Yesterday I received a photo book in the mail containing prints of an entire film roll of 20-25 professionally shot photographs of @franche_coma’s final show with The Misfits at “The Squeeze Inn” in Detroit, Michigan back in August of 1978. Franché was the guitarist who played on the band’s first proper album “Static Age”. It also came with a surprise holographic, lenticular card of Franché live in action!
A lot of people think of “The Original Misfits” as being Glenn, Jerry, and Doyle…but that’s just not true. In fact, Doyle was their fourth guitarist after Jimi Battle, Franché Coma, and Bobby Steele.
Franché played guitar on a lot of The Misfits’ most popular songs: Last Caress, Hybrid Moments, We Are 138, Teenagers From Mars, Some Kinda Hate, Attitude, Bullet, and so forth. Like I said - the entire “Static Age” album.
The visual history of The Misfits prior to 1979 had been somewhat of a mystery to me because of the fact that I hadn’t seen many photos of the band before they adopted their signature horror aesthetic. I was only 13 or so when I first heard The Misfits and the only Static Age photos I saw at the time were the ones contained in the box set. One larger sized image and four much smaller ones. They didn’t even look like the same people to me back then.
Sure there had been lineup changes, but Glenn didn’t look like Glenn, and Jerry didn’t really look like Jerry. The only thing that made it clear to me that one of them was in fact Jerry was that he had dark makeup under his eyes. Other than that, I don’t know if I would have even been able to tell you what band I was looking at if you had just randomly shown me those photos.
However, more and more photos started to appear online over the years which slowly began to paint a clearer picture of what the band actually looked like between 1977 and 1978. With the recently leaked “Manny Tapes” as well as more never before seen high quality photos, this is the closest we’ve ever been to truly understanding and appreciating this very unique and transitional era of the band.
This book of photos taken by Ruth Kondrat is limited to 333 copies and is an important document in the history of The Misfits’ legacy because it truly marks the final moments of the “Static Age”.
While the seeds had already been sewn with songs like “Teenagers From Mars” and “Return Of The Fly”, it wasn’t until after this that they went on to hone their image, fully shift their lyrical content, and embrace the themes that would eventually turn them into the horror punk progenitors that we know and love today.
