The normal kids wore tie-dye and went to prep school we wore black and did gravity-defying things with Aquanet.

Within our little summer-school society, we were the misfits, and we relished it. I have a dim recollection of catching Youth of Today with JFA at TT the Bears-surely one of the most mismatched bills in the history of hardcore. Occasionally we'd head into Harvard Square and load up on records at Newbury Comics or one of the stores around the corner that did a brisk business in Cure and Joy Division bootlegs. I took gloomy black-and-white pictures in photography class on humid afternoons, my friends and I would get lime rickeys and hang out in the town graveyard, swapping punk rock trivia. I was 16 when I spent the summer on a leafy college campus outside Boston, getting up to the usual 16-year-old things.

Lawsuits sprung up regarding songwriting royalties, and eventually in the 1990s, Only secured the “exclusive legal right to tour and record as the Misfits.” While Danzig focused on his eponymous new band, Jerry Only and the other Misfits took legal action against Danzig. During a Detroit show, two nights before Halloween (appropriately enough), Danzig announced to the audience that it was the Misfits’ “last show ever.” The band parted ways, and the relationship between Danzig and Only seemed to fracture for good. They had the songs, they had the look, and at the end of 1983, they were done. What’s more, they became a symbol, crafting a horror punk aesthetic with an awesome logo that teenagers across the world aspired to mimic (more on that in a minute). Together with bassist Jerry Only and guitarist Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein (among other members of the band’s ever-rotating lineup), they made anthemic, shout-along pit music-punk records like 1982’s Walk Among Us that hold up to this day. He co-founded the band, wrote the songs, and fronted all of their records with an iconic, authoritative howl. Danzig was the aesthetic and creative powerhouse behind the Misfits. Understandably, this is huge news for the band’s fans.

Danzig bootlegs