The beginning

The beginning

In January of 1977, after singing in several garage bands such as Talus and Whodat And Boojang that mostly played Black Sabbath songs, twenty-one year old Glenn Danzig decided it was finally time to create something serious and original. As a tribute to Marilyn Monroe, he named his musical project after her final movie, The Misfits.

The Misfits, circa 1977

For weeks, Glenn wrote songs and practiced with friends and old band mates, trying to find a suitable lineup of musicians to bring his vision to life. The first complete Misfits lineup consisted of Jimmy Battle on guitar, his old band mate Manny Martínez on drums, Diane DiPiazza on bass, and Danzig on electric piano and vocals. However, after only about a month of practicing, both Jimmy and Diane left the band. In need of new band mates, Manny suggested that his friend, Jerry Caiafa, should audition for bass. Jerry, a young football player who had been voted most popular in his senior class at Lodi High School, had just received a bass guitar for Christmas and had only been practicing with it for two months. Despite Jerry's fledgling bass talents, Glenn accepted him into the band and offered to teach him how to play. After three months of practicing, the trio headed into the studio to record their first single, Cough/Cool. The single contained two keyboard-driven songs (the B-side was a version of the song, She) that were quite different from the music for which the Misfits would later become known. The title track was somber and poetic, and reminiscent of The Doors. The band released the single themselves through their own label, Blank Records, and it remains one of the rarest and most valuable items in the bands's catalogue. Bassist Jerry Caiafa's last name was misspelled on the notes for the single, which led to his stage name Jerry Only which he has been known by since.

Over the next several months, Glenn, Manny, and Jerry (who had adopted the stage name Jerry Only) played a handful of gigs (their first two at CBGB in New York City) as they continued to practice and forge their own sound. Their experimental art rock style was met mostly with confusion.

By October 1977, British punk bands such as The Damned and New York punk bands like The Ramones began to have an influence on The Misfits. They decided to take the band in a more punk direction by adding guitarist Franché Coma to the band and ditching the keyboards, allowing Danzig to engage in antics typical of a punk frontman. Their sound, as evinced on the album Static Age, was one of the most crisp, melodic, and powerful sounds in punk at that time. Excluding the songs "Teenagers from Mars" and "Return of the Fly", they wouldn't draw on B-movies for lyrical inspiration for at least another year, and at this point their lyrics instead portrayed a futuristic dystopia of television saturation, automaton-like submissiveness, and glamorized sex and violence. As 1977 drew to a close, Glenn and Jerry decided that Manny was too unreliable and asked him to leave the band. He was replaced by Jim Catania, or "Mr. Jim", who had played in a previous band with Glenn.

At this time The Misfits caught their first big break. Mercury Records wanted to use the name Blank Records for a subdivision, but Glenn Danzig had a head for business and had secured a trademark on the name. They contacted Glenn and offered him thirty hours of free time in a professional studio, in exchange for full use of the Blank Records title. Glenn accepted the offer and in January of 1978, The Misfits headed into the New York studio to record their first full length album.

Seventeen songs were recorded, featuring a unique combination of their early art rock material and the hard driving punk direction they had begun to adopt. Once the album was complete, the band shopped it around to various labels but no one was interested in releasing it. The album was shelved, and would remain unreleased in its entirety until 1997, when it was finally released as the Static Age CD. With no one interested in their album, The Misfits decided to take four tracks from it and release it themselves as an EP. In June 1978, the Bullet EP was released on their new label, Plan 9, which Danzig had named after the infamous Ed Wood movie Plan 9 From Outer Space.