When GG Allin’s prolonged and ordurous interrogation of his own existence ended at last in June 1993, when punk rock’s abuser-in-chief finally exited the reeking stage via the trapdoor of an overdose, the informed consensus was . . . well, that’s that then. There would be no musical legacy to speak of, because GG’s music was godawful. Who could take anything from, or do anything with, the rubbishy noise that he made? And as a performer — helmeted in blood, throwing poo-poo, starting riots — he seemed to have taken the frontman-as-health-hazard thing to the limit. Après GG — nothing.

Perhaps that’s why we still talk about him: there’s no school of acolytes to disperse his influence, no clones or knockoffs to adulterate his memory. The new DVD Terror in America: Live 1993 (Music Video Distributors) catches GG on the last tour of his life, giving everyone hell. It’s a gentler viewing experience than last year’s Savage South: Best of 1992 Tour. GG in Terror is fresh from prison, and he looks almost pleased to be back with his band. Dressed for work in boots, jockstrap, rubber gloves, studded collar, and bloodstained lab coat, he measures out the stage with his distinctive lumpy swagger before going predictably berserk. But there’s a little less horror. Lots of bashing himself in the head, yes, and some random swinging at the crowd, but this is standard damage, just GG setting the mood. The abject, essential figure captured in Savage South — naked and raging, daubed in his special palette of blacks and blues and browns and smeared reds — does not materialize.

Once again, though, we ask ourselves: who the hell is this person? What happened? Can anyone explain it? Perhaps Joe Coughlin can. Coughlin — 46 years old, works in a cemetery, resident of South Boston — knows a thing or two about GG Allin. Why, he (almost) wrote the book. In 1992, during a conversation with GG’s brother and bassist Merle, Coughlin was handed a document purporting to be the life story of GG Allin, self-penned. The childhood in the two-room log cabin in Northumberland, New Hampshire, the terrifying father who christened him Jesus Christ Allin (his mother later changed his name to Kevin Michael, but Merle still called him JeJe), the years spent wolfing peanut-butter-and-dog-food sandwiches in Boston rooming houses, the bands, the beatings . . . It all seemed to be there. Coughlin, a non-professional writer, asked to be allowed to work up the manuscript into a full-blown biography, and he sent a 10-page treatment to GG, who was in state prison in Jackson, Mississippi, for a parole violation at the time. “I applied for the job,” he says when we meet on a dark afternoon in Jamaica Plain’s Midway Cafe. “And, uh, I got it.”

Coughlin is nursing a cold; he takes another gulp from one of the pint glasses of water served him by a solicitous bartender. “This guy was the most ridiculed artist in the world, but I don’t know anybody that ever saw him play that made fun of him. At that point, it was very serious. Not like some hardcore show where you’re worried you might stub your toe in the moshpit. This was danger in the air — real dissension. You could feel a lot of walls breaking down around you. Before a note was played, before anybody moved, it was like, ‘Okay, this is where everything changes.’ ”

As the newly authorized biographer, Coughlin entered into a correspondence with inmate GG and took collect calls from him after getting home from his then-job in an office. “It was pretty remarkable how detailed some of his memories were for someone who basically beat the shit out of himself every day. One time he was telling me about being in a bar and seeing some blood on a wall, and as he was looking at it, he realized it was his own blood that he’d left there the year before. So I said, ‘That’s interesting, how did that happen?’ And he said — dead serious — ‘Hmm, well, let’s see, I could have been bloody for any number of reasons.’ And I’m cracking up, and he goes, ‘What?’, and I say, ‘Do you have any idea how fucking funny you’re sounding?’ He didn’t, of course.”

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When GG was released, in 1993, he went out on the road with his band the Murder Junkies, and in June Coughlin met his subject — first in Atlanta and then in Chicago. Less than a month later, Allin died in NYC. Coughlin attended the funeral in Littleton, New Hampshire, an event he describes as “a freak show,” and it was there that he began to have doubts about the authenticity of GG’s “memoirs.”