Banned in Boston (album)

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Banned In Boston
Banned In Boston cover
Compilation album by GG Allin
Released February 1988
Recorded 1978-November 1984
Genre Punk rock
Length 72:31
Label Black & Blue Records
Producer(s) David Peel, Peter Yarmouth, GG Allin, Steve Spinard.
Professional reviews
GG Allin chronology
Freaks, Faggots, Drunks and Junkies
(1988)
Banned In Boston
(1989)
The Suicide Sessions
(1989)


Banned In Boston is a compilation album from punk rock singer/songwriter/performance artist GG Allin, released in 1989 (although it was compiled and sent to the manufacturing plant in the winter of 1988 and gives a copyright date of that year). It was also the first ever GG Allin title to be released on compact disc.

The CD was compiled by Black and Blue Records owner Peter Yarmouth in the fall of 1988 as a test to see if the still-young CD market would include punk rock fans, specifically those interested in GG Allin's music. At the time, SST Records and Alternative Tentacles Records had already been releasing compact discs of their already lucrative back catalog, and Dischord Records were about to follow.

At the time, Allin's notoriety was already growing at a notoriously fast pace. His two album releases for Homestead Records, You Give Love A Bad Name and Freaks, Faggots, Drunks and Junkies, were partly to blame for Allin's increased visibility - at least in stores that were willing to carry the albums in the first place. Allin had not dealt with Yarmouth since a few years previous, and had been telling interviewers that Yarmouth had not paid him a cent in royalties (a charge later refuted by Yarmouth when he said he "paid" GG by giving him records to sell), yet Yarmouth had rights to, or at least possession of, either tapes or records of Allin's pre-Homestead releases. Black and Blue's first release was an Allin recording, the Live Fast Die Fast EP, and Black and Blue had since been reissuing Allin material in various analog formats.

Loooking to both stretch out the material he had for the first-ever GG Allin CD and attract collectors of Allin's work to a compilation of previously released material, Yarmouth took the initiative and came up with a professional-sounding recording of Allin and his first band, The Jabbers, playing what was said to be the last show GG and the band would ever pay together in Boston, at the popular Boston nightclub The Channel. Rather than add track marks to the beginning of every song, for whatever unknown reason Yarmouth incorporated all seven live recordings as one 15-minute-plus track on the CD, and framed this track with pre-and-post-show interviews with GG and the band, although it is not entirely clear if these interviews actually took place before the show presented on the CD.

For the previously released material, Yarmouth presented most of Allin's first album Always Was, Is And Always Shall Be, as well as the single "Gimme Some Head" and the EPs Live Fast Die Fast and You Hate Me And I Hate You. Of these recordings, only Always Is... and You Hate Me... are actually by GG and the Jabbers. Live Fast Die Fast was done by Allin and a local hair-metal band called the Flying 69, while "Gimme Some Head" was Allin's already legendary collaboration with former MC5 members Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson.

Yarmouth remixed the Always Is... album tracks but presented the original mixes for the remaining tracks, all from their master tapes except for "Gimme Some Head" which is clearly from a copy of the original single on David Peel's Orange Records label.

In a further fit of revisionist history, Yarmouth falsely credited production on all of the recordings to "Dick Urine", the fictitious production credit from GG's early post-Jabbers cassette self-releases that later became the collective psuedonymn for Allin and Yarmouth when Eat My Fuc was recorded and released, and claimed on the back cover of the CD, in a parody of standard early compact disc technical notes, "We haven't tried very hard to improve the sound."

This compilation would see rerelease in a couple of different variations over the years. In 1993, the entire CD would be released with a different front cover (of Allin from the Always Is... days) under the extended title Insult & Injury Volume 1 - 1977-1982 Banned In Boston and the contents of same would also be split into two different CDs in 1998 as Banned In Boston, Volume 1 and Volume 2, with Volume 1 containing the studio recordings and Volume 2 featuring the live tracks and interviews.

[edit] Track listing

  1. Dead Or Alive
  2. Interview
  3. Live Boston
    1. You Hate Me And I Hate You
    2. Gimme Some Head
    3. Don't Talk To Me
    4. Automatic
    5. Nuke Attack
    6. Bored To Death
    7. Assface
  4. Interview
  5. Live Fast Die Dast
  6. Livin' Like An Animal
  7. Loudenbomber
  8. I Need Adventure
  9. NYC Tonite
  10. No Rules
  11. A Fuckup
  12. Gimme Some Head
  13. You Hate Me And I Hate You
  14. Bored To Death
  15. Beat Beat Beat
  16. One Man Army
  17. Assface
  18. Cheri Love Affair
  19. Automatic
  20. I Need Adventure (1980 Version)
  21. Don't Talk To Me
  22. Unpredictable
  23. Radio Interview (unlisted on the CD tray liner)
GG Allin
Bands: The Jabbers - The Scumfucs - Psycho (band) - Bloody Mess & The Skabs - Antiseen - The Murder Junkies
GG Allin - Merle Allin - Dick Urine - Mykel Board - Mark Kramer - David Peel
Studio albums: Always Was, Is And Always Shall Be - Eat My Fuc - Hated in the Nation - You Give Love a Bad Name (album) - Freaks, Faggots, Drunks and Junkies - Banned in Boston (album) - Carnival Of Excess: Limited Edition - The Troubled Troubador -Brutality and Bloodshed for All
EPs: The Troubled Troubador (EP)
Films:Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies
See also: Punk rock - Hardcore punk - Shock rock - Scum punk - Transgressive art - Nihilism - Country and Western