Our album of the week is an old-time cut from the early ’80’s. It’s a cult classic from a band that took on a life of its own after originally breaking up and has now ascended to legendary status.

The Misfits – Walk Among Us

Released March 1982 on Ruby Records

Favorite tracks – Astro Zombies, Mommy Can I Go Out And Kill Tonight, Skulls

Walk Among Us is a record I backed into for fairly obvious reasons – I was 4 years old when it came out. For whatever music I was exposed to in my early upbringing, The Misfits were not going to be counted among it.

About a decade later I was, like many adolescent dudes at the time, into Danzig. The Misfits’ former singer had found success in the early ’90’s with his Evil Elvis brand of metal. He was polarizing and is to this day reviled by some but I still hold up those early Danzig albums as examples of some truly great music.

At some point in that early half of the decade a buddy of mine needed to run to the next town over for something I can’t quite remember. I went along because well, you ain’t got much to do in mid-Missouri as a teen in 1993, or 1994, or 2004, or ever.

We wound up at a pawn shop and I sped straight over to their music section. The quality of music in a Midwest pawn shop was not up to the standards of any living being. It was the literal bottom of the barrel – just rejected tapes and CD’s that frankly should have never been recorded in the first place.

As luck would have it on that day, I spotted Walk Among Us in the pile of cast-off music. I paid $6 for a good used copy of this classic in a day and age where finding stuff like this wasn’t easy at all. The Internet was just barely a thing at the time and was not at all useful for commerce. And rural areas were sorely underserved for music – it was Wal-Mart or nothing.

I got home with my prized find and was instantly in love. I was nothing more than a tourist as it concerns punk but I was a Danzig fan and I was after everything he’d been involved in. And The Misfits were spectacular. The savage attack of unrefined horror punk was absolutely welcome to this young metalhead’s ears. It’s not some huge chasm between their stuff and metal anyway so it was pretty easy to see why so many in metal loved The Misfits.

The years wore on as they do and found both The Misfits and Danzig changing course and adding distance between them and their classic periods. Eventually they would find each other again and, if nothing else, they could count the money on the table and so they launched a few reunion gigs. I myself didn’t get to see them but that’s ok.

So there we have it – one of my all-time favorites and a more than fitting selection for the album of the week. 13 killer songs in 25 lean minutes and sometimes that, and some brains for lunch, is all you really need.