The band performed with contemporaries such as Sonic Youth, along with Nirvana, Jesus and Mary Chain, the Replacements, Smashing Pumpkins, the Gun Club, Leaving Trains and Redd Kross.
It played its first show as a quartet with Doug Gillard on lead guitar on May 20, 1984, at the Pop Shop, an underground music club located in the basement of the famed Cleveland Agora.
[4] The four-piece lineup proceeded to release two singles on St. Valentine Records, a local cooperative label formed to document Cleveland's non-hardcore underground.
The band's follow-up single, "Coca Cola and Licorice" (or as it was also called, Porn in the U.S.A.), cemented their status as an rising darling in the underground scene.
Featuring an ominous bass groove, brash guitars and noisy clarinets, not to mention liner notes by writer and early DOS supporter Byron Coley, it received rave reviews around the country.
Like that pair, DOS leap outta some aural vacuum with nary a root exposed, but with plenty of bare wires to trip up the unsuspecting.
The truly surreal "Coca Cola and Licorice" could successfully play hide 'n' seek on Trout Mask Replica, but the Cap'n isn't the object of any idle worship.
Singer John Petkovic testifies in an addled shout that combines the better halves of Tom Waits and Ian Curtis without the caricatured styling of either".
The cover featured a naked mannequin watching television in an empty lot with the Cleveland skyline in the background, with a baby mask staring into the camera.
[11] Come All Ye Faithless continued the expanded instrumentation of Where the Women... Rolling Stone remarked that "DOS cooks with a wiry, more refined guitar clamor and Dylanesque lyric attack",[12] while Pulse!
[16] In 2013, the band released the double album (and single CD) If Memory Serves Us Well on St. Valentine, a live, in-the-studio recording of songs spanning the group's career and featuring liner notes by Mark Lanegan, Thurston Moore and Pollard.
With Gillard in place as a visual foil and constantly riffing guitar PRESENCE, Petkovic was freed to spurt around the stage like a big pock of metallic jiz in a low-gravity environment.
His mouth jammed full of red licorice, his cheap suit soiled by un-named liquids, Petkovic power-oozed like a Vegas lounge singer on Benzedrine, while the band flared around him.
Doug Gillard tottered on sky-high platform heels, spuzzing out thick chords of raunch and craning his head around as though someone had told him that the Sensational Alex Harvey had just walked into the room.
Steve Eierdam (aka Steve-O) pounded the tubs like a big game hunter, and appeared to be something like an unholy cross between Ubu's Crocus Behemoth and The Meatmen's Tesco Vee - gushing philosophy, jokes, magic tricks and an untaggable brand of bad-vibe weirdness, looking all the while like one of his bandmates' tubby uncles in dire need of electroshock treatment.
We got ours playing next to a popcorn machine, on chicken wing night, in front of a bunch of people in acid-washed jeans," said Petkovic in Eric Davidson's book, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001.
According to We Never Learn: "The initial scam at the Ground Round was the first of many subversive pranks Death of Samantha regularly doled out like chicken wings at a suburban family restaurant.
[17] The "funeral show" featured Steve-O popping out of a coffin to the overture from Jesus Christ Superstar in a Cleveland club called the Phantasy.
[18] Death of Samantha often incorporated non-music performers, including Cleveland late-night horror host The Ghoul and organ grinder and monkey duo Pete and Pop.
We Never Learn described Doug Gillard as looking like "a Kandinsky doodle of Johnny Thunders (fishnet armbands, glitter platforms), a Weimar-era prostitute (black stockings, lace) and a suburban punk (guitar slash shards and greeeezy hair)".