“You’ll know it as Spinal Remains, but at the time we had a song called Feline Nursery,” Jerry says, explaining the logical jump from cats to corpses. The skulls and hairstyles may be what many perceive as the Misfits, but it all stems from the chunky basslines, repetitive choruses and lyrics of a horrific hue. Static Age harbours some of the catchiest, most defiantly anarchic anthems the Misfits ever penned. The songs are simplistic in nature but that’s punk rock for you. If you listen to all the leads, though, they’re all one-note leads – so it doesn’t take long to drop something like that! – and I love it.” Punk rock was relatively new at this point so we needed to keep our shit together, and we did. “There are some people who believe they can just strap on a guitar and blast something great out, but we were dealing with something new. “Preparation is the key to success when recording,” he assures us, shattering every beginner’s dream of picking up a six-string and churning out a note-perfect rendition of Dyers Eve. It was about nine months into my career and we were recording our first album! Most things were done in the first take or two but we needed more time, so I came up with more money to keep the project going. “They gave us about 20 hours of recording time, so we went in having written all the Static Age songs in January 1978. Recordings and a gentleman named David Achelis was the engineer,” recalls Jerry, once again with pin-point precision. “The studio was on 57th Street in Manhattan, it was called C.I. Given this colourful backdrop, the Static Age sessions were surprisingly uneventful. They were punks in the most archetypal fashion they would have taken your #ladbanter and your #cheekynandos and lodged it forcefully between your buttocks. The band were, at one point, arrested for allegedly grave-robbing. Everything was played with the utmost brutality and the crowd became one disorganised pool of perspiring punters with more limbs than The Luggage and a mindset just as violent. The Misfits’ early shows were – to put it politely – absolutely fucking bananas.
Misfits at Florentine Gardens, Los Angeles circa 1980