MTV demanded several heavy edits to the content, which Menello and Giordano duly complied with, before the station agreed to premiere the approved version on Headbanger’s Ball. Saturday night comes around and MTV roll the video. Except it’s the original, unedited version – ‘blood’, chicks and all. Giordano maintains that they made the edits and MTV were to blame for the SNAFU, while Menello recalls that Rick Rubin was elated. “Rick Rubin got one hundred people to call MTV, ‘Yo, I want to see the video where they sacrifice the chicken!’” he wrote. “For a whole weekend, the original version was on the air.”
Naturally, MTV freaked out and pulled the video from rotation. "It really pisses me off because they’ll show Freddy Krueger, his bones, and the dog comes over and pisses on his bones and all of a sudden, his skin comes back and his guts,” fumed Danzig in an interview at the time, describing a promotional spot for Nightmare On Elm Street IV. But the controversy and MTV’s hard stance against subsequent Danzig videos fed into the view of radio stations that the band was too transgressive for mass audiences. This effectively stunted the trajectory of both the album and the band, who would slog away for years as underground cult sensations rather than mainstream contenders. “I thought it was pretty tame. With my background I could have done something really wild.”
Danzig did have the last laugh, though. Five years later the band issued a slightly-tweaked version entitled Mother ’93 as part of the Thrall: Demonsweatlive EP, which picked up national radio play. Under pressure from public demand for Mother, MTV relented and placed a ‘live' version of the video on heavy rotation. The surge of interest pushed Danzig to number 43 on mainstream rock charts in the US and propelled their debut to gold-selling status in 1995. The album has since gone platinum and continues to rip harder than a rhino’s drawers.
So occasionally, Mother does know best. Give her a call and try to refrain from yelling down the phone like a combination of Tarzan and Scooby Doo.