When GG Allin tried to outdo Henry Rollins by sticking a banana in his rectum
In 1993, The Hangover director Todd Phillips released a documentary just after he had dropped out of New York University film school. The doc focused on the highly-controversial punk musician GG Allin and his band, The Murder Junkies. Allin’s live shows had been known to feature him self-mutilating, flinging his own faeces at the crowd and starting fights with them.
Within the film, there is a scene where Allin grabs a banana, shoves it up his arse and then throws it at the crowd, which in many ways is somewhat tame for the head of the Murder Junkies. Interestingly, the show at which Allin performed the bizarre stunt saw Phillips trick New York University into hosting it.
Phillips explained, “About a month before we did the GG thing, there were these posters all over NYU that said ‘Henry Speaks,’ and it was Henry Rollins doing one of his things where he reads from one of his books, and it was pretty cool and all. And so I sold it to NYU as ‘Oh, it’s that, [GG] does the same thing.’ So [Rollins] was a really big hit, and they said, ‘Okay, this guy, we haven’t heard of him, but I guess he does the same thing.’”
He added, “We were really there because he had done some spoken word, like the thing he did in 1988 where he grabbed that woman, and he was cutting himself. So I was sort of envisioning that, but GG just came drunk, and he hadn’t planned anything, and he sees a banana, and he became really dumb and it was a silly part.”
Seeing as Phillips had played a big hand in putting the show on at NYU, the school actually brought up charges against him – as serious as “attempting to do great bodily harm less than murder”, such was the danger that Allin possessed at his live shows.
Phillips noted that “[it was] because I knew what this thing was, and I was deceiving everyone by saying it was a Henry Rollins thing. They literally had a trial, and the dean of the film school and two students were on the jury or whatever. They didn’t convict me, but it was an interesting time.”
It was a strange way for Phillips to get started in the film industry, especially considering the kind of films he went on to make later in his career: The Hangover, Road Trip, Old School, etc. However, it provided a rare glimpse into one of punk’s most controversial figures.
