The Misfits - Static Age

What is Static Age? It's The Misfits' first album. G'night.

As origin stories go, though, it's pretty awesome. They released their first single on Glenn Danzig's properly paperworked and trademarked Blank Records. Then Mercury wanted to use that name, and Danzig accepted a deal for 30 hours of studio time in exchange for the name, because you can just go fill out the paperwork again with a different name, Plan 9 in his case. There's always strings attached though, so those 30 hours happened late at night, and the engineers wasted most of that time getting levels, so they just bashed out 18 songs of highly varying quality. Musically it's fantastic, but lyrically it runs the gamut from truly shocking classic tracks like Last Caress and Bullet, to enjoyable mid-level songs on various topics, to simply listing the cast of the movie Return of the Fly. It's fantastic (if not exactly intelligent) late 70s punk. Supposedly Sid Vicious' mom was a random guest of the sessions. They were all hanging out with Sid, and she tagged along the night after he ODed. Who am i to assume Glenn and Jerry (their ice cream flavor would of course be Gravel Road, ba dum ching) were more interested in her wares than her celebrity? If you don't know that story, i'll give you the short version: Sid just got out of prison on bail, and most everyone thinks she gave him uncut dope (that would kill pretty much anybody) to spare him from his future return to said fine dining establishment where he would almost certainly be going in the near future. She was a professional mule, after all. Beverly was not a particularly nice human being.

Trouble is, sure they recorded it for free, but nobody wanted to pay to publish it. Two decades of randomly flicking the tracks out on other smaller projects, they finally released the whole thing in the 90s. It's awesome though. I mean, who doesn't want Glenn Danzig to kill their baby?