriter Glenn Danzig formed the Misfits in Lodi, New Jersey. The band joined the aggression of punk to melodies drawn from older rock and roll, filling their songs with monsters from low-budget horror films. Listeners could sing along from the monster's point of view, making the grotesque a source of shared pleasure.
By 1983, the Misfits were pushing their music toward hardcore, the faster, more aggressive form of punk. Danzig disliked how far speed had come to define the band and began rehearsing a new group, Samhain, while the Misfits were still active. He brought his horror imagery with him, but wanted songs with more varied rhythms and arrangements, giving the musicians different problems to solve.
Samhain released two full-length albums and a shorter EP between 1984 and 1986. They built an underground following before a change of lineup in 1987 produced the hard rock band Danzig, named after Glenn. That later band would reach a much larger audience. Samhain's own records show him finding horror in ordinary needs for comfort and companionship, even as some of his lyrics continued to depend on blunt provocation.
From the archive / Plan 9 publicity
What came from the Misfits
On the Misfits' 1982 album Walk Among Us, songs such as "I Turned Into a Martian" and "Astro Zombies" gave the monsters their own voices. An audience could join in with the creatures doing the damage. The next album, Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood (1983), accelerated the music toward hardcore, but the appeal of Danzig's songwriting still depended on melodies people could recognize and sing.
One of his first collaborators in the emerging Samhain was Eerie Von, who had photographed the Misfits and played drums in the local hardcore band Rosemary's Babies. Their work together began before the Misfits ended, with people who knew both the old band's appeal and its limitations.
Samhain's debut album, Initium, arrived in 1984 through Danzig's own Plan 9 record label. The five-song EP Unholy Passion followed in 1985, then the second full-length album, Samhain III: November-Coming-Fire, in 1986. Together, these releases gave him room to reconsider familiar material and develop songs for the new musicians.
Two Misfits songs crossed over. "Horror Business" became "Horror Biz" on Initium, and "All Hell Breaks Loose" returned as "All Hell" on Unholy Passion. Reworking his own material let Danzig test how much a song's identity depended on the band playing it. The familiar songs gave listeners something to recognize while the musicians found a different way through them.
That search drew punk toward slower rhythms, electronics, and gothic rock. Danzig's attachment to forceful, economical songs gave the experiments a recognizable shape. The new band still had to find players who could make those different approaches work together.
Learning a different way to play
Changing the pace required players who could resist their own habits. Von initially tried drums, but the timing of "Black Dream" and "All Murder, All Guts, All Fun," both songs on Initium, defeated his instinct to race through a hardcore song. Drummer Steve Zing took over the kit, and Von moved to bass. His place in the band survived because the job changed. Danzig was assembling a working group around particular songs, with technical ability and personal chemistry pulling in different directions.
Guitarist Lyle Preslar, previously of the hardcore band Minor Threat, contributed to Initium before Pete "Damien" Marshall took his place in 1984. For live performances of "Archangel," the song that closes Initium, Marshall switched to a second bass alongside Von while Glenn played guitar. The song's two bass parts required the musicians to rearrange themselves onstage.
The album opens with its title track, "Initium," a short piece made by altering a bass recording. The bass was recorded through tape echo at high speed, then played back more slowly before Danzig added his voice. Slowing the tape lowered and lengthened the performance. That short entrance gives the record a scale the players could manufacture in the studio, using the machine to transform the sound they had put into it.
- 01 / Record the bassBass through tape echo, recorded at high speed.
- 02 / Slow the playbackThe pitch falls and the recorded performance lengthens.
- 03 / Add the voiceDanzig adds his vocal over the slowed recording.
The resources were limited, and their consequences were not always welcome. Zing had to use the studio's acoustic drum kit and disliked its dead sound. Samhain worked with restrictions that sometimes helped define a record even when the musician responsible wanted a different result.
Drummer London May replaced Zing in 1985. By November-Coming-Fire, Danzig was teaching May parts whose logic only became clear as the recording took shape. The chopping pattern of the album's song "Mother of Mercy" initially fought the drummer's instincts. May also recorded his drum parts without a vocal track to follow, counting from notes before he could hear how Danzig's singing would fit the song.
There is a tension here between a band developing its own character and a songwriter asking musicians to inhabit an arrangement already imagined for them. The difficulty could produce a distinctive part, as May eventually felt it had on "Mother of Mercy." It could also leave a player executing instructions without hearing the whole song. Samhain's working method made room for invention while concentrating most of the decisions in one person's hands.
What the horror wanted
The band took their name from Samhain, the festival marking winter's beginning in Irish tradition. On the cover of Initium, the musicians appear covered in blood. Danzig connected that image to his understanding of the festival as a season of sacrifice and the earth's death. His explanation belongs to the imaginative world he was building. The customs surrounding the beginning of winter on November 1 included celebrations the previous evening involving food, games, and visitors in disguise. Families expected the dead home and observed customs intended to keep misfortune out.
Those practices offer a context for the invitation in the song "Samhain" on Initium, where a gathering promises pleasure alongside sacrifice. A welcome can carry conditions the visitor does not control. The song's uncertainty about who is being addressed leaves the invitation open, while its juxtaposition of feasting and killing makes the price of joining difficult to ignore.
