What up guys and gals, this little headbanger is back with more writing for y'all to enjoy. Today we're going down to the depths of darkness, and find Danzig's self titled album.
This was Danzig's debut album, released in August of 1988. The band was formed a year before, with members: Glenn Danzig on vocals/keyboard, Eerie Von on bass, John Christ on guitar, Chuck Biscuits on drums, and on this particular album, James Hetfield of Metallica was a guest guy and did background vocals on the songs "Posession" and "Twist of Cain" (even I'm just discovering this!). However he was uncredited for that due to contract.
The tracking list for this album is:
1. Twist of Cain
2. Not of This World
3. She Rides
4. Soul on Fire
5. Am I Demon
6. Mother
7. Possession
8. End of Time
9. The Hunter
10. Evil Thing
Whole lotta good stuff. As you can tell, the Danzig band wasn't afraid of showing off the dark side of things in their music. "Twist of Cain" and "Possession" Glenn originally wrote for his previous band, Samhain. The first song is influenced by the biblical story of Cain and Abel. "She Rides" is really a sex song that is influenced by the mythology on the demon-goddess Lilith. In the lyrical part, "she rides/from the daylight in chains", it describes a method of demon binding.
"The Hunter" is the only song on the album that isn't written by Glenn, though the credits say otherwise. It was originally written by Booker T & The MG's and Carl Wells. However the Danzig version has the lyrics slightly modified.
There were 4 music videos made for the album. They were the songs "Mother", "Twist of Cain", "Am I Demon", and "She Rides". But "Mother" got banned from MTV due to controversial imagery. However a couple years back, a new channel came along called MTV Classic, which is like an exact replica of the original MTV. All music. And this music video has played on there god knows how many times now. Thought it was awesome at first but now it just drives me crazy.
The song also was number 17 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks charting in 1993, and was number 43 on The Billboard Hot 100 in 1994. It was also renamed "Mother '93" and had a music video of a live concert with the studio recording overdubbing it.
The skull on the album art was originally from the Samhain band. But the skull also comes from a Marvel comic book, "The Saga of Crystar". Original copies of the self titled album (no matter what format) had just the skull on a black background, and no words. However later copies got the sticker for parental advisory on the content of the album.
Glenn responded to the advisory with, "That's because of its content. We're making people think. You're not allowed to make people think in the United States. You're not allowed to have them question the government or authority".
Danzig is another one of the many old school metal bands I grew up on. Basically this one here was my mother's fault. This was one of the albums of theirs she had on CD (and still has it). Apparently she bought this copy back in the 90s. It got played like hell in the car everywhere we went. I remember especially the songs "Twist of Cain" and "She Rides" playing a lot. Sometimes as a little thing I would ask her to pop the album into the CD player and she would gladly do so. And these days, from her knowing how much I collects CDs and what not, she lets me borrow the album a lot.
Thanks for reading! Up next we'll be going into Motorhead's iconic "Ace of Spades" record. So remember to...
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