"This is a song 'bout fuckin'. It's called Unholy Passion..."

Titled Live 1984 but with a title card that states November 21st, 1985 (?) during their "Season of The Dead" tour, this is a sick live document of what appears to be the first ever L.A. show from the post-Misfits deathrock / hardcore band Samhain, fronted of course by the legendary Glenn Danzig. It's almost impossible to get your hands on anything Samhain-related nowadays, so I was stoked to finally have my mitts on my own copy of this Flipside-shot classic, which came out on DVD in 2005 but went out of print for ages. This complete set from the legendary devil-punks is, to the best of my knowledge, a previously unreleased show that hasn't shown up on any of the other Samhain and/or Flipside videocassette releases that came out back in the day. Being an Al Flipside production (which was an offshoot of the crucial long-running punk rock fanzine of the same name), this romper stomper, most likely recorded by high end camcorder straight to videotape, is rough-hewn and made up of raw footage and audio, and it definitely shows its age at times, mainly with the audio. The picture quality is pretty killer, to be honest, but the soundboard audio has some very brief blips of in-the-red signal overload or tape dropout that remain from the original copy, but for me that just adds to the urgent verisimilitude of the whole thing. Bottom line, you'd be hard pressed to get ahold of a better live concert video from Samhain, at least outside of that now impossible-to-find Samhain box set from the late 1990s.

This concert video ranks among my favorites of the original hardcore / death rock era, raw and mangy and bananas, capturing the spirit of the band on VHS in all of its rabid power. The lineup features the Eerie Von / Damien Marshall / Steve Zing version of the band, and the fifteen song set is pretty comprehensive, heavily weighted with stuff off of 1984's Initium ("Samhain", "Black Dream", "The Howl", "Archangel", "Horror Biz", "Macabre", "All Murder, All Guts, All Fun", "The Shift"), along with material that would soon show up on 1985's Unholy Passion 12" ("Unholy Passion", "I Am Misery", "Moribund", "The Hungry End"), the obscure "He Who Cannot Be Named" that (I believe) only appeared on the later-80s self-released EP On Earth As It Is In Hell, and requisite performances of classic Misfits anthems "Die, Die, My Darling" and "Halloween II" (looking at old Samhain set lists, it looks like these guys couldn’t make it out of the venue without bustin' out at least a couple of Misfits tunes) that are delivered via chainsaw power. The set runs the gamut through Samhain's awesome blend of death rock and hardcore, hammering that audience and the listener with speedfreak three-chord anthems, dark and ominous mid-paced chuggers, macabre lunatic thrash blitzkriegs, tribal drumming rumbling forth in full adrenaline power amid sinister minor key hooks, blasphemous and profane dirges, bits of rockabilly / blues-tainted crunch, and the band's signature witchy gothic sludgepunk lurch. The performance features some of the added metallic bite that propelled this band beyond the crude / perfect campiness of Misfits, and the performance is ferocious, crowd goin' batfuck...Danzig is his classic belligerent self.

The title credits state this is from November 21st, 1985 at the Stardust Ballroom on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, and the forty-seven minute set offers that classic Flipside production with multi-camera shots , great angles, and that 80s style of video editing with dramatic fades and skull-smacking editing. The band and cameras and audience all in constant motion, the sound is soundboard and slightly blown out at the beginning of the set, with some tape audio dropouts occasionally popping up, gets kinda fried out with the levels slammin' into the red, but that clears up pretty quickly for the majority of the performance. Again, it's on the raw side though , by Flipside standards, but the energy, set list, band and audience (who are non-stop losing their shit), and solid video make up for it. In a word? Pandemonium.

A killer piece of O.G. goth-punk history.