RVANews

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 51

Dave Brockie — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:03:25 +0000

We are getting close to the big premiere of my new TV show, "Holliston", on FEARnet. The brainchild of horror director Adam Green (Frozen, Hatchet) and Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2), this show is, quite simply, a sitcom for horror movie nerds and people who love metal dudes who dress in ridiculous costumes! Check it out on Direct TV or the web or however the fuck you are supposed to do it. Here: go here.

But we are not here to watch TV, we are here to read more ridiculous stories about the world's hardest-working band: the mighty GWAR. So let's be on it!

— ∮∮∮ —

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

Episode 51: "My Homo-Brother is Dying of AIDS"

We had done it! We had successfully made it around the entire country without the bus suffering any major blow-outs or any of us killing each other. The clubs had been far from packed, but we had some good shows and there was definitely a developing interest in the band. The biggest proof of this was a huge article in the then-very-influential Flipside Magazine, featuring a great shot of Slymenstra on the cover, fist in the air, blood streaming down her thighs. There was a long in-character interview with the whole band, and whoever wrote it used those annoying Mac-emoticons (computers were pretty neat back then!), so nobody could tell who the hell was saying what. In the same issue we were voted "best show" and "worst new band" of 1988. With the exception of having to leave SlaveOne in a Navy stockade, we had come through all right. It was a chance to catch our breath and take stock of the situation, and I split to the D.C. area for a weekend with my brother and Mom and the new dog Higgins, and hopefully some late-night Advanced Squad Leader games with my best friend Dr. Skull. But it was getting tougher to both be either present or away from there for too long.

My older brother Landrew was entering the final stages of his long struggle with AIDS. The symptoms would come and go but they were always nasty. My brother suffered from shingles especially. The pain meds were heavy, but I never touched his medicine. At that point I was still terrified of that shit. Besides that he needed every bit he could get. The shingles would form into big patches of sores and scabs that itched and ached him woefully. When they formed on his back he couldn't lay down flat for days. It was fucking horrible. He'd lost a ton a weight and was becoming more and more bed-ridden.

Then, suddenly, he'd get better. He's be back to his usual bossy yet indolent self, indulging in all manners of yummies I would get for him at the local mall that now occupied the ground that, as child-soldiers, we had once ruled. He would laugh and drink a glass of wine, smoke a joint, and sit in the sun. If I was lucky I was home for these times. If he was lucky I would work out in the yard.

It would only last a week or two and then he would get worse again. Then he started having to go to the hospital--sometimes for days. Then he'd get better, and come home again. So we still had every reason to think that it was possible a cure or treatment could be found before the illness claimed his life--as it had claimed the life of every single person thus infected so far. To fight the disease, and dull it's pain, Landrew was on a wild concoction of drugs...the beginnings of the famous "cocktails" used to slow the disease down. I'd sit there and watch him take pill after pill. He had survived years with the disease so far, and I wasn't going to let him down--I wasn't going to give up hope that somehow Landrew could be saved.

But slowly at first, and then with alarming regularity, his friends had started dying. Landrew had lived all over the country in the diaspora that was his life after high school. His lovers and friends were scattered coast-to-coast. And one by one they began to get sick and die. My Mom would tell me all the details over the phone and I would listen in stunned silence as people I had known for years started dropping like flies. At first Landrew had spent time taking care of them, but it wasn't until the disease made it hard for him to take care of himself that he had to move back home, to that room where he had used to come as a child--the only sanctuary he had against the relentless teasing and abuse that drove him from school. Over the next few years Landrew had lost pretty much every gay friend and lover he had ever had. They had been doctors and drunks, bell-ringers and book-shop owners. All of them were great people, kind, generous, full of spirit and life. Their deaths seemed so cruel and their lives so useless. It made me want to cram as much life as possible into whatever time I had.

To cope with my brother's impending death, I made myself believe that with Landrew it was somehow going to be different. He hadn't come home to die, he had come home to get better. They were going to find a cure or at least a way of slowing this thing down. He would just have to fight it out until then. But he wasn't going to be alone in his struggle. Landrew had made good friends with many of the GWAR people, and his best friend was Kathy Duck, who had been my girlfriend in high school and the early D.C. punk days (which were actually still going on at the time). And of course he had my Mom. I did my best to get up to Northern Virginia at least once a month, bringing Landrew pot to help him work up his appetite.

It was a bittersweet feeling for my Mom, I am sure, who was delighted to have someone to share the house but would have given her own life in an instant if she could have somehow altered the circumstances that dictated the situation. For my Mom it was the final acknowledgement of the crummy cards life had dealt her, and if it hadn't been for my brother's illness I am sure the depression that finally consumed her would have struck much earlier.

It hadn't been an easy road for my Mom. She had lived through a horrible war, then lost her boyfriend in the King David Hotel bombing in Palestine. Thoroughly fed-up, she had met my Dad and moved to Canada, leaving her entire life behind. After that there was a series of no less than FIVE miscarriages, and each one must have been a devastating experience for her. Then came years of my Father's infidelity. My Mom was a very intelligent woman and was well aware he had been dorking his secretary for years. She'd put up with his cheating ways until Landrew and I were out of the house, then hired a private detective. When she had enough evidence (he had dumped his secretary and moved on to another, younger woman) she had him served with it, and the out-of-court settlement was both quickly rendered and substantial. Dad hadn't been around much since. Mom was looking at the prospect of living the rest of her days alone in that house, and unless my brother had moved in she might not done that very long...the prospect of Landrew's death had given her a new lease on life.

We were beset with the forces of death, but for that fragile moment the family was still together. I would get Sexy or Sleazy to take me to the old Greyhound Station and take the bus to Springfield. There my Mom would be waiting for me in the new Cierra she had treated herself to after the divorce--that I would go on to drunkenly wreck years after her death. We'd drive along and yak it up until we came to the house, where Landrew would either be up or down depending on how he felt. If it was a good day he was dressed and active and might even come to the table to eat dinner. But usually we'd bring him his food in bed, and sometimes I would sit in there with him until he would fall asleep. Then I'd go hang out with my Mom and we would gape at the wonders of cable TV. Higgins would sniff around until I walked him, or Dr. Skull would come by and we would play ridiculously complicated hexboard wargames that would cover the entire living room table. This was my refuge from the stress of running the rest of my life, this was the home of my youth, complete with a mom, a brother, and even a dog. I'd lived there forever and thought we always would, but it was beginning to dawn on me that things were changing fast.

Back in Richmond the guys were getting ready for whatever came next. It seemed obvious that we needed to get back on the road as soon as possible and play as many gigs as we could.

Wild Bill from Indy was still trying to get us to sign a management deal but it was looking like Jiz from San Francisco was a lot more useful. Wild Bill hadn't really got us any good gigs on the last tour, Jiz had delivered tons. A strange war had developed between them to try and develop their influence over me. They both started giving me presents. While we were in SF, Liz had given me just about every Slayer shirt ever, plus a pair of rad sneakers. The shirts were courtesy of the folks at Winterland merch, where Jiz was in the process of getting us our first merchandise deal. Wild Bill, sensing doom, pathetically countered with a new bathrobe and some barbecue sauce. Of course the guys didn't appreciate it too much as I strutted about the Slave-Pit, wearing my new bathrobe, sneakers, and several of the Slayer shirts at once, yammering on about how great I was.

NEXT TIME! AS USUAL, WHAT I SAID I WAS GOING TO WRITE ABOUT LAST TIME!

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GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 50

Dave Brockie — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:20:45 +0000

Come on out to the Cory Smoot Memorial Show II at the National! Support the Smoot Family Fund and celebrate the life of one of Richmond’s most amazing musicians. HAIL SMOOTY!

— ∮∮∮ —

It’s hard to believe that it has been four months since we lost Cory that cold morning in North Dakota. What was undoubtedly the worst day of my life has in my memory become a dull smudge of pain that all-too-frequently flares up into a not-so-dull one. Yeah, it still sucks, and it always will, and I can only imagine how much worse it is for Jaime. But there are good things happening and I am going to concentrate on that stuff.

The Smoot Family Fund now has its own FB page--check it out! I’d like this site to be a place where Cory’s friends, family, and fans can go to read stories, look at photos and hear the music of the man himself...maybe his daughter will use it one day to show off how cool her Dad was to her friends. People can upload their own photos and memories of our beloved Smooty as well. There are a lot of Flattus tattoos out there.

I just want to thank everybody involved for all the support. It’s been unreal, and very humbling. I am looking forward to getting out there and wrapping up the tour we started with Cory but couldn’t finish with him. Give everybody a chance to say goodbye Flattus and Cory one last time. They’ll both be there, in spirit.

Check out this page from my original tour diary, circa 1988. This was the original lap top, called a “notebook.” It couldn’t play movies, and you couldn’t use it to lie about yourself on the internet, but it had a few advantages over today’s classroom standard: it never ran out of batteries, had instant file retrieval, and only cost 1.99!

Holy shit! We are turning 50 today. 50 episodes spewed out semi-regularly over what? Two years? I need to turn up the heat on this thing, for fuck's sake we are only at just now reaching 1989. Looks like it is going to take the rest of my life to finish telling this story.

A couple quick observations and comments as to how we got here...

In the two years since we started this thing a whole bunch has happened. Sometimes it feels weird to be reporting so much on stuff that happened 25 years ago when so much is happening now. But hell, that’s what Twitter is for! And while we are at it, let’s get me up to 15,000 followers!

Looking back over the work so far, I realize the events have in some cases gotten a little confused. I’ve reported on things that are still in the future (like Lee Beato and losing Rocks for instance) and forgotten things that weren’t in the past. I think. But with the help of Bob Gorman and his amazing GWAR timeline, and my stack of old “lap-tops”, I think I have got it under control, and will attempt to sort it out in future episodes.

I am pretty stoked I have stuck with this as long as I have, and happy I have not pissed off too many ex-band mates or girlfriends so far. Maybe I should try harder? Naw...I love all of my GWAR brothers and sisters, old and new...there are far too many sordid stories about me to tell about myself to spend TOO MUCH time humiliating my co-workers. The aim of this work is not to embarrass anyone, it’s to get some laughs, and the best way to do that is keep them at my expense. For some weird reason I often value the friendship and support of people I suspect of despising me. Anybody who hung in there with GWAR hung in there through some insane shit...and I am grateful for anything anyone ever did for GWAR, whether they hate my guts or not. That kind of useless drama doesn’t even enter into my thought process any more. I mean, I can honestly say I wouldn’t hang out with most of the people I work with, and that may be true for you as well. But the idea of GWAR is so awesome that it binds together people of very disparate backgrounds, and forces them to work together to serve the common good...after all these years I still really enjoy that.

