I saw The Murder Junkies post-GG and it was one of the handful of most insane things I've ever witnessed or participated in my life.
This was in 1996 at a rec center in the Northern Liberties section of Philly. NoLibs today is our gentrified sorta Williamsburg-ish area. But in 1996, it was insanely dangerous. I had never even really heard of it (only having lived in Philly for one year) and me and my two friends I went with walked past abandoned houses with homeless dudes smoking crack brazenly while leaning in the windows.
The show was called something like Rulebreakers Rule. I believe snippets of it are on YouTube. Trust me when I tell you they don't do it justice.
The bill was: The Murder Junkies, Anti-Seen and Rancid Vat. Rancid Vat was sorta well-known locally because their lead singer Cosmo Commander was a prominent tattoo artist/insane person. Anti-Seen were also popular in the 90s for just absolute insanely violent shows.
And, oh yeah, in between bands was professional wrestling. You can't really get more Gregg than that.
The opening band was this local legend band called Snail Trail. They were this absolutely awful hardcore band -- even by 90s hardcore standards -- from the bowels of Philly. The rumor about them was that they robbed a band of their instruments but got shy when looking to pawn them off and decided to just form a band with this hot merchandise. I have absolutely no idea if this is true or not but I want to believe.
Snail Trail started the show by lighting off a series of Roman Candles and other flares off the stage. Mind you, this is at a tiny rec center gym. The ceiling was probably 12 feet high at the most. These flaming torches were bouncing off the ceiling and right into people. Legitimately, I saw people get burned and then want to fight Snail Trail. This was within the first 30 minutes.
The wrestling was nuts. This was when the late, great ECW was taking over and all these low-level rasslers wanted to get signed, and they thought the best way to get noticed was to do the most hardcore violent stuff ever. I saw a dude with a thumbtack in his eyelid at one point. It was just chaos.
The Murder Junkies set was pretty ingenious. While they played, a wrestling battle royal was taking place.
I haven't even started to talk about who was in the crowd yet. I went with my two nerdy friends from college. We liked punk and wrestling and watched Hated a combined 100,000 times. We were possibly the only people there who never had to testify in a criminal trial. The place was filled with just out-and-out trash. Prison looking biker dudes, 90s hardcore mooks, skinheads, crust punks, etc. I was strictly avoided eye contact with strangers the whole day.
So a lot of these people obviously were there just to fight. And the actual fighting started during the battle royale.
It was just surreal. These wrestlers in day glo spandex and the like were fake fighting while a friggin' prison riot was breaking out around them. It was just utter chaos. Fists. Kicks. Broken bottles. Chains. I'm not kidding you when all these things were out. While wrestlers were fake fighting.
At some point, someone collided with The Murder Junkies' monitor or something along those lines so their sound went out. (They were playing as all this was going on.) Dino the drummer, naked of course, came to the front of the stage yelling "GG ALLLLLINN!!!!"
He then took his drumstick, stuck them somewhere, while Merle did something to another part of his body. I won't spell out the details.
People were just straight-up getting jumped. My one friend of I stood on the top bleacher and pinned each other against the wall behind us so no one could stick us. It was that friggin' nuts. My other friend (completely nuts at the time, now a sales representative and married father of two and suburban homeowner) was in the middle of all this like it was nothing.
We decided to bolt a bit after that. We went to the main stairwell and from a few feet away it looked like it could have been sorta too Who In Cincinnati for our tastes. We left through some fire door.
