Spencer must’ve sinned something terrible this last year. He’s curled up on the couch with Bob Woodward’s The War Within. The value of Woodward’s prose notwithstanding, reading that book means reading an awful lot of George W. Bush. A penance maybe only Bush himself deserves.

Two strange things about my haircut the other day. One, my haircuttress cuts my hair dry and washes/rinses it afterward, when just about a week ago I robustly denied in a debate with Tommy that these steps ever happen in this order anywhere in North America. Conditions at the salon, or on my head, seem to have undone my theory. Two, my haircuttress informs me about a subculture in the District I’ve never heard of: Glenn Danzig Tourism.

To be sure, my haircutress is aware of all punk-rock traditions. She and her boyfriend, a bike mechanic and former vegan pastry slinger who’s had ink done on 5 of 7 continents, took me to Flint, Michigan, two years ago for the punkest of all Fourths of July, where I witnessed firsthand the kind of economic depression that gave rise to bands like The Jam and The Clash in 1970s Britain. (I’m obligated to admit that I witnessed such disrepair while driving to and fro from the friends’ family lake house—but let’s not let ideological purity stand in the way of the point.) During that vacation we bonded over punk, hardcore, Ford vehicles, and America.

I have no reason to doubt her, and yet, when my haircuttress tells me that DC punks have made it a practice over the years to fly to LA on a pilgrimage to see Glenn Danzig’s house—well, I had my doubts. It was at one time her boyfriend’s job to usher Danzig around when he came to Flint. (Danzig’s a huge comic-book collector and asked only to be driven to and from the local comic-book store, apparently.) And sure enough, it seems there’s really something to her story. Glenn Danzig’s house has its own MySpace page. Glenn Danzig’s house is the first thing that comes up in a Google search for "flickr+Danzig" and it’s among the first images to pop up in a Flickr search for "Danzig" alone. The semantic Web believes Danzig is an address in Los Feliz.

What’s inspired kids on this mission from God Satan? It is Danzig, after all; any cultural meme built around Danzig that’s borderline absurd is baseline appropriate, given that it’s him. But my haircuttress tells me—and this is where the story falls apart—that kids show up at Danzig’s home, smear dog shit on his door handle, inconsiderately ring his doorbell and run away, all in an effort to pester him into reuniting Samhain. That’s right: Samhain. Why in God’s name would anyone want to do that? Not even the most diehard Misfits fan would accept such a Mephistophelean deal to see Danzig playing like it mattered again.

Disciples of Danzig, or people who just want to visit his house for some weird reason, ye may yet have hope (but please, not for Samhain). Among the gods of rock who now call Los Angeles their celestial sphere, it seems that Danzig has clearly bothered the least. Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, Dave Mustaine, Jason Newsted, Kirk Hammett—all of them bought estates large enough to require aerial photography to depict them in their entirety. Estates whose values, one imagines, are plummeting faster than record industry sales. Not Danzig—his home’s overgrown with ivy and weeds and features a strange brick half-wall made from his ruined chimney just behind his front gate. In another time, this would be called keeping it real. In aesthetic terms, it hardly matters. But in the midst of a financial crisis spurred by the lending and bundling of incredibly unsound home mortgages, Danzig’s looking like a buyer with the foresight not to put equity before abode.