Last year really sucked. But for all the meaningless horror of it, despite Kodar getting beaten to death with a baseball bat, or my old buddy Mindbeast finally losing his long fight with cancer, despite the tremendous professional and personal loss we have suffered, somehow, inside my head, I am in a better place than I have been in years, and feel like I finally have full control of my life. Somehow this group of people that I do my best to lead went through just about the toughest thing you CAN go through and not only came through it, but did it with respect, reverence, and class. I can’t say how proud I am of them and how honored I am to continue working with them.

I guess the best thing about my life is that I’m not lying unconscious next to my bed, about to die of a drug overdose. That’s right, at one point in the darkest of my days it had gotten that bad for me. I did so many different drugs that I was high enough to think I should do MORE. The only thing that saved me was the noise I made falling out of bed, alerting my equally fucked-up but not quite as unconscious drug-buddy. Yeah, I probably would have died if they hadn’t been there to call the ambulance. But I am happy to say that even in the midst of my room being filled with EMT’s and cops, even with me shuddering with cold and the effects of the Narcon that was in the process of saving my life, even with me being unable to answer ANY questions about what the fuck was going on, or what I had taken, or ANYTHING really, I still would not consent into letting the attendant cops search my house. In fact I was told later my exact words were:

“All of you cops get the fuck out of my house!”

But that was enough. I started going to NA. And though I am not a 12-stepper, I got a lot of good stuff out of the program, and still go to the occasional meeting. I can’t not enjoy beer, and I love weed. I can party and control myself. Yeah, I know, I know...but the one thing I know is that hard drugs are out of my life and it’s been long enough now that think I made it through my jungle, and met my old self on the other side. The one that wasn’t on his way to an early grave. The one that has to finish this book, and that painting, and a whole new album. This guy. I like him a whole lot better.

We all have triumphed over death. Somehow this group of people that I do my best to lead went through just about the toughest thing you CAN go through and not only came through it but did it but somehow became stronger, better people. We took the hardest shot death has given us yet, but GWAR will live.

After all of that, I don’t feel much like writing the next episode. That’s a lot of heavy shit and now I feel all mushy inside. But don’t worry! The next episode will be chock full of the asinine depravity and idiotic antics you have come to expect out of me. We’ll be back in two weeks with: life after tour, the cover of Flipside and our first national TV appearance, Black Donna, Mind Control Monthly, inappropriate gifting, and our quest to find a musical home for our next album, which would history would know as...

“The Scumdogs of the Universe”

ALL THIS AND MORE IN THE NEXT THRILLING EPISODE OF
“GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death”
HAIL SMOOTY!

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 49

Dave Brockie — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:00:04 +0000

Here is a page from the original tour diary, this one being the character sheet for the Space Melee super-villain, Dr. Mechano, with his dwindling hit-points to the right. Somebody (looks like Sexy’s handwriting) has given the Doctor a less complimentary name.

— ∮∮∮ —

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

"Cannibalism and Corn-Nuts, Part II"

After the gig we melded with the locals and stumbled through the darkened streets and parks of San Fran-damn-sissy-co, where we were immediately accepted into the tribe and slathered in acid. Due to the influence of Jiz, who had prepared the town for us in exquisite fashion, SF opened it’s hearts and baggies full of illicit substances to us, and we plunged into a multi-gig meltdown of Bay Area debauchery with furious aplomb. That crazy band of mutant rednecks called GWAR had finally made it to the most fucked-up city in the U.S., and SF was going to make sure that it left its stamp on us.

San Francisco and California in general are basically on another planet, one that arguably shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Of course it was end-to-end fucking beautiful, San Francisco included, unless you had the misfortune of witnessing bumsex in the middle of a Tenderloin sidewalk. It went from dark to light quickly there! The terrain in north California is my world-favorite, even when covered in bums. There are landscapes that are so impressive they are scary. Anybody who has ever seen Mt. Shasta knows what I mean. It looks like it’s about to kill you! The climate adds to the general comfort level and attracts homeless people from all over the US. More people live outside there than anywhere else in our country, and they shit anywhere. But they will throw you in jail for flicking a cigarette!

This is kinda random, but what is more disturbing to you: the thought of bums having sex or old people? How about bums having sex with old people? What if the old people are already bums? Who cares? I just have to live life from every angle.

California. I just loved it. It was like some fantasy world of fun. Here I was, mid-twenties, with my mates, rolling around in the Golden Battle Barge, playing shows in the craziest place in the world, and being greeted with gusto and drugs--so many drugs. More drugs than I had ever seen...which wasn’t that hard back then, I was still fairly innocent. I mean I partied. I did suburban drugs, like LSD, beer, and weed. I had done tons of acid, but at that point my hard drug limit was the homemade crank Bam-Bam had used to make out of nasal inhalers. I was still terrified of hard drugs. Memories of walking in on Landrew as he prepared to inject himself, or hanging around with punks in Richmond who were sharing needles (one had actually offered me a syringe full of their dirty blood, I politely demurred.) had given me a certain aversion to it. I liked to think that underneath my asinine persona there was a fairly reasonable and wise person. One who was smart enough to never fuck with hard drugs. After all, I had run the business to this point. Oh, but how that would crumble away...

The state was and still is flooded with cheap and powerful drugs which could be found easily and were in fact offered to us constantly. It seemed like everybody in California was on drugs! If you weren’t injecting black tar heroin then you were snorting meth at least! Being terrified of dying, I had no wish to mess with needles. I pretty much left everything else on the table, and it filled up quickly. For many tours I would spend my entire time in California in a drug-induced stupor. But I would always leave my dalliances behind me. California was like some kind of drug-holiday land.

At a series of parties, meal, walks, and shows we bonded with the Bay and the plethora of personages that it produced. They bum-rushed us in a unrelenting display of attempted friendship, most bearing gifts, and most gifts being drugs. I mean, we had just hung out with a whale, so there was a high mark set, but with the Bay Area being the number one freak magnet in the USA that whale seemed maudlin by comparison (whales are, by circumstance more than nature, naturally sad). There was Gluehead and his speed, and Monteray mark, the scene-appointed “King of the Skins.” We hung with R.K.L. and NOFX and FANG...it was the coolest.

Our next gig was at the Oasis, a club that had a swimming pool in it. Somewhere around there we encountered the hulking blonde bigfoot who would go down in GWAR-lore as the legendary BILLY BAD ASS. Billy was the monstrously cheerful beast of a man-child, and we immediately bonded over a keg of locally brewed barley wine consumed amongst the dunes beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Billy loved GWAR and gave me a whole sheet of acid. On later tours we would pick Billy up in LA and let him ride around with us for a while, mostly because he always brought weed but also because we liked him. He was probably most famous for having to consume an entire sheet of acid (over 100 powerful hits) at a border crossing and suffered no apparent ill effects!

It gets a bit foggy there, but after a couple days of dogged pursuit I found myself groping a young nymphette who shall be known as Wartney, a blonde beach bunny with big boobs and a slightly bulging forehead. We rudely coupled in a cluster of dirty sleeping bags that our drug-ravaged brains dubbed “acid island”. I blew a load and finally passed out.

When I awoke, I discovered that Muscle, Hootie, Slave1, and Hot Heather had all just arrived from Richmond. With Muscle on board, we added our samples, which made the shows so much better. Slave1 was still on the run from the Navy, and together with me and Hootie made up the improvisational/comedy/hardcore band called Dairy-Aire. We actually had a show set up at Jiz’s club, the Covered Wagon, which Slave1 drove 3000 miles to miss. SF was his original home and he had grown up on it’s streets and almost died on them. His near-death misses included being trapped in an exploding camper to almost bleeding out after ripping himself open jumping over a wall. So the shows were a hell of a homecoming for him. But the whole time, because of him bailing on the Navy, he was one traffic stop away from going to jail at any moment--no fun.

Together the gang plunged into a frenzy of shows that included the Phoenix in Oakland. This legendary venue had walls stitched with Uzi rounds and was in one of the worst neighborhoods in the Bay. Nevertheless we had a sick show there and then proceeded to sell out the Covered Wagon the next night. People were following us around, seeing show after show. Not only fans but now people from record companies. We were doing interviews with Kerrang and hanging out with Robert Crumbs wife! Shit was happening!

So after days of this we finally peeled ourselves out of SF and headed back to LA, where Finch had set us up a final spate of California Shows...and a bunch of good press with photos. It was here that we ran across an obscure group of freaks led by a a guy named Manspeaker. They called themselves “Green Jell-o” and worshiped “the Cow God”. We recognized our shared designs and became fast and life-long friends. Then we hung out with members of the Vandals, St. Vitus, Faith No More, and The Adolescents. Coochy was back too.

I remember sitting with her on a beach, eating fish and chips. It was fucking good. I asked her why people in LA did so much dope.

“Why do you give a shit?” she said.

Right around then we got the word that Slave1, on his way back to Richmond, had been busted by a Nebraska State trooper, and was in a Naval Stockade for at least a year. We were bummed, but knew it had to happen. He would do his time and then return to us. It was actually a pretty good move on his part. For him like many others, GWAR provided a lift-off point from life’s stagnation. The freedom we offered was worth that year in the pokey, and he had hooked up with Hot Heather as well, who would be waiting for him, as would we.

And then it was time to point the snout of the great Golden Battle Barge to the east and leave this drug-soaked fairy tale land behind us. El Duce waved farewell and crawled back into his box. Coochy got her rock star, and L7 went on to the cover of SPIN! But it was time to go. We had to drive all the way to Salt Lake and then to Lawrence Kansas. After the constant partying of California there came a period of endless driving as we took on that journey at 45 mph. We’d managed to build up some money but it was reduced chunk by chunk as we filled up the tank again and again. The 20 people that showed up to our Salt Lake gig didn’t help much.

The first thing to be cut was the grog, then the rations. We whiled away the hours with our favorite game, Space Melee, a hybrid of several miniature wargame systems that Techno had customized for our purposes: building elaborate death machines and painting the super-villians that piloted them, to wage mighty war across the front lounge as we crossed the Rockies. My guy was named Dr. Mechano, and he was a Dr. Doom type of super-cyborg that had ten fingers all of which could do a different attack or defense. I had maxed him out in every respect, and he entered the battlefield inside a giant skull-meteor that had giant drills sticking out all over it. That would bounce around, crushing everything, until it broke apart to reveal Mechano inside his “Slay-Mek”, a customized Goblin Juggernaut. When that finally died, Mechano would fight out in the open, where he was invariably beaten down by a combined assault from all of the games participants.

