Did The Kinks really party at John Wayne Gacy’s house in 1965?
Charm has been one of the most quintessential traits for some of the most famous murderers in history, a weapon so powerfully subtle it barely even registers in legal fine print. Ted Bundy? Somewhat uninteresting but terribly charismatic. Rodney Alcala? Must have had something to land the gig on a dating game before he, well, you know. John Wayne Gacy? See, the thing here was that, weirdly, The Kinks apparently saw right through it once.
One of the unique things about the ‘Killer Clown’ is that he seemed strangely rooted in the underbelly of culture, with a somewhat confusing résumé that could otherwise be seen as someone without a clue of what they wanted to do with their life. Of course, hindsight here points to a darker truth about the nature of Gacy’s mind, but beneath that glaring aimlessness was a deeply conniving predator who exercised power and control at every corner.
Joining the Jaycees was likely the moment Gacy’s work ethic (if you could call it that) became a little more angular, and of course, where the more nuanced parts of his endearing personality traits made themselves known. Gacy was a popular part of the community with accreditations proving as such in 1964 and 1965, when he won ‘Outstanding First Year Member’ and ‘Man Of The Year’, and was no doubt well on the path to finding his way, with endorsements coming in thick and fast.
As part of the Jaycees Scholarship Fund, Gacy got more involved in live events, doing promotion and booking slots for bands to perform locally. This is also how he booked The Kinks for a show at Springfield’s Illinois State Armoury. Now, musicians accidentally finding themselves in strange, questionable situations isn’t entirely unheard of, but the moment this includes future killers (like Debbie Harry’s accidental run-in with Ted Bundy), everything feels just that little bit more spine-tingling.
But the thing is: unlike Harry’s experience, it seemed like the members of The Kinks didn’t suspect anything was seemingly off in the situation they found themselves in, other than the fact that the promoter who followed them around all night and lured them into his home for the afterparty seemed a little, well, irritating. Granted, it’s unclear whether said promoter was actually Gacy, as the band never actually named him in their recollections, but a Mojo interview with Pete Quaife suggested that whoever it was was particularly disturbing.
“The local promoter that was looking after us turned out to be a real greaseball,” he said. “He was polite enough, but a greaseball nonetheless. After the gig, he invites us back to his house. Says he’s got some people coming round and he’s got some booze, so we say, ok. We get there, and the place has an awful, sickly smell about it. But he’s our promoter, so we stay there, drinking, ’til about 03:00. When we decide to go, he gets upset, says can’t a couple of us stay? By now, we were beginning to get a bit antsy about this guy, so we took off to the hotel, and that was the last we saw of him.”
He added: “We could have ended up as mementoes, bricked up in his walls”.
Elsewhere, Ray Davies also hinted at the potential danger of the situation, telling Classic Rock, “I don’t know what the guy claimed to be at that time. You’d meet a lot of people like that, hanging out with promoters. That could have been a potentially scary time. I’ve worked with a lot of dodgy people in my time, without knowing their connections.”
In all fairness, the entire story seems a little mythologised, like no one really knows if The Kinks (or even just Quaife) partied with one of the most notorious serial killers in history without even knowing it at the time. Still, considering the way their paths definitely crossed in one way or another, the whole thing feels pretty likely; a story that stinks of the truth just like the walls inside Gacy’s home.
