The Murder Junkies trace their origins to 1990 and 1991, when brothers-in-arms Merle Allin and drummer Donald "Dino Sex" Sachs assembled a new backing band for GG Allin while he served out a prison sentence. This was actually the third band to carry the Murder Junkies name, following an earlier independent Texas outfit and a separate studio project, but it was this lineup, initially rounded out by guitarist "Chicken" John Rinaldi, that would become historically significant. The lineup was formed in 1990 as Allin's new backing band and rehearsed while he concluded his prison sentence, with an original line-up consisting of guitarist "Chicken" John Rinaldi, GG's elder brother Merle Allin on bass, and drummer Donald "Dino Sex" Sachs. The band's raw, confrontational sound fused primal punk aggression with garage rock filth, built to match the chaos of Allin's notorious stage persona.
The band's defining moment arrived through its association with GG Allin's final years. After Rinaldi's departure, guitarist William Weber joined, and even Dee Dee Ramone was briefly recruited before quitting without playing a live show. GG Allin and the Murder Junkies recorded their sole studio album with Allin, Brutality and Bloodshed for All, for Alive Records in April 1993. All songs were written while Allin was in Michigan State Prison. The subsequent tour became infamous in punk history, as it was shortly succeeded by Allin's death from an apparent drug overdose on June 28, and was chronicled by roadie Evan Cohen in the book I Was A Murder Junkie: The Last Days Of GG Allin. This chapter was also captured in Todd Phillips's documentary "Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies," cementing the band's place at the center of one of punk's most extreme and mythologized stories.
Rather than dissolve after Allin's death, the surviving members pressed on. Dino, Merle, and Weber decided to continue the band, recruiting new singer Mike Denied, former bassist with New York City band The Denied. Over the following years the group cycled through a revolving cast of frontmen, including Michael "Mike" Hudson, formerly of Pagans, Jeffrey "Jeff" Clayton of Antiseen, and J.B. Beverley, a musician from the Washington, D.C. area , while releasing the EP "Feed My Sleaze" in 1995 and the single "The Right to Remain Violent" the following year. Murder Junkies broke up in 1999, then reformed with Clayton singing for a tour in the spring of 2003, marking the 10th anniversary of GG Allin's death. They kept touring internationally in the years after, as they completed a tour of continental Europe in 2005, and in 2006 appeared at two shows supporting CKY while touring as the opening act for Hank Williams III. The band's legacy has endured well into the 21st century, continuing to release new material long after their notorious beginnings. They released the album Road Killers in 2011, followed by A Killing Tradition in 2013 , and later put out limited-edition vinyl like the 2014 single "Gut Pit," a red translucent 7 inch containing three songs plus a rant by Merle Allin . With Merle Allin and Dino Sex remaining as the band's core through decades of lineup changes, the Murder Junkies have solidified their reputation less as a conventional touring act and more as living custodians of GG Allin's transgressive legacy, still playing underground venues and drawing punk lifers curious about a direct link to one of the genre's most extreme chapters.
It is fitting that a project built on preserving raw, unfiltered documentation of punk's underground would include the Murder Junkies in its collection. Wayne Dennon photographed the band at one show in 2007, and the 25 images from that night remain part of the archive today, a small but enduring record of a band whose entire existence has always been tangled up with documentation, myth, and memory. Visitors have returned to those photos again and again, racking up 18,984 views over the years, a testament to the enduring fascination with a band that has spent more than three decades outliving the chaos that created it.