We were down to our last pack of corn-nuts when we rumbled into the cornfield outside of our gig in Lawrenceville, Kansas, almost 2000 miles from the west coast where we so recently had ruled. Now beaten and bedraggled by days of bus travel, we stumbled around the grounds of the hovel-esque club waiting for the pizza to show up. When it did we were so hungry that we attacked the Dominos man in his truck, eating the pizza through the window like that scene from Night of the Living Dead.

Next time: The final leg of GWAR’s first tour...will our heroes get home alive? And what will await them once that they get there? Find out in two weeks in the next thrilling installment of...

GWAR, ME, AND THE ONRUSHING GRIP OF DEATH!

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 48

Dave Brockie — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:00:34 +0000

Check out the new pic of the cast of my new TV show comedy-thingy, HOLLISTON! Aren't Cory and Laura HOT? They smell good too! Gee, Dee doesn't look too happy. I guess the bus was late! And WTF is Oderus doing in there? I guess we'll figure it out on April 3rd when the first episode comes out. That's right, Oderus is in a sit-com. Dreams do come true! But we're not here to watch TV, we're here for...

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

"Cannibalism and Corn-Nuts"

So the tour had made it to the West Coast and it had yet to be a disaster. LA had greeted us with a leery eye, but we had won them over with relentless enthusiasm and wacky antics. The local scene was buzzing about this crazy band from Richmond, and to the smog-choked denizens of that strange place, we must have been a breath of fresh air. Plus we weren't a bad-looking lot, as Finch¹ put it:

"I was expecting a bunch of fat, perverted old men. But instead you guys are a bunch of skinny, perverted young men."

The Battle Barge had found its berth in front of Babushka's house--one of those classic LA one-floors right next to a gigantic elevated highway. There were comforts for all and we spent a day re-charging our batteries as I tried to book us more shows. The tour was far from completely booked, and there were holes all over the schedule. Despite Spewy spending an entire day under the bus, still it did not move. This was not good.

It seemed that we would have to actually spend some money and buy some parts rather than have Spewy continue to fashion them out of bark and chewing gum. The tour was usually running on less than 100 bucks, so at any point we were one happenstance away from a catastrophic plunge into ruin. But we were coming up on our San Francisco shows, home of the mighty Jiz. We were playing the Covered Wagon in San Francisco, and she had a bunch of other shows in the Bay Area ready to go. Then we were headed back to LA before we reversed our course and attempted to return to Richmond. Considering that the Battle Barge was breaking down repeatedly, I wasn't overly optimistic about our chances of getting home without having to call somebody's parents. But at that point I felt confident enough to give everybody a per diem (five bucks...) and set them loose on the city of Hollyweird.

Babushka and I hit it off hard, and our whirlwind punk-rock romance left both of us naked and breathless. She was the only girl I knew that had ever read Michael Moorcock's "Elric" stories, and that gave her limitless cool points. Her band, L7, was coming up in the local scene, and everybody loved them, so she was basically the perfect person to get a tour of LA from. We went to some insane warehouse party where the walls were covered in black light and florescent paint and a crowd of a couple hundred freaks were checking out a really kick-ass band whose lead singer was going fucking nuts. The name of the band was TOOL, and Babushka introduced me to them after the show. They shared a drummer with a band called Green Jell-O, and in a few days a band named Soundgarden was opening up for us. Funny thing, life.

Finally we got the bus moving and drove north along the coastal highway. The view of the Pacific Ocean was simply incredible, and we drove off of the road several times looking at it. Later tours would employ hulking tour buses which hurtle bands through the night at 85 miles an hour, but for now we were touring the world at 45 mph--which made it a lot easier to stop.

About halfway to San Francisco we saw a gaggle of various vehicles parked besides the beach, and a small crowd of people gathered on the sand. It seemed like a good place for a piss break, so we pulled the Battle Barge to a slewing halt and stumbled out into the brilliant sunshine. As we got closer to the ocean, we could see people in the group were pointing at something out in the water, and I strained to see what they were staring at. Suddenly a black shape broke the surface, followed by a larger mass; the behemoth rolled over on its side, and from not more than 100 yards away fixed its eyeball on the group of humans on the beach, wondering at us as much as us at them. It was incredible. A group of three pilot whales were playing in the surf and for about an hour we marveled at them. They seemed completely aware of our presence and at times seemed to be putting on a bit of a show for us. Even the most jaded punk rocker could not be in the presence of such a creature and not feel a peculiar empathy with it. I'll never forget that glittering eye, and the way it looked into my soul.

If LA was a brash youngster, San Francisco was its weird cousin. LA was more muscular, San Francisco more cerebral. LA was Black Flag, San Francisco was Dead Kennedy's. San Francisco was Flipper and Fang, the Residents and Helios Creed. But oddly enough LA was heroin and San Francisco was meth!

San Francisco was the avant-garde clearing house for the punk movement, and the diversity was palpable. This was the city that Jiz called home, and ruled with meat-wielding fist. We rolled into town at about four in the morning, and parked on Mission, fending off local weirdoes until we finally made contact with Jiz. She took us to yet another warehouse where we crashed for a bit and then headed to what would be the first of many gigs in San Francisco--this one at the infamous Kennel Club. As I said earlier, some band named Soundgarden opened the show, and blew the doors off the place. Their set was incredible and tons of people were showing up. Then our old buddies from Tragic Mulatto played, and the vibe started getting incredibly freaky. Tragic Mulatto was like San Francisco's version of the Butthole Surfers, and the place was soon completely packed with tons of people on lots of drugs. San Francisco's finest freaks turned out in force that night, and about halfway through their set somebody threw a dead cat onto the stage. The singer, Gail, did a horrible puppet show with the thing, whose guts were coming out.

"Poor Flopsy.." she crooned. The woman had an amazing voice and could shoot hot dogs out of her pussy.

Backstage we were flushed with beer and power. This was it. GWAR's first show in San Francisco. I will translate directly from the spiral notebook journal I kept of this trip. How these words echo through time!

"The crowd is over 450, and we begin to crush them. So close at first our majesty in unaffirmed. They react with a fury of their own. It's us against them. It won't happen without a fight, and these people won't go down easy. I look down and a wild-haired creature is gnawing on my toe. She rips it off and dances away. The Slave loads everywhere, right into this girls face, she helps him and gulps the GWAR load straight down. I go to fill up my brain and that fucking dead cat is back on the stage, eyeball hanging out, wretchedness personified. Don as the Redneck is dragged into the audience, desperately fighting for his ax, slugging audience members. Somehow his rubber head lands directly at my feet, and I feast. Two encores. It ruled."

NEXT WEEK: No, it's not next week, it's the week after that! But did you notice how once again the title of this week's episode had nothing to do with the episode itself? That's because I always think I am going to write more than I actually do. So don't be surprised if we use that title again next time--there is a really funny story behind it!

— ∮∮∮ —

Footnotes

Actually, I am gonna start calling her "Babushka," that was my nickname for her--or at least that's what it says in the old journal I'm getting a lot of this from. ↩

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 47

Dave Brockie — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:28:45 +0000

GWAR promo shot, 1988. At first I was unsure of why Beefcake (then portrayed by The Bishop) wasn’t in the picture, unless it was “his turn in the bucket” day. Or perhaps he was taking the picture. But with closer scrutiny, you can see that he is actually in the shot, just obscured by the rest of the band (obscuring Beefcake is no mean feat). See his baby-hand reaching out from the middle? The Bishop has tiny child-hands, which until recently were covered in Russian prison tattoos. Welcome, dear readers, to 2012! Which means it’s time to start another year of...

— ∮∮∮ —

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

“La-La Land”

After a thoroughly forgettable show in El Paso (I think The Rhythm Pigs were there), we once again clambered into our up-until-that-point-faithful Battle-Barge and pointed it’s snout due west. We slowly made our way through the trackless desert which gave way to trackless mountains, which would occasionally be festooned with gigantic letters made out of random rocks denoting whatever college was stupid enough to have a campus in the middle of fucking nowhere. These mountains were the first serious obstacles the Battle-Barge had thus far encountered and soon the blessed beast was wheezing brake fluid and oil in a final near-cataclysm that left us stranded a mere hour from our goal, the city of angels, Hollywood and Dogtown…Los Angeles.

Spewy once again proved his worth as a mechanic and after several hours spent under the bus declared it fit to make the final push into the city where only the sea would finally stop us. After spending several hours stuck in a paralyzing traffic jam, the bloody towers of downtown suddenly loomed out of the smog only a few blocks away. We finally pulled behind the warehouse where El Duce had told us he was living, and after scouting around a bit, we discovered that “living behind it” would have been a more apt description, as El was at last sighted crawling out of a refrigerator box that served as his domicile. El was homeless at the time, but his box suited him well, besides the fact that he was woken every morning from his drunken stupor by the chattering sprinklers of a nearby bank. It was of no matter anyway, as El fully intended to cash in on the huge favor he had been doing us for the last year by telling everyone he met about how great we were. So great that El immediately moved into our bus for the majority of our LA stay.

The warehouse was right on Hollywood Blvd. and was occupied by a group of bohemians who played as a band called Celebrity Skin. That’s right, Courtney Love would later steal the name for an album title for her horrible band. It wasn’t surprising that she would, as at the time she was living at the warehouse (along w/ about 20 other people, including Germs/45 Graves drummer Don Bolles), and was one of the first people I met. Courtney, who for the purposes of this tale shall be known as Coochy (for reasons that will be told later), was in LA on a mission. She was going to “find a rock and roll star and take all his shit.” As proof of her success thus far produced a picture of her and Axl Rose all cuddled up together. Only later did I find out that it was actually a picture of her and a slightly larger-than-life size cardboard cut-out of Axl, whose band, Guns and Roses, I had never heard of. It fooled me!

El, also known with reverence amongst the locals as “Eldon” or slightly less-reverentially as “The Doosh”, had donned a Nazi helmet and led us into our first LA gig at Hollywood’s Candlahaus. It must be remembered that at this point GWAR was exclusively a product of the world of hardcore. It was from hardcore’s web of fax and phone numbers that I had used to get us to this point…a punk rock gig at a punk rock club at a time when the hardcore scene was arguably over, at least in the sense of it being a new thing. Hardcore had been around long enough at that point to re-define itself several times over, and the growing staleness of the offerings were at least a part of why we created GWAR. We looked like a ridiculous metal-band parody, and indeed we were, but we were still undeniably a part of the punk scene, and indeed the need for punks to ridicule the metal scene (which at the time was filled with nauseating bands like Poison) was a major part of our appeal to them.