On November-Coming-Fire, the strongest writing brings that danger into needs a listener can recognize. The wish to command the world in "In My Grip" gives way to a more restricted existence in "To Walk the Night," whose speaker makes the night a spouse and excludes human love from the union. The promise of permanence becomes a form of confinement. Companionship solves solitude by removing the possibility of any other relationship.
"Mother of Mercy" begins from a more bodily wish for refuge, asking for soothing and a return to the womb. Its refrain expands that private appeal into a claim that everyone wants a period in hell. The speaker makes a desire for relief sound universal, then gives the relief a terrible destination. The song's disturbing force comes from the closeness of those two wishes, the wish to be cared for and the wish to cease being responsible for oneself.
These are the moments in which Samhain's horror becomes most convincing. A listener can understand the need before rejecting the bargain. That recognition gives the threat something to work on: loneliness in one song, exhaustion and dependence in the other. The writing allows a frightening situation to develop from an ordinary vulnerability.
Elsewhere, provocation does more of the work. "Human Pony Girl," from November-Coming-Fire, turns sexual domination into commands, while "All Murder, All Guts, All Fun," from Initium, makes mutilation a source of pleasure. Their bluntness leaves less to discover in the desires they depict. Samhain's achievement is uneven, and the care put into an arrangement cannot by itself make every piece of violent imagery interesting.
An audience before the breakthrough
The group found listeners who welcomed the departure. In October 1984, Tesco Vee's review of Initium in the punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll praised the singing and the move toward mid-tempo songs, even while noting uneven production. Pushead's review of November-Coming-Fire in the same magazine in April 1986 was positive about its pacing and sing-alongs. These contemporary responses show an audience recognizing the records' appeal before the later success of the band Danzig could confer prestige on them.
The combination made sense within punk's audience. Samhain retained choruses people could join while asking the players to do something beyond maintaining speed. The production could frustrate a reviewer without defeating the songs. Their appeal depended on that balance: enough of Danzig's melodic instinct remained to give the experiments a recognizable shape.
The business also grew. Danzig remembered better earnings and a more sustained touring schedule with Samhain than with the original Misfits, whose members' jobs limited travel. Staying on the road gave the band more opportunities to find listeners beyond occasional hometown or coastal appearances. Samhain were becoming a more workable occupation as well as a different musical proposition.
In July 1986, record producer Rick Rubin saw them at the Ritz, a New York venue, during the New Music Seminar, a music-business convention. Rubin, then associated with the record label Def Jam, wanted to work with Glenn Danzig. The decisive opportunity arrived while Samhain were active. Their disappearance from new-release schedules followed a change in the project and its personnel, rather than a simple failure to find an audience.
From the archive / Samhain onstage
The price of becoming Danzig
By 1987, guitarist John Christ and drummer Chuck Biscuits had joined Glenn Danzig and Eerie Von. The band took the singer's surname, and Rubin produced the band's self-titled debut album, Danzig, released by his Def American label in 1988. Von supplied a direct human connection with Samhain, while the new guitarist and drummer helped give Glenn a new performing unit. The move also shifted the center of the public identity toward its singer.
The boundary between the catalogs remained porous. Early versions of "Twist of Cain" and "Possession" were recorded during the late Samhain period before the songs appeared on that 1988 debut album. The unfinished Samhain material was subsequently gathered and completed for the collection Final Descent (1990), released after Samhain had become Danzig. A change of name divided a continuing body of work into separate histories.
Rubin's approach involved subtraction. Danzig later explained that the producer helped strip arrangements down, a process he initially welcomed and eventually found restrictive as he began to miss the layers. The early Danzig records organized the singer's interests around blues and hard rock, with a more conventional band framework. Greater clarity made the songs easier to identify with a single frontman, while some of Samhain's experiments receded.
The commercial breakthrough took years. The song "Mother," recorded for the 1988 debut, reached a much wider audience through its renewed promotion in 1993-1994, when its video entered MTV's rotation and the debut went gold. A strong song had acquired a larger promotional platform and another chance to be heard. The delay matters: the deal with Rubin created opportunities, but recognition still depended on exposure and timing.
Measured by mainstream reach, that success belonged to the band Danzig. Samhain's achievement was earlier and smaller in scale: they had established a touring band, gained positive underground coverage, and made a group of records capable of attracting label interest. The transition brought Glenn a larger career while bringing the original Samhain project to an end. Judging those records only by the hit that followed would make their most unusual decisions look like mistakes waiting to be corrected.
What came back
The later history gives Samhain an audience of their own. The 1999 reunion put guitarist Todd Youth alongside Danzig and former Samhain members. Youth's attachment was specifically to Samhain; he recalled loving them while disliking the Misfits as a young listener. After the reunion tour, he and London May began writing new music in that vein, with Steve Zing and Davey Havok, the singer of the punk band AFI, joining the project that became Son of Sam.
Their album Songs from the Earth, released by Nitro Records in 2001, makes the inheritance unusually concrete. Musicians from the older band were working with a singer from a younger punk group, making new songs from an attachment developed around Samhain's records and performances. The influence passed through collaboration, where it could be tested and altered, rather than remaining a list of admired names.
Then, in 2014, the music festival Riot Fest included Initium in its tenth-anniversary series of full-album performances. Thirty years after its release, a festival was booking the record as a complete work with its own audience. The assignment was to play Initium from beginning to end.
