Destroy All Monsters - Biography
By Oliver Hall
Destroy All Monsters, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, was exclusively regarded as one of Ron Asheton’s minor post-Stooges bands. However, before Asheton and MC5 bassist Mike Davis joined in 1977, Destroy All Monsters had been a conceptual anti-rock noise band that included artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. This early version of the band was largely unheard and unknown until Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and writer Byron Coley released a three-CD retrospective of home recordings assembled by Kelley called Destroy All Monsters: 1974-1976 (1994 Ecstatic Peace!/Father Yod). The original band’s legacy has since eclipsed that of the Asheton-period band. Founding members Niagara Detroit, Cary Loren, Jim Shaw, and Kelley have continued sporadically as Destroy All Monsters since reuniting in 1995.
Niagara, Shaw, and Kelley met as art students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1972. Niagara stood out among the hippies with her B-movie star good looks, and she spoke and sang with a pronounced Michigan accent. Loren, Niagara’s boyfriend, made film, photo, sculpture, and collage art based largely on the imagery of late-night TV horror and science fiction movies, often with Niagara as its subject. Loren and Niagara shared an apartment in Ann Arbor, while Kelley and Shaw lived at God’s Oasis Drive-In Church. Kelley describes God’s Oasis on his website as “a three-story Victorian house housing a large enough group of freaks to make the rent affordable to everyone.” He lived in the basement.
Some accounts say the band formed in 1973, but Kelley remembers the four original members deciding to form the band at a party in 1974. They took the name from the 1968 Japanese movie Destroy All Monsters, in which Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra try to exterminate the human race on behalf of alien masters. Very few people saw or heard the original line-up of Destroy All Monsters, but one person in the audience, David Fair, was inspired to form the noise band Half Japanese with his brother Jad. According to Loren, Half Japanese’s first single, “Calling All Girls” (1977 50 Skidillion Watts), is an interpretation of Destroy All Monsters’ “Calling All Girls.”
Kelley and Shaw moved to Southern California in 1976 to attend California Institute of the Arts. Kelley writes at his website, “After I moved to Los Angeles in 1976, I discovered that there indeed were other bands working in the world who had somewhat the same interests as Destroy All Monsters: Suicide, Airway, Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, Half Japanese, Devo, the Screamers, Non, the Residents, and such New York No Wave groups as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and DNA. All of these bands were of interest to me. I, however, found the LA scene not very supportive of this type of ugly noise and I quickly gave up the idea of continuing in bands. I began to do solo performance work geared toward an art audience.” Kelley continued to make experimental music with Tony Oursler as the Poetics. In Michigan, Loren replaced Kelley and Shaw with twins Larry and Ben Miller, whose brother Roger Miller had sometimes drummed with the band. Roger later went on to form Mission of Burma. Loren then took a fateful step; he asked Ron Asheton (ex-Stooges) and Mike Davis (ex-MC5) to join the band.
Writing about Destroy All Monsters for Perfect Sound Forever in May of 1996, Loren disclosed that he had two “schizoid” experiences during this period. “During the summer of 1976, following Jim and Mike’s departure for art school, I had a series of powerful visual, audible, and religious toned hallucinations (all non-drug induced) that continued non-stop for about one month that led me to be voluntarily admitted to a Pontiac mental ward.” Niagara and Loren’s parents helped him recuperate, but he had another episode in 1977 while the band was in New York. By this time, Niagara and Asheton had become romantically involved. They sent Loren back to Detroit and continued the band without him.
Led by Niagara and Asheton, Destroy All Monsters became more like a conventional hard rock band. The band’s first single, released in 1978, presented new arrangements of the old songs “You’re Gonna Die” and “Bored” (1978 IDBI). Loren, displeased by the band’s use of his song “You’re Gonna Die,” released his own Destroy All Monsters EP, Days of Diamonds (1978 Black Hole), that same year from lo-fi rehearsal tapes. Niagara called it “garbage” in a 1979 interview with Sounds.
The Miller twins quit the group in October of 1978 and formed the short-lived Xanadu with Loren and Rob King. Loren and Barry Roth then started the Nightcrawlerz, a Burroughs/Gysin-inspired project that continued for a decade and can be heard on the CD anthology The Third Mind: Nightcrawlerz (2001 The End Is Here). Niagara, Asheton, Davis, and King continued to perform and record as Destroy All Monsters, releasing the singles “November 22nd 1963” backed with “Meet the Creeper” (1979 IDBI) and “What Do I Get” backed with “Nobody Knows” (1979 IDBI) in 1979. The three IDBI singles are collected with a bonus track on the CD Bored (1991 Cherry Red). Loren says in his Perfect Sound Forever article that the Niagara-Asheton-Davis-King lineup lasted until 1985. Niagara and Asheton started a new project called Dark Carnival in 1984, and it appears that Dark Carnival superseded Destroy All Monsters.
Destroy All Monsters’ early material remained secret until the 1994 release of the three-CD set Destroy All Monsters: 1974-1976 (1994 Ecstatic Peace!/Father Yod). Niagara, Loren, Shaw, and Kelley reunited for shows in Detroit and Southern California in 1995. The live album Destroy All Monsters Silver Wedding Anniversary (1995 Sympathy for the Record Industry) documents the reunion tour. The book Destroy All Monsters: Geisha This (published in 1995 by Book Beat Gallery) collects all the issues of the band’s magazine as well as other 70’s Monsters print ephemera. The book also includes a flexidisc of an otherwise unavailable 1975 recording of “My Cowboy Hero,” “Calling All Girls,” and the original “I’m Bored.” Also released was the Grow Live Monsters (1995 Lobsterworld, re-released on DVD 2007 MVD) video, which was edited from Loren’s 1970’s Super 8 films.
Loren, Shaw, and Kelley continued to collaborate as Destroy All Monsters after the reunion tour, from which sidemen Art Byington and Dave Muller remained. The five recorded the cassette Backyard Monster Tube (1996 Time Stereo) in Kelley’s studio in 1996. A remix of the cassette appeared on CD with the bonus live track “Pig” as Backyard Monster Tube and Pig (1998 Time Stereo) in 1998. Since 2000, Destroy All Monsters has operated as the trio of Loren, Kelley, and Shaw. The voice of Sun Ra appears on Swamp Gas (2002 The End Is Here), a 2002 album concerning UFOs and the Top Ten in Dexter, Michigan in 1966. The album came packaged with a Swamp Gas Gazette newspaper and a sticker. In 2003, Kelley and Loren co-released Detroit Oratorio (2003 Compound Annex/The End Is Here), a CD of 1998 performances.
Ron Asheton died at his Ann Arbor home in January of 2009. Hungry for Death, a Destroy All Monsters gallery exhibition, opened at Printed Matter in New York in May of 2009. A previously unreleased 1975 recording of Destroy All Monsters playing as a sextet was released on vinyl as Double Sextet (2009 Printed Matter/The End Is Here/Compound Annex) to coincide with the art show. The sextet includes God’s Oasis Drive-In Church housemates Kalle Nemvalts and John Reed.
Loren runs an excellent independent bookstore called The Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan, where one can still buy Destroy All Monsters memorabilia.