We gave “The Doosh” a GWAR t-shirt (his first clean one in weeks) and blazed into our set for a crowd of a 100 or so stunned onlookers. Jaded old LA got a faceful that night as we blew the first of would turn out to be many thousands of subsequent loads (both on and offstage). I set the groundwork for a future one as I noticed a couple of tough-looking hotties in the front, covered in blood and grinning madly. These gals would turn out to be none other than a couple the L7 girls, Finch and Donita, who we befriended after the gig with amazing results. Finch invited the whole bloodstained horde over to her house. The Celebrity Skin palace was great, except for the fact that it didn’t have a toilet. Finch had a real house, the like of which many of us hadn’t seen in years, which she shared with her Dad, who apparently was never home. Showers, food, TV...we plunged into blissful recovery, even though I noticed with alarm that Spewy was already employing his main (and only) pre-make-out maneuver, the back rub. As we passed the bong around, Spewy and Finch disappeared into another room. I was smitten with the girl but had little choice but pass out. But the next morning she told me she had spent a restless night fending off Spewy’s relentless advances.

“Everytime I woke up, he would be sitting next to me, rubbing my hand!” she said.

Maybe there was hope!

IN TWO WEEKS: Fang and SF…the return to LA…and will I have sex with Finch from L7? All this and that in the next mind-blistering episode of this bunch of…episodes. In the next episode of--

“GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death”
EPISODE 48
“Cannibalism and Corn-nuts”

See ya in two weeks!

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 46

Dave Brockie — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:07:18 +0000

There was big news around campfire this week. No, it wasn't the fact that we just had to cancel our Euro-tour because lame-ass promoters make deals they can't fulfill and then bail at the first sign of slow sales, despite the fact that GWAR traditionally has one of the best walk-ups in the biz (follow me on Twitter @therealoderus if you want to hear me bitch a lot more about this). And, it wasn't Balsac and Oderus showing up on MTV's NextMovie, reviewing the new Steven Spielberg film.

No, the news was of a more local variety, and at first it was bad. We heard that Cannabis Corpse, one of Richmond's coolest up-and-coming bands, had lost half of their line-up. Uninformed, and rather presumptuously, I proceeded to get on the phone and bitch loudly to anybody who would listen. But my concerns were un-warranted. In a move that is as awesome as it was unexpected, Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe is going to fill in for their set at The Cory Smoot Experiment (Saturday, January 7th; 6pm; $10; proceeds go to the Smoot Family Foundation).

Randy and Cory were good friends, studio buddies, and fellow metal-heads. They are both examples of the best that the Richmond scene has to offer, and as much as it sucks that Cannabis lost half its lineup, the quick-fix is a doozy. Let's get the whole city out there to pay respects to one of the most amazing musicians to ever strap on the feedbag. He's the guy that took GWAR's music and saved it from becoming the puerile pap that it was doomed to stagnant as if we had continued to make albums like We Kill Everything*. He's the guy that blasted GWAR into the 21st century and made us re-set our focus on immortality. Because when I heard songs like "Bring Back the Bomb," it gave me a whole new vision of GWAR. Cory mother-fucking SMOOT.

Cory was my little bro. That's funny because I looked up to him, and he could never believe that. He was always unsure of his place in GWAR, so much so that he still referred to us as "you guys." He never could quite grasp the fact that, somehow, he had ended up in his favorite band. He was the humblest rock star I have ever met. So let's all get out there and show the love! I promise DBX is gonna actually practice for this.

Now back to the reason I am here in the first place, the continuation of the lurching monstrosity that is this semi-regular exploration into the history of GWAR and the Slave Pit that spawned it! When we left off, our bumbling belligerents were getting ready to head out on their first coast-to-coast tour. Let's pick up the action in 5-4-3-2-1...

— ∮∮∮ —

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 46

"On the Load Again"

In October of 1988 we embarked on our first coast-to coast tour, cobbled together with a string of phone numbers attached to anonymous individuals on whose promises I was staking the well-being of nine human beings. For the most part I was confident we would be OK--OK in that we would usually have the essential ingredients for any successful tour: gas, food, beer, and the occasional bag of "wizzy" for those long, story-telling rides between gigs, as I searched the country for blow jobs. I had put a lot of effort into getting this thing together, and in the places we had been playing already we had modest guarantees and pizza waiting. Jiz had us set for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the upper west coast. It was the places in between that were sketchy. Many of these people were found through random phone calls to clubs, and they set up the shows based solely on the vague rumors they had heard about us.

"Yeah, they fuck goats and chop off people's heads!"

Anticipation was high as we motored the Battle Barge south, and started the tour with a semi-crowded show in Athens, Georgia. This was at the height of the town's notoriety as an indie music hotspot, and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. was rumored to have shown up at our gig until he got a face full of jiz. He was fresh off a recent humiliation at the hands of the Butthole Surfers. The Buttholes used to tour around in a van with the words "Butthole" spray-painted on one side and "Surfer" on the other. They had found Michael Stipes house and parked outside for a day, relentlessly blaring an old sea-chanty through Gibby's ubiquitous bull-horn. As I recall it went something like this...

"Michael Stipe, despite all the hype, we still want to suck on your big, fat, pipe..."

Then we were off to New Orleans, where we had another great show at O'Sullivans, the Irish family that had adopted us and this time treated us to a genuine Cajun crawfish boil that went on for hours. And yes, I do suck the heads! The tour was off to a good start but New Orleans marked the limit of our southern travels. Ahead of us stretched the trackless wasteland of the great Republic of Texas, a place we had yet to defile. We pointed the yellow snout of our Golden Battle Barge to the west and hurtled towards our destiny at a blistering 45 mph.

Our first stop was Austin and the famous Liberty Lunch. It was a big place, kinda half-outside, and pretty much everybody played there. The Buttholes were in town and The Bishop and I went to go do his radio show. Gibby was one of the few people I got tongue-tied around. I was pretty much in awe of the man. At that point we had played together a few times, and they had spread the word well enough in their hometown that a sizable crowd of Texans showed up for our first show in what would ultimately mutate into one of the strongest bastions of GWAR devotees in the whole country.

Right before the show started I slipped out of the dressing room and through the darkened club. For some reason there was a picnic table in the slam pit and I clambered atop it, slowly rising in the midst of the crowd as the rest of the band took the stage. It was crude but effective, and we had an amazing set. After it was over I was complimented by a random female about my six-pack abs. I smugly accepted the compliment, knowing full well they had been achieved by the application of greasepaint. Ahhh, the power of illusion. Afterwards we piled into the battle Barge and drove out to the Buttholes' ranch house in Driftwood. Here we engaged in an all-night acid-laden debauch of epic proportions, where we chased each other around the gullies and sagebrush that surrounded the sprawling house until the bloody dawn. But the highlight of the night was hearing NWA for the first time. This was pre-Staight Outta Compton, and the album cover featured the guys hanging around on a loading dock with some five-year old white girls, as a Richie Cunningham look-a-like served them malt liquor and serviced their shoes. I was fucking blown away!

Our strong start fell apart as soon as we rolled into San Antonio and the famous Tacoland...famous in that it was one of the worst gigs we have ever played. The place was a small taco-shop, where they pulled together some plywood covered pool tables for a stage and the most offensive David Allen Coe song you can think of played repeatedly. The surreal element of the gig was strengthened by the appearance of the promoter, who went by the name of "Baby Jesus", was out of his mind on coke, and brought with him a gaggle of transvestite friends. The show was a complete disaster, but unbelievably we let BJ talk us into hanging around another day and playing at yet another lousy club.

"This one has a marquee", he said as he did rails off a urinal that a transvestite was vomiting into. "We'll put your name up on it, and tons of people will show up." The six people that did show were barely a half-a-ton. As soon as the show was over the place was overrun with transvestites, and I think one of our guys had sex with one--I'm not saying anymore about that other than it was not me! But it was the first time the word GWAR had been on a marquee, which makes it worthy of mention.

Leaving a puke-smeared promoter in the bathroom, we loaded up our faithful Battle Barge and continued our journey west...the golden west, and two weeks worth of gigs in California. GWAR's first real tour was underway, and we hadn't flailed out yet. But the real challenges lay ahead of us, and it was a long way to Los Angeles...but it was a fucking great time.

NEXT TIME - A NEW YEAR! Have a happy and safe holiday...make the most of what you have, and try not to think about what you don't. If you are reading this, you are alive, and that's reason enough to celebrate. Merry Christmas everyone!

— ∮∮∮ —

* Don't get me wrong. I love WKE. With songs like "Babyraper"and "Fishfuck", how can you go wrong? But the album lacked focus, and a lot of my punk riffs were sounding a bit dated. Rather than continue down this path, I formed DBX to suck up all of the silly stuff, and with Violence Has Arrived, GWAR began a quest to reclaim their metallic crown of blistering opulence! Which GWAR style is better? Who can say? But one thing is for sure--nobody is right!

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 45

Dave Brockie — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:00:53 +0000

The GWAR tour bus, the same one that Cory died on and the same one that we finished our tour with, stands outside the Slave Pit. We had just returned from the first tour where we left someone out there. On November 3rd we realized our dear and fellow musician, colleague, explorer, buddy and pal, Cory Smoot had passed away during the early morning of a sudden heart attack.

Of course we didn’t realize that at the time. We had no answers, just the unreal reality that Cory was gone. Everything assumed a surreal sheen as we stumbled through those next few days. I’m not going to dwell on it. It was the worst, and we did the best that we could. We had to finish that tour, and it was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.

But I wanted to say thanks again to everybody in the Slave Pit, our amazing crew, and the extended & loving family we have created over the years. You guys blew me away. You rose up and played your A-game. When one of us faltered, someone else was there to pick us up.

Nothing tests us like death. I have seen with my own two eyes that it can make you stronger, if somehow you can find a way to turn it into something good. I am going spend the rest of my life trying to do that.

Good bye, Cory. A lot of people loved the hell out of you, man. I think a lot more than you ever knew, and I hope you know it now. I loved you like a little brother, and I should have told you that more often. You saved my life...you saved GWAR. You gave us everything you had, and you had so much more to give. We are going to miss you.

Perhaps Oderus, for all of his idiocy, said it best…“Fuck you Death! You are a fucking ASSHOLE!”

