Jerry Only Wants To Star In A Children's Film

Fuelled by dozens of bands including Guns N’ Roses and Metallica covering their seminal tracks, the new Misfits injected a healthy dose of heavy metal into the mix and will be giving punk-metal fans rockgasms when they play their Earth A.D. and Static Age albums in their entirety.

“Yeah, we’re going to do some other stuff in the middle,” singer/bassist, Jerry Only says. “Earth A.D. is only 22 minutes long. The Static Age album, we added a bunch of songs that were done at the same era that didn’t actually come out on the release of Static Age. It’s a learning process for my son (Jerry Caiafa II) who is in the band now, and we’re working on putting together a new album.

We figured, ‘hey, look, we’re rolling into our 40th anniversary in about a year and half. Let’s go back and let my son walk through the footsteps of what the band had done earlier’. We felt that he needed to learn every song that we did.

“It’s very enlightening to go back and run through everything we’d done. It refreshes your memory. It gives you a sense of being that nobody can pull the wool over your eyes on anything, and you haven’t left any details out.”

It’s a rare album that you can play from start to finish and not have any filler in there, but The Misfits’ albums are just so ferocious that they’re always going to go down well live.

“Actually, they are going really well,” a grees Only, who adopted the surname after his real surname was misspelt on their first album cover. From then on it would be ‘Jerry. Only Jerry’, before continuing tangentially, “I was hanging out with the guys from Biohazard the other day, and they said, ‘we were talking about bands and we came to the conclusion that The Misfits is the greatest American band of all time, because you guys don’t have any bad songs’. I said, ‘well, you know, that’s true - we don’t have gold records hanging up on the wall, but there is no bullshit in between, every song is a good song. If it’s not a good song, we don’t record it’. I had to agree with them on that. I said, ‘look, guys, I feel that way too. We’re not flashy, but we sure are consistent’.”

Only has an interesting perspective on what made the band’s early albums so potent.

“The thing was, I worked in a machine shop my whole life,” he explains. “I was about 10 years old and I started going to work in the summer with my dad. When I got into seventh or eighth grade in grammar school, I started playing sports, so my dad got me weights and we started working out. Back when I was a kid, everybody that was in a band was getting high and they weren’t working out, so if you were a jock or you were an athlete, they didn’t think you had any business being in the music scene.

“What makes The Misfits so potent is that when I started to play guitar, I was a senior in high school. I picked up the bass and I started playing in February. In April, I was in a band - I started The Misfits with Glenn (Danzig), and then the following January, I recorded Static Age. I hadn’t even been playing a year when we cut the record.”

With such an instantly recognisable cartoonish look and image, I wonder if Only has ever considered going into acting?

“I wouldn’t mind acting,” he laughs. “We’ve been in a couple of movies doing cameos for different things. People think acting is an easy job. You’ve got to be there at 6am and they don’t let you go until 1 or 2 in the morning, and sometimes you sit around for 12 hours before they call your name. I don’t think I have the patience for that shit.

“But I would try it. If I had the right role, I would give it a shot. I’d like to be in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3 or something (laughing). My daughter loves Papi!”

Originally published in X-Press Magazine