Misfits

On September 8, 2007, the cruise terminal at the Port of Bari hosted the closing night of the third edition of the L'acqua in testa/Eastpak Music Festival, an event always noted for its eclectic bill and its skillful balance between Italian and international acts.

This year's big draw was the live show on the final night (6-7-8) from the legendary American punk/thrash outfit The Misfits.

It was an extremely windy night, almost in solidarity with the stormy sound of the American veterans from Lodi, New Jersey - a trio made up of Jerry Only (bass/guitar), Dez Cadena (guitar/vocals) and Robo on drums (an original member of the band alongside Jerry), holders since 1977 of a horror appeal mixed with macabre sci-fi overtones. These traits made their primal trash-punk quite distant from the sound of their contemporaries in the Californian punk scene and beyond (Black Flag, Alleycats, Circle Jerks, X, Minutemen, Descendents etc.). That didn't stop the devastating guitarist originally from Black Flag, Dez Cadena, from joining their lineup decades later (something that also happened with Marky Ramone): he was there in Bari too, long hair whipped by the wind and sepulchral make-up. The leader of the '77-era Misfits was Glenn Danzig, a singer with a morbid delivery not unlike Dave Vanian of the English band The Damned, endowed with a considerable charisma he'd go on to prove again with Danzig, after leaving the band in the mid-80s.

The Misfits' history has been a tormented one, marked by legal battles, breakups and reunions, but also by important records like "Legacy Of Brutality" (1985, Plan 9/Caroline) and "American Psycho" (1997, Geffen), and the credit for keeping them alive through these decades belongs, without doubt, to Jerry Only. This year marked their thirtieth anniversary, and they embarked on a lengthy world tour across Europe and the United States.

We really had to work for the privilege of seeing them perform, since they didn't menacingly take the stage until well past one in the morning, after the sets of three bands on the bill, joined at the last minute by a fourth.

A few words on them: Bari's own Plastic Casters are a breathtaking hard-metal outfit, though badly let down by their overblown singer. Far more original were our own Jolaurlo, with their pulsing "pulp" mix of punk, ragamuffin and pop, fronted by an aggressive lead singer. Cherry Stone, from Milan, were tedious, blasting out their pretentious, brutal hip-hop-metal-hardcore at full throttle.

The real revelation, though, were Turin's pounding, percussive Disco Drive, who manage to convey genuinely unsettling modernist vibrations live, pinning you down with their minimal, obsessive sound.

And the Misfits? A full-throttle show, though a divisive one by most accounts, even among those who caught their later gigs on the tour.

Serial Ramones-isms ran through the whole set, at once emphatic and grandiose in Jerry's vocal style, hampered by the wind, which badly disrupted the sound of Dez Cadena's guitar as it ground out its vicious, amphetamine-fuelled maniac riffs and minimal-punk churn.

All the classics paraded past: "American Psycho", "Skulls", "Halloween", "American Nightmare", "Horror Hotel", "Die-die My Darling", "We Are 138", "Horror Business" etc., but the charisma of a Glenn Danzig was missing - though, to be fair, Jerry Only, made up to the hilt, surrounded by bones and skeletons of every kind, and encased in the eternal Misfits uniform (which, curiously enough, in some ways recalls that of the Rockets), held absolutely nothing back on bass and vocals, delivering a muscular, gripping performance, clichés and all.

After half an hour, though, the foul weather fatally plunged the trio's sound into chaos, with Cadena's guitar coming across muddled and worn out. Amid the general sonic chaos, a few truly classic passages deserve mention - wonderful, extended dark-punk raptures that seemed to rise straight out of the most treacherous depths of hell.

Is it too much to hope to see them again under more acoustically favorable circumstances? Who knows... For better or worse, it's a show that remains wickedly etched into the synapses and the psyche. Punks had turned up from far and wide in droves, virtually all of them, fittingly, sporting their own Misfits t-shirt. The only thing to spoil the atmosphere was a small gang of troublemakers busy hurling empty beer bottles and wine bottles at random into the crowd.

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