LONG LIVE CORY SMOOT! LONG LIVE FLATTUS MAXIMUS! LONG LIVE GWAR!!!!

And now we are back to the never-more-appropriately-named...

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 45

“20,000 Colleagues Under the Sea”

OK, I remember now...we got WAY ahead of ourselves there! I guess I was just in a hurry to fire those guys again. The truth is we rocked with Rox all the way through 1988 and into 1989. It was after we parted ways that we got Lee Beato, and then finally arrived at the “Scumdogs”-era GWAR--which many would say was us at our finest. I really just couldn’t wait to tell that last story.

So let’s reign in this chronological circus until I can catch my literary breath. We find our heroes (us), firmly entrenched in our blood-red Slave Pit on the corner of Laurel and Broad. Every night the streets beneath us swirl with near race-riots, and on most weekends the Golden Battle-Barge lurches out of its Broad Street berth in search of gigs and booty. It usually went something like this:

After driving for a day straight we arrive at a burnt-out section of Detroit and the infamous Blondies. During the gig a large section of the ceiling collapses directly into the slam-pit, covering several unconscious patrons in soaked drywall. Nobody seems to mind much and the gig continues. After the show I meet this stripper who people keep calling “a retard”. I am thinking to myself “this is a good sign!” at the time not realizing that the girl really WAS retarded. I end up back at some abandoned factory under the care of a local drug and crime lord known as “Scary”*, where I have sex with the retarded stripper on a piece of damp cardboard in the middle of a cavernous assembly room. Afterwards (actually, after about five minutes...) we return to the club where her equally retarded boyfriend walks up behind me at the bar and proceeds to smash me in the back of my head so hard that I don’t even realize that I have been hit. I just sit there with a glazed look on my face wondering what warm liquid was running down the back of my neck. I guess the challenged ruffian mistook my concussion for toughness, as he immediately bought me a beer and said he was sorry for hitting me, but after all, I had fucked his girlfriend. At this point the guys show up and drag me back to the bus. I wake up in Richmond a day later, go to my room, and scrape my bong.

— ∮∮∮ —

We had finally made our way clear of the entanglements posed by a variety of potentially lethal managers until I was fully in the thrall of Rotundra. She had been a San Francisco girl since day one, and it wasn't clear that one day she would move to Richmond and become our manager. She had a good spot for herself, booking the Covered Wagon, a bar in SF that had non-stop punk shows. She was the scene matriarch and had all kinds of great hook-ups in the biz--we loved her. As it was, she exerted considerable influence over the phone and was always exhorting me to get GWAR out to the west coast. Her relentless harrying was probably the biggest reason we finally did so.

The album had been out for a little while, and a year of ceaseless weekend gigs had built us a small but energetic following. People were actually starting to call me back, and the money was getting to the point that the band didn’t have to pay dues anymore. That’s right, back in the ancient times before the inter-web, when we didn’t have enough money to pay the bills we all had to cough up 20 bucks a month. But now we had worked ourselves to the point that not only did we not have to pay dues, GWAR would occasionally buy us pot!--the transactions dutifully recorded in the Slave Pit ledger under the heading of “wizzy” or “green paint.” For all of our triumphs we had yet to cross the Mississippi. The Golden West was calling, so I got on the phone.

The plan was to leave in early October, going to the warm places first and the cold places later when it was winter--so right off the bat we were fucked. Meanwhile we warmed up for the tour with a simply awful run through Florida. We played horrible gigs at completely empty clubs and sat around for days in sweltering parking lots. Nobody had any money, so Sexy and I made a whole bag full of bologna sandwiches, which we hid under a blanket so no one would get them. It never occurred to us to use a cooler, and we were appalled to find our food stash rotted and inedible within a day. Broke, hungry, and deeply horny, we limped home. But luckily we regained our panache when we hooked up with Bones's buddies from Canada, The Dayglo Abortions, for a classic show at the FloodZone. The gigs were starting to come in, and a full-fledged tour was developing. They were few, far-between, and for no money, but they were gigs nonetheless!

I am glad I got to experience this before the advent of the internet. We had to make our contacts with phone calls, and we didn’t have internet yellow pages--so contacts were very important. I used to love going into offices for settlements and at the first chance go through the rolodex, dredging whatever numbers looked interesting. I would call and call until I got somebody on the phone that was willing to do the show. There were no contracts or deposits. Sometimes there was a guarantee, but mostly not. All the info was written into a calendar workbook, which was the equivalent of a laptop back then. I still wonder which is better. I mean, my workbook never ran out of battery, was always on, and had instant file retrieval. Best thing was that it only cost five bucks.

NEXT TIME! I DON’T KNOW! LETS JUST BE HAPPY THIS THING IS FINALLY HAPPENING AGAIN!

* At this point synchronicity occurs in a blatant way. While writing this, I took a break and went to a GWAR meeting, one of those weekly enclaves where we rub dicks and scoff. Bam-Bam hands me an letter that has shown up in the PO box. It's from a correctional facility in Michigan, and it’s from none other than Scary himself. I hadn’t thought about the dude in years, then on the one day I decide to write about him, I get handed a letter from him. I'm thinking about this for the rest of the day, and am still doing so when I go to dollar Taco night at Little Mexico. There I run into Fontaine. She is standing there with a guy in a Social D shirt, and they both look up in surprise.

“Dave!” she says. “Speak of the devil! We were just talking about you!”.

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 44

Dave Brockie — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:33:02 +0000

I was looking at the episodes and their little preambles when I noticed that the word “heartfelt”had been used not once but TWICE in reference to this series. That will never do! So I thought I would do an episode where I undoubtedly came off as an asshole. Here goes…

“Homo Butt Chain” was more than a jumble of confusing lines in my sketchbook…it was also a song in one of my ever-present side projects, this one being the band Milk. We were pretty good until I wrote this song, which pissed off the bass player so much that he quit the band. And seeing as he owned most of our gear, we were done. Oh well…no use crying over spilt milk! Ha ha! Get it? Here are the lyrics to the last part of the song (I can’t remember the first part).

CHORUS

No!
No more Homo Butt Chain
You’ll get A-A-A-A-A-AIDS x 2
No! No more homo-butt chain

You’re lying there in the hospital bed
Your mind has turned to muck, and jello fills your head
Your eyes are getting cloudy and your life is sinking slow
The people making rubbers are raking in the dough!
Ain’t gotta be gay and there ain’t no cure
Soon to the top-five killer in the world
And you know things are getting drastic
Can’t get laid without a piece of plastic

No!

-- “Homo Butt Chain” 1986 (yeah the timeline is way fucked on this one, we go backwards two years and then forward three!)

Pretty sick, huh? And it’s even sicker that I wrote this at the time my brother was entering the fifth year of his battle with AIDS. That’s what pissed off Jazzbo so much, or what he claimed pissed him off so much…that I would write such an appalling song with seemingly no regard or sympathy for anyone suffering from the disease…not even my own brother. Truth is, the impending death of my brother hadn’t really sunk into me at that point, and my sick humor was my way of dealing with it. I took a gleeful delight in discomforting others, and no joke was beneath me. My brother wasn’t going to die, even if by that point half his friends had died. My Mom wasn’t going to die either. Home was there, forever…but somewhere inside me I guess I knew that change was coming soon.

AIDS wasn’t at all like it is now—that is as long as it’s AIDS in a country where medicine is ample. AIDS in Africa is fucking awful, but because Magic Johnson is OK, nobody in the U.S. gives a shit. Back then AIDS was a death sentence.

One visit Andrew would look fine, the next he would be bed-ridden, pale, and thin. I would bring him pot, which helped with his appetite. But sometimes these episodes would be so serious that he would have to go into the hospital for days or even weeks to fight off whatever common cold or skin virus was ravaging him. Like shingles, a horrid discomfort that would turn large sections of his skin into painful lesions. So painful he couldn’t lie on his back. Or a sore throat that rapidly swelled up to the point where he couldn’t breath. But one thing was sure, my brother made sure he had good drugs, and towards the end was pumping morphine and diluted straight into his catheter. Thank god for opium, just try not to fuck with it until you are pretty sure you are going to die. For Andrew, it was still a ways off. But I could feel it coming.

He still had good times in him, and would meet us at our shows in the old 9:30 Club. It was a sweet victory to be headlining at the same club that not long ago had banned us. We had a hotel in Chinatown and Bones fucked Andrew’s nurse, who he nicknamed “Blood Bags.” Andrew loved the show, was proud of his little brother, and Mom was waiting at home with the dog, Higgins. Moms or pets don’t get code names, and we were still a family.

THE SAD AND TRAGIC TALE OF LEE BEATO

Before we found Cro-Mag, but after we got Dirty D, we went through a brief period where we tried out a few different area drummers. One guy that had a good rep was this kid LEE BEATO (that’s his code name anyway, you know how that goes…). He was rumored to have a “huge kit,” and was supposedly an accomplished metal drummer. Then we heard that this kid was a bit high strung…and had some problems in college that led to a nervous breakdown…but he was “much better” now, and his audition was awesome. Plus he had this girl with him that was supposedly “taking care” of him, but wasn’t fucking him, so I fucked her. He had one of those huge Neil Peart kits that all metal bands had to have, and had long heavy-metal hair…and seemed normal enough. He didn’t talk much, even when addressed directly, but that was actually refreshing considering the general level of conversation around the place. But his entry seemed too seamless, so we decided that the best thing to do with our maybe-crazy new drummer was to devise and execute a brutal hazing ritual, one that was pretty much all my idea. We (I) overcame any hesitation Lee might have felt by insisting that this was a time-honored part of joining GWAR, when in actuality we had never done anything like this.

We met Lee at the appointed spot and immediately blindfolded and duct-taped him inside a large canvas sack, then spun him around a bunch and pushed him into the back of a van. We then took off and treated Lee to a hellish, jolting ride up and down the alleys of the Fan, one in which his struggling body was thrown about the back cab like a rag doll. After no less than a half an hour of this we dumped him out in the middle of a parking lot, where we released his bonds and drove the van away, leaving him to squirm free. At that point, from the far edge of the parking lot, I began running towards him at full speed, screaming all the way, right up until I stopped about half a foot from his contorted face with a final vocal blow. Lee stood his ground, and seemed strangely unaffected by the whole ritual, and the heavy drinking that ensued. What we thought was good-natured tolerance was actually the last remnants of his mind retreating to some dark place deep inside of him. But if there was any hope for Lee Beato retaining his new job or even having a shot at the rest of his life, the next atrocity we heaped upon him put an end to such aspirations.

