Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

by Michael Azerrad

Haynes had taken to making his stage entrance with a dummy duct-taped to his body so it looked like he was dancing with it—then he’d tear it off and start attacking it. He’d sing through a megaphone, an idea that was stolen ad infinitum over the next ten years. Often he’d wear several layers of dresses and peel them off one by one until by the end of the show he was down to his skivvies. He’d stuff his clothes with condoms filled with fake blood so that when he’d fall on the floor, he’d turn into a gory mess; he’d hurl reams of photocopied pictures of cockroaches into the crowd; he’d pour a flammable liquid into an inverted cymbal, then whack it, sending up a geyser of flame; he’d usually set his hands on fire, too. There was the time he made his entrance through a hole he’d cut in a mattress covered in fake blood. Often the whole band would rip apart stuffed animals onstage, like a frenzied pack of psychotic cannibals. “It was just madness,” says Coffey. “It was just the more the merrier.”