Sorry to have missed the anniversary.

Kevin Michael “GG” Allin (29 August 1956 – 29 June 1993) was a punk rock singer-songwriter and musician who performed and recorded with many groups during his career.

Allin is best remembered for his notorious live performances that typically featured wildly transgressive acts such as Allin defecating and urinating onstage, rolling in feces and often consuming excrement (coprophagia), committing self-injury, performing naked, taunting people to perform fellatio on him, and commiting violent actions toward the audience—often doing many of these things more or less simultaneously. Although more notorious for his stage antics than for his wide body of music, he recorded prolifically, not only in the punk rock genre, but also in spoken word, country and Rolling Stones-influenced rock. Though he has a small, devoted cult following, Allin’s music, often poorly recorded, has received quite mixed reviews from critics.

Allin was born Jesus Christ Allin at Weeks’ Memorial Hospital, in Lancaster, New Hampshire and grew up in East St. Johnsbury, VT.[4] He was given this messianic name because his father, Merle Allin, Sr. (a religious and antisocial man), then 32 years old, had told his wife, Arleta Gunther, then 21 years old, that an angel had visited him and told him that his newborn son would be a great man in the vein of the Messiah.[5] [6] As a young child, his older brother, Merle Allin, Jr., was unable to pronounce “Jesus” properly and kept calling him “Jeje”, which became “GG”. The family lived in a log cabin with no water or electricity. Allin’s father, who forbade all conversation in the home after dark, was reportedly physically abusive and sexually abusive as well as mentally unstable, though GG himself never used this as an excuse for any of his own eccentricities. Allin is also said to have contracted Lyme disease at the age of twelve and to have never fully recovered from the effects of having the disease at such a young age.

Shortly before Allin started school, his mother changed his legal name to Kevin Michael Allin (on March 2, 1962 by his birth certificate). Arleta had allowed his birth name to stand until this point. However, with her husband’s deteriorating mental health, his mother changed his name in order to give Allin a chance at a normal, mockery-free childhood.

GG was considered a misfit from junior high school onwards, and he was placed in special ed classes and left back a year. He was known to rebel by showing up to school dressed in drag (his 11th grade school picture depicts him this way), which he said was inspired by the New York Dolls. When asked about his childhood, GG has been quoted as saying “Very chaotic. Full of chances and dangers. We sold drugs, stole, broke into houses, cars, etc. Did whatever we wanted to for the most part – including all the bands we played in. People even hated us back then.”

In late 1989, Allin was arrested and charged with rape and torture of a female acquaintance in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Despite threats of an onstage suicide, Allin died of a heroin overdose in New York City on June 29, 1993, in the Manhattan apartment of John Handley Hurt and Dwanna Yount.

Much of the factual material above was shamelessly nicked from Wikipedia, which is only fair, because they didn’t print my exegesis of a few points in “Green Grow the Rushes.”

I’ve heard some of Allin’s records. They’re awful. I never saw his live show. He evidently missed the Princess Theater here in Decatur, Alabama.

It was such a strange and possibly unhappy life. But is reverence what he’d have wanted?

RedOctane, which has recntly released the”Guitar Hero Aerosmith” game is planning to release “Guitar Hero GG Allin” before the Christmas shopping season. Be sure to save up your razor blades and feces.