It happened on a trip up to New York. We had to meet our lawyers or some such shit, and had a show in Baltimore (the timeline is really fucked as this takes place after Rotundra became our manager yet before we added Bam-Bam - remember I reserve the right to change the code-names anytime). After this episode we are getting it straight again! But anyway, it was set to be Lee Beato’s first show. We had a new costume for him that Techno had built (kinda a gargoyle theme, he even had little wings), and practice’s were sounding good. So we went up to New York and checked into a hotel. We were about to go to the meeting when we noticed Lee sitting on the bed, staring at the wall. Rotundra mumbled something about him not feeling well, and offered to stay behind and look after him. Thinking nothing of it, we went off to whatever it is we were doing that day, and returned a couple of hours later to pick up Rotundra and get on to the next meeting. When we got in the room we saw Lee sitting in the exact _same_ position he was when we had left, his hair mussed-up and his clothing in disarray, his eyes glassy and wide as drool dripped off his chin. He wasn’t going anywhere. Rotundra bee-lined out the door, completely ecstatic, and high-fived me in the elevator.

“I got some!” she exclaimed.

The next day we drove to Baltimore and loaded in to the show. Lee sat backstage for the duration of the day and continued to not utter a word. Noticing that his drums remained packed, I went backstage and found Lee Beato rolled into a fetal ball, murmuring softly to himself. Any attempt at getting him to assay his responsibilities was met with more drooling, and soon it became obvious that Lee had lost it. Attempts to get him to snap out of it proved useless, until finally he uttered…

“I just feel…if I don’t get out of here…I am going to die…”

We had to cancel the show and drove home that night. We never saw Lee again after that. I heard he was doing well.

Next week! We get the timeline sorted out at last and power on into the last half of 1989 and GWAR’s first coast-to-coast tour! See ya in two weeks, more or less, for…

“20,000 Colleagues Under the Sea”

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 43

Dave Brockie — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:00:59 +0000

FLYER FROM THE INFAMOUS “TONY’S PIZZA”, LOCATED RIGHT NEXT TO THE OLD SLAVE PIT ON LAUREL

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 43

“Comings and Goings, and Cummings...”

Despite our semi-steady rise to middledom, there were conflicts breaking out in the band. The Bishop just did not like Thuglas, and Hoseby said so little that it was unsure if he liked anybody. There had been some problems during a trip to New Orleans. Hoseby started having sex with Damnsmell, even though she had just broken up with Sleazy a couple of days before. And when I say she started having sex with him, I meant actually started having sex with him on the floor of the bus, about five feet away from where Sleazy was sleeping. We got into town, the truth was revealed, and Sleazy and Hoseby came to blows. As much as he didn’t deserve it, Sleazy got cracked in the head with an empty beer bottle, and I spent the better part of an hour picking glass out of his ear. And even though Sleazy ended up going home, pissed as hell, it was Hoseby that had to leave the band.

But it wasn’t solely his sexual indiscretions that led to our parting of the ways...hell, if that was the case I would have been fired repeatedly! It was more of the fact that Hoseby was a rock-solid drummer, in fact so rock-solid that he found it impossible to change or adapt to any new styles. Slayers Reign in Blood was spending a lot of time on my tape deck, and I lent it to him in hopes that he would be as blown away as I was and want to push the band in a similar direction. Instead he returned the tape the next day with a look on his face that said “you’re crazy.” That’s how I interpreted it anyway, as Hoseby never used any actual words or emotions to get in the way of how he was feeling (however that was...).

I have never seen anybody get fired from a band with such grace. During one of our weekly meetings, Hoseby wandered in, sensed he was about to be fired, and quit. And all that without even saying a word! But in reality, I was very bummed we had lost him. I really liked him, and was really fond of his drum style--despite his stubborn desire to not take any influence from anyone else. Hoseby came up with the drum intro to “Horror of Yg”, and any drummer that can do that is pretty awesome in my book. But back then there was just something inherently uncool about being in GWAR, and Hoseby was cool, super-cool, cool to a fault...and he was history.

The New Orleans trip was amazing. I had never been there before, and it was part of the longest tour we had embarked on to date. I’d never been to a place like it, with the 24-7 partying, and as soon as I saw a group of beautiful co-eds passed out on Bourbon Street in a growing puddle of their own vomit (and several other people's) I knew it was my kind of town. The locals warmed to us immediately and we found ourselves invited to a house party where the host encouraged us to try on all of his roommate’s dresses. That didn’t work so well on The Bishop, who tore up several trying to squeeze them onto his 250+ pound frame. Then the guys from NOFX showed up, and the party was really on. I remember being in drag, heels and all, my nose painted black, flying down a huge flight of stairs on a cafeteria tray and hitting the door at the bottom of the landing so hard that I set the bell off. The only way to shut it up was to rip it out of the wall, and as we did the REAL owner of the house came home who was none too happy to find out her entire wardrobe had been destroyed and her antique serving-tray used as a bobsled.

Thuglas was the next to go. He was the oldest guy in the band, and for some reason that made him a target for a considerable amount of scorn from The Bishop, who wanted his friend, Dirty D, in the band. Thuglas didn’t help himself much by being in like five bands at once. I remember once he showed me a shirt he had made that had all of the names of all of the bands he was in, with arrows pointing to what he considered the appropriate matching body part. Mudd Helmut was his head, Death Piggy (which still hadn’t thrown in the towel at that point) was his heart, and GWAR was his cock. I remember him proudly showing it off to me, and thinking it was about the stupidest thing I had ever seen.

Thuglas and Hoseby were also the only two band members who used hard drugs, though later I would find out what a complete lie that was, and indeed become a pathetic drug addict myself, almost offing myself in the process. But that’s another story-—an ugly, horrible story. Thuglas was infamous for an incident in which he claimed that a piece of crack he had bought (which we thought looked suspiciously like sheet rock) was “blowing the back of his head right the fuck off.” These things, and much, much less, led to his demise...and it was ridiculous and unfair. Thuglas had supported the band with time and money, had worked as hard as anyone else, and once had piloted the battle-barge through a dangerous glacier crossing in which icicles were actually forming inside the bus. I would have stuck with him for those reasons and many others, especially the fact that I was a complete pussy. But I was going to lose The Bishop if I stuck with him, and The Bishop was the best musician we had. It was a shitty position to be in, and I felt really bad the night we summoned Thuglas to the space to fire him. As it turned out, he sensed the impending doom, and quit before we could lower the boom. Thuglas was like an older brother to me, and I felt completely shitty about losing him. It took about three pitchers of beer and a slobbery blowjob from Scrappy McGee until I felt better.

Thuglas’s departure opened the door for Dirty D, who stepped into the character of Balsac, which fit him well, as he talked even less than Hoseby had. For our new drummer we cast our eye on the local scene until it settled on Cro-Mag, a burly brute of a man-boy who had a bright yellow Yamaha kit that was about the loudest thing I had ever heard--next to my mouth. Cro-Mag had first encountered me at a punk rock show at the legendary Benny’s, where I had been slamming the wrong way and had a copious amount of dirt coming out of my mouth. He was advised by his friends that “everybody hated me” and to never drink after me. Still, for some reason, he felt compelled to be in a band with me, and liked that we had lost and gained both a guitarist and a drummer. If I knew then that 25 years later I would still be working with him, I would have shit a string of pearls.

I was still booking shows, mostly east of the Mississippi, but my eye was straying westward. I knew when “Hell-o” came out that we would have to tour the entire U.S., and I needed help doing it. Around that time I started getting calls from the notorious Jiz, a promoter from San Francisco who ran a club called the Covered Wagon and worked with a band named “Tragic Mulatto”, a kinda poor man’s Butthole Surfers. They had heard about us, probably from El Duce, and somehow dug up my number hoping to get a show out of me, which they did (see flyer above). I was pretty stoked about working with them as they had three girls in the band, and I was pretty sure I stood a chance of fucking at least one of them. We booked a gig with them in Raleigh, N.C., and took off to meet them. I will never forget seeing their van pull up outside the club and disgorge the most mutated crew of freaks I had ever seen. But they were a great band, and their singer Gail could shoot hot dogs out of her pussy, and sang like a mother fucker. Bambi played drums, and Jiz was the manager.

Jiz was one of the most formidable women I had ever seen. Called “The Great Pumpkin” by some, she had the dubious distinction of being wider than she was tall, with a brain that was even bigger. We had a great time over those few days, and when they left it was with the promise that she would help us book our first national tour. Little did I know that within a year she would move to Richmond, and be our first manager that was worth a shit.

But not all the girls that were starting to gravitate towards GWAR were managers...or mutants. Around that time a skinny brunette with legs up to her armpits began hanging around the Slave Pit, taking pictures of the various proceedings, and shooting down everyone that tried to fuck her. I hated being shot down, and my standards reflected that, but...damn she was hot. She quickly got the nickname of “Highbutt,” for reasons that were obvious. My idea of courtship was hanging around the Slave Pit and singing along to N.W.A. with my shirt off as she and her buddy Smelly took pictures of various disgusting things. My idea of a move was waiting for her to go to the bathroom, or the office, or anywhere on the premises where she would be momentarily isolated, so I could suddenly loom out of the darkness and jam my face onto hers.

Little did I know that it would work, and within a couple of years I would have my first real girlfriend...a bitching, righteous girlfriend, who stuck with my worthless ass for years. A girlfriend that I didn’t ever appreciate or treat right, and probably never told her until right now just how bad I have always felt for the pain I put her through. For some reason, just like Hoseby and Thuglas and Jiz, we remain friends. I’m not sure why it happened that these people I loved, but let down, still stick up for me. I just want all of them to know: you were part of GWAR when we needed you the most, and you always will be. We miss you, and when we see each other on the street or at the gig or even in Australia (as is the case with Thuglas, whose band The Resignators just toured Canada), everything we did together is never far away.

I had a new guitarist, drummer, girlfriend, and manager, and I was the lead singer of the coolest band in the universe. How would I manage to fuck it up?

NEXT TIME : I don’t fucking know!

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 42

Dave Brockie — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:27:19 +0000

I was deeply touched (by a clown) at the public out-pouring of support after my admission of complete and abject pathetic-ness in the last installment. Since then things have improved immensely, though I suppose due to my drug addiction I shall never be a truly wealthy man. Weed, caffeine, and sugar sure do take a bite. Now I find out you can be addicted to food...that you can be addicted to stuff. Man, I am fucked-up!

I want to make one thing clear before we get back to the action. Yes, it’s true that my scumbag roommate ripped me and GWAR off and then disappeared. And it’s true that he would not give us the pass codes to the sites he had been working on for us, so we lost gwar.tv, the Crack-a-Thon, and the gwar-b-q websites. But he never succeeded in taking ONE CENT from the various donations you wonderful fans gave to GWAR.tv and the Crack-a-Thon. That’s because we immediately spent that money on the cameras, lights, and tripods that we will be bringing you this year’s Crack-a-Thon with. That stuff stays locked-up in the Slave Pit. Just because this scumbag fucked us over doesn’t mean he stole from YOU. We still have the stuff YOU BOUGHT US and plan to continue to entertain you with it. So for now, GWAR TV is residing here, and [GWAR.net][3] remains the official cyber-fortress of your Lords and Masters, the mighty GWAR! Don’t believe it unless you see it there.

Now, there are a few of you guys that were duped and cheated by said scumbag, with fake ebay auctions and fraudulent “donation” links. We are in the midst of tracking down every one of these transgressions and taking the appropriate action. He will get his! PayPal and ebay WILL refund your money after checking out the claim so if you think you got ripped, email me at maggotmaster13@gmail.com!

OK, back to the story. When we last left off, we were waiting for “Hell-o” to drop and slowly expanding our tour horizons thanks to our Golden Battle Barge. It was 1988, and GWAR was starting to blow up! So it’s time for...

Me and Bones, Seattle, 1989. Kurt Cobain was at this gig. Unfortunately he had to leave early to go shoot junk.

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 42

Fuck a Chick From Playboy”

The City-Gardens gig had increased our following tremendously as word of our triumph over both Glenn Danzig and the Skinhead Army spread up and down the east coast. Alarmingly we didn’t really seem to be attracting many hot groupies, and seeing as my one and only goal at the time was to use GWAR as a way to get laid as much as possible, my standards (which weren’t much to begin with) dropped alarmingly. We however had no problem attracting tons of dudes, and occasionally we even liked them. One such person will go down in history as “Bones,” a perpetually-stoned band-dude who started showing up at all of our Jersey gigs. He had good pedigree as a Dayglo Abortions roadie and was smart enough to understand that any attempt at breaching our security screens had to involve an offering of some sort. And, much in the way Proto-Slave had used his constantly-brimming cooler of beers and bologna sandwiches, Bones and the “bones” he rolled became a regular part of any northern venture.

Bones was hard-working, trustworthy, and always had pot. And he was always willing to drive, and always had pot. One day I had a horrible hemorrhoid and Bones explained that if I “tucked” the offending bulb back in the anus where it belonged, chances are the pain would subside. It did! Bones's quirky home-spun wisdom, tempered by years of military duty, gave him an earthy texture that nobody hated too much and would go on to figure in Slave Pit affairs for years. And, his contributions to the Slave Pit verbal lexicon (this gig is geeked!) will go down in history. Bones still lives, and you can see his band, Bloody Crackdown, at the GWAR-B-Q!

I believe Bones had something to do with us getting a gig at Princeton. Our gigs at colleges were usually disasters and this one was no exception. Some braincell had the great idea of putting us in their frat’s dining hall, which was pretty much destroyed by GWAR’s relentless assault of spew. The one good thing about it was that I met this chick who had actually been in a Playboy spread about Ivy-League schools. I had seen her picture before I met her and she looked fucking hot...I mean she was in Playboy, right? But when I met her she had the face of a horse, the breath of a wrestler, and stood about six inches taller than Balsac. The only way to make sure she wasn’t a man was to fuck her, which I did in a closet next to a room full of jeering frat-boys. As Bones became a regular part of this adventure (I believe he was watching the door)--and many more--he slowly became our music-slave, and the ex-roadie/ex-Blackhawk crew chief found a place as GWAR’s guitar tech—and a new home in Richmond, Va.

Back then we were not the house-washing capable spew machine that we are today. Today we roll with a powerful compressor and a bunch of spew tanks that look like atom bombs. Back then we had a rickety wooden structure that housed anywhere up to ten or so regular fire extinguishers. We would generally roll into gigs late, due to the Golden Battle Barge not being able to travel any faster than 45 miles an hour (straight down off a cliff), and filling and priming the tanks was the first and foremost concern. That would usually involve The Mantis frenziedly searching out a grocery store for those little bottles of food coloring, a garden hose to fill the tanks, and finally a gas station with a working air pump to prime the devices. The age of the tanks would make them wildly erratic in the range of their capabilities, and anything from a tepid dribble to an eye-gouging blast was likely to come out of them. But blindness was far from the only danger of the spew cart, as we called it.

First on all it was designed in a manner that made it way easy to trap your fingers in the plywood handle, and of course the wheels never worked, so you ended up dragging this thing around everywhere, mangling your digits in the process. But by far the worst to suffer were the fans. Back then we really didn’t care too much about what we spewed, or maybe we cared too much, because we never missed an opportunity to fuck with people. We would use hot water, put salt, or sugar, or even worse flavors in it. Sometimes the creamer we would use for fake cum would rot inside the can overnight or even worse bake a couple days in the bus and become completely rancid. So when Oderus blew his filthy load (or even worse when we fucked up attaching the lines to the right place and blew it out a decap), he really did blow his filthy load--to the point that automatic mass-vomiting would ensue. It got so stinky that we actually considered chopping people’s heads off for real.

IN TWO WEEKS – ENTER DIRTY D, EXIT A COUPLE OF OTHER’S, ENTER THE GREAT PUMPKIN!

[3]:http:// www.gwar.net/

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 41

Dave Brockie — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:55:00 +0000

Me and my buddy Neil Fallon from Clutch hanging around before a show in England while he gives me some beard-growing tips. Damn is my nose broken...

It is a time of great tumult for the brave rubber monsters of GWAR, as the crappy economy finally caught up with us. For the first time in a long time, we had gone on a European tour and returned home with no money. Sure we had our stories of red-light wanderings and beer-drenched debauchery, but without cash to pay the slaves their miserable pittance, they soon resorted to eating their own fecal matter. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, they began eating other people’s fecal matter. They would make fecal matter out of eating fecal matter, and then eat the fecal matter.

And while I am at it, isn’t it wonderful the way that words that describe nasty things are always so appropriate, like for instance “fecal matter”. It’s right up there with “phlegm” and “buboes”. Who invents these words anyway?

And while I am still at it (as I haven’t really figured out what to write about this time), who are “they”, anyway? I first heard about “them” when I was in elementary school. I was asking a question about the textbook I had just smacked Calvin Livesay* with. Asking why a certain section was written a certain way, I was informed that “they” had done it that way, and nobody ever knew why “they” did anything. So right off the bat I was convinced a shadowy group of semi-demonic beings known as “them” controlled everything from what was in our textbooks to how much a Big Mac cost. Still am!

But to get back to the story—rising fuel costs, a lousy exchange rate, and a ravening beast that eats money (named GWAR) had left us in arrears, but were we worried? Fuck no. We had been through periods of no money before, like the entire first five years of our existence. So I came home with my head held high, ready to leap into preparing for the GWAR-b-q and catching up with my mountain of overdue painting commissions. But a fate more hideous than eating fecal matter or being broke awaited me.

I first met Symptom about three years ago. His sallow face and darkly-circled eyes made him look like a junkie and I thought he was until I heard he had “rotten guts,” a condition that made him routinely beg near-strangers for pain medication. What made him different from the rest of my friends like that was his skill with the internet and constructing web sites. His help was immeasurable on a number of projects, and soon enough he was accompanying me to NYC to help me stream the Crack-a-Thon to the interweb. After that he began to enjoy more GWAR responsibilities, and soon the GWAR-B-Q and GWAR.TV sites were up and running. Much pleased with this, and desperately needing another responsible person as a roommate, I agreed to let him move into my hovel.

But cracks were starting to show. I returned home from my fall tour to discover that in my absence, Symptom had moved his girlfriend into my house without asking me. I was pissed to say the least but after hearing the sad story of how she had nowhere else to go I began to waver. She did have a job, and another income in the house would definitely help. So I caved in like a spaghetti lean-to in a rain-forest.

Then it got weirder. Symptom was out the door early every day, usually off to work by seven. His wench would follow a little later. When they returned from work, they would go straight into their room and not leave until it was time to go to work again. Now, I can sort of understand that. My house is a bit of a mess, and my other roommate is a creature from Hell. Plus I am sure the young couple was enjoying having sex with each other. But it really seemed like a couple of junkies had moved in. I told the guys in GWAR to cool out on this guy, who up until this point had been a Slave Pit star on the rise. I knew something was up, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

The wheels had fallen off (and burst into flames) before I got home from the latest GWAR European tour. Symptom and his girlfriend, who for the purposes of this story will be called “The Scumbag’s Equally Scummy Girlfriend”, were gone, moving out in the few days before I got back and using MY TRUCK to do it. They left behind four months of unpaid rent and bills, as I, in my infinite stupidity, had allowed Symptom to be the one who collected said monies every month and make sure they got to the right hands. He had performed this task admirably up until that moment, to the point where I completely trusted him…and then he fucked me HARD.

Four grand in rent…bills neglected to the tune of many hundreds of dollars…an eviction note on the door…but that wasn’t the worst thing, no, not by far (though that was really bad)…the worst thing was that this piece of shit had actually taken pieces of my art out of my private collection, sold them on ebay, and then never sent the merchandise. A stack of priceless GWAR concert DVD’s, some going back to the late eighties had also disappeared.

Why am I sharing this with you? Well, first of all I needed to explain what happened to the GWAR-b-q site and GWAR.TV. They are gone and won’t come back. As for the rest, I’m not sure. I only know that a betrayal this deep, by someone who I considered a valued friend and ally, cuts to the bone, and by writing about it I might enjoy some sense of closure. But it never ceases to amaze me how low humans can stoop in their quest to elevate themselves. The damage to my life has been vast, and it could not have happened at a worse time—a time in which I was pretty broke already. It means instead of working on GWAR or my art, I have been forced to take any manner of actual “work” in order to somehow get myself out of this hole.

But I will! Hang in there brave followers of GWAR, greener pastures await! For next month is the 2011 Crack-a-Thon, and even greater, the GWAR-B-Q is soon after that. And after that we have an amazing fall tour with some awesome bands which I will be announcing soon. Before you know it, all will be right in the world again. I will get caught up with all of my projects, make good money on the fall tour, get out of debt, and hopefully find a good roommate, one that won’t steal my art and money and do their best to ruin my life. I will get to the happy place again, and there will be much rejoicing.

The same cannot be said of my ex-roommate. Wherever he is (and he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth), whatever he does, every morning when he wakes up and stares into that haggard face looking back at him from the bathroom mirror, he will see the face of an undeniable piece of shit, someone that took the good will of a good friend and turned it into a weapon. The face of someone that stole art from an artist who depends on such art to survive. A liar, a user, and a thief. He will see the face of a LOSER, and he will have that face for the rest of his miserable life.

So if I was supposed to get you some art by now, please continue to be patient (even the guys who have been waiting years). My life is currently a disaster zone and it may take a little while to get out of it. But I just had to get that off my chest before starting the next episode of …

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 41

I Wrote Too Much About My Scumbag Ex-Roomate and Therefore am Going to Wait Until the Next Chapter Before I Tell You Anything Else

See ya in two weeks!

* Poor Calvin was one of my first victims. One day in fourth grade I attacked him and pushed his head into the folds of one of those accordion walls, which I then closed on his neck. I received no mercy from the elementary school Lords of Discipline, and it didn’t help that the poor kid was actually retarded.

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 40

Dave Brockie — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:39:58 +0000

Greetings from Das Deutsches Panzer Museum! I recently realized the dream of a lifetime by finally getting to this place where it was said to house every example of German tank design ever made--some in running condition. Of course at that point my fertile imagination took over, and soon I began to envision a parade-like atmosphere to the place, as drunken Germans filled sagging bleachers beyond capacity, all to witness the continual running of tank after tank in an all-to-familiar display of military prowess. Unfortunately budget cuts have stopped the museum from running the tanks much anymore, but it was still one of the coolest places I have ever been to...check out my full coverage over on Facebook.

But, I am back from Europe, ready for another summer in the city! So it MUST be time for another episode of...

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 40

The Wall of Death

SEXY CONFRONTS THE WALL OF DEATH, SHITTY GARDENS, 1989

The New Music Seminar, held every year in NYC, was the equivalent back then to what SXSW is today, except it was like a million times smaller. We had made quite a stir there when we walked into the middle of a huge conference and contemptuously made our way to the stage, Sleazy handing out fake (but very convincing) vials of crack to the horde of music writers, label people, and NYC hipsters. Once we got to the stage I didn’t really know what to do, so I turned around and took a hefty swipe at the giant banner which hung over the place. To my delight the blow managed to knock it off its support on one side, and the whole thing plummeted to the floor with a satisfactory crash. After a couple of bellicose remarks, we were out of there.

After about a year of playing mostly southern small-town venues, the east coast was finally beginning to open up for us, and one of our favorite places to play was in Trenton, New Jersey, at the infamous City “Shitty” Gardens. The hardcore scene was exploding all over the country and it wasn’t uncommon to have ten-band bills where every band was a Bad Brains or a Black Flag, and the tiny dive punk bars which had spawned the movement had quickly been outgrown. In NYC The Ritz was the large venue of choice, and to the south Shitty Gardens, run by the notorious postal courier “The Male-Man”, was the spot. Tongues were wagging about GWAR, and we were offered a couple of gigs at The Ritz and Shitty Gardens opening up for Danzig, who had just put out their first album. It was the first time he had played with the new band live, and for us to land a main support gig was pretty awesome.

The show in Manhattan was all Glenn’s but at Shitty Gardens a curious thing happened. After Danzig had finished their main set, the crowd didn’t launch into what you would have thought would have been raucous adulation but was instead surly silence which quickly began to form into a chorus of one chanted syllable, which grew in numbers and volume until the sound of it was unmistakable. We heard it clearly from backstage, and we were sure Glenn did as well.

“GWAR! GWAR! GWAR! GWAR!”

It was the first time we had ever heard anybody chant our name except for ourselves! Maybe we weren’t complete losers!

After the show Glenn came to visit us in our dressing room, flanked by at least ten burly weight-lifting buddies, all in leather jackets, and a daffy stripper that for the purposes of this chronicle shall be known as Bubbles.

“Good show, man...” said Glenn, extending a burly paw. As one his minions nodded their agreement. But then Bubbles ruined everything.

“Oooo, whats this?” she said, reaching for and picking up one of the slave dicks, knowing full well what it was. Acting from instinct, she held the cock up to her face, where the last wad of stinky coffee-creamer and carrageenan faux-cum was jarred loose, spewing out of the slave cock with considerable vigor and draping Danzig’s girlfriend with its infested load.

For a moment there was silence as everyone looked on in horror. Then Danzig, with military precision, spun on his boot-heel and strode from the room without a word followed by his buddies who simultaneously emulated the leaders exact move. Last to leave was Bubbles, a confused yet-longing look thrown over her load-drenched shoulder on the way out.

We got a ton of good press following these antics. East Coast Rocker said that after GWAR, watching Danzig was like “watching grass grow.” And the Village Voice said we “rocked them like a boxed lunch and a giant Japanese robot.” Our friends in The Lunachicks had hooked us up with the nefarious persona of Jimmy Gestapo, singer of Murphy’s Law, and one of the few people in this story who doesn’t get a nickname because he already had one. Jimmy got us another Shitty Gardens gig opening up for his band, known favorites of the skinhead scene, which at the time was considerably more fearsome than it is today.

It was a huge gig for us and we planned appropriately with a new invention called “The Chandelier of Blood.” This device was made up of three huge hooks, on which were impaled three severed heads. Spew tubes terminated in the mouths of these three heads, and the idea was to have a spew device which could hose the crowd while being operated from backstage. We weren’t sure if it was going to work or not.

From the first song the local ape-men didn’t know what to think of GWAR and didn’t really know what to do. Some slammed, some stared, some made threatening gestures, but everything seemed under control...until the first decapitation hosed the first few rows with a drenching spray of food-coloring gore. Maybe they didn’t want to get their laces dirty, but the skinheads didn’t like that AT ALL.

Soon the threatening gestures had led to jeers. The mob began to get ugly as Sexy and I watched the scene with growing concern. There were no bouncers, no security, just us and a 300+ angry mob that was forming up in a wide wall of baldness, stretching from slam-pit side to slam-pit-side, and glaring at us with evil intent. It was the infamous “Wall of Death,” New Jersey skinhead-style, but instead of consisting of two opposite sides of the slam-pit there was just one ugly formation pointed straight at us, which after a brief period spent forming up charged the stage with a blood-curdling scream and the stomp of a hundred Doc Martins!

Right in the middle of a song, we watched in horror as the wall came closer, and closer, and then suddenly there was a great vomiting of spew, a tidal wave of gore, which blasted out from the stage and crashed with contact-lens ruining intensity into the front several ranks of the the skinhead menace. The effect was immediate, chaotic, and hilarious, as the “Wall of Death” instantly became a “Wall of Buffoons.” From backstage, someone had loosed the Chandelier, which worked far better than we ever dreamt it would, and caught the horde in mid-charge with a debilitating dousing of what I am sure most of the baldies thought was an AIDS-infested substance. In D&D terms, we rolled a twenty, got double damage, instant kill, whatever...all I know is that the only blood the skinheads got to enjoy that day was fake. Their charge routed and their idiocy exposed, the mob broke apart under continuing blasts from our beautiful contraption, which I believe never worked again.

NEXT TIME! GET READY DEAR READERS! EPISODE FORTY-ONE OF “GWAR, ME, AND THE ON-RUSING GRIP OF DEATH”, HERE IN TWO WEEKS...WE HOPE!

Like this? Then be sure to check out my first novel, Whargoul, now available at Amazon.com.

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Part 39

Dave Brockie — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:51:04 +0000

A lot of people have been asking me, “Hey Oderus, when are you going to be on Red Eye again?” After a few months of waiting for an answer, I am pretty sure I have one now.

NEVER.

It shouldn’t surprise me or anybody else--the surprise part was me ever being on the show to begin with. As soon as I showed up on FOX I began getting assailed with alarmed inquiries as to why the fuck I was doing it. Wasn’t FOX a bastion of conservative crap, a fortress populated by mighty crusaders with names like Sir Beck and unassailable maidens like the fair Lady Palin? That may be true, I replied, but the King was named Homer! Surely there was a place for Oderus, even if it was at three in the morning and only semi-regularly.

So I settled in as the official Red Eye “Intergalactic Correspondent”...hell, I even had my own cool titles (I think they call them “kyrons”). And I think everybody would agree that I killed it! Over a year and a half I appeared fourteen times, and hilarity ensued. Who can forget such show-stoppers as “tank on the moon”, or “make-up"...and my tirade against Ann Coulter’s refusal to tip hotel wait staff was simply classic! Don’t believe me? Check out a few episodes here!

About once a month I would show up, delivering most of the episodes from studios in Richmond but occasionally from spots on the road and even, most magnificently, from the FOX home studio in New York City. Completely at our expense I might add. But I didn’t complain. MTV had taught me long ago that you had to pay to play in the big leagues. The conservative agenda of the network didn’t seem to matter so much. I was funny; comedy shows needed funny people, so the calls kept coming.

Until the day I realized I hadn’t gotten a call for a while. So I called, and e-mailed, and finally got a chance to sit down with the show’s host, Greg Gutfeld, while we were passing through New York on a GWAR tour. Several beers later, I got the truth.

Certain people at FOX were pissed at Greg for having me on the show because we had been killing Sara Palin for the entire fall tour...I mean shit, that’s what GWAR does! We have killed every president since Reagan, and even brought a few back from the dead to kill them again. But some people out there had gotten very upset at our mock-slaying of someone who was not even at the time an elected official. Even Greg seemed a little surprised that we had been decapitating Obama before he was even elected. Greg tried to be hopeful (and I love Greg, he is the guy that got me on there to begin with and did his best to keep me on), but I got the feeling the higher-ups at FOX had decided my little run of horror was over.

It wasn’t a boot to the ass kicked off, it was more of a let’s wait a couple of months and then a couple more and let’s just never call him again kind of kicked off. And really, I’m not mad, just a little disappointed. I was surprised as hell to ever be on the show and even more so that my run lasted as long as it did. But a GWAR character being a semi-regular character on a network TV show was a big thing and to just stop it without any explanation to the people that were digging it the most--GWAR fans--well, I had a problem with that. So there’s the explanation.

It wasn’t Sara Palin who got me kicked off Red Eye--it was her pandering pundits that kiss her ass in much the same way completely smart people embrace the gibberish of religion to facilitate whatever it is they are after: whether it’s controlling their kids, keeping their job, or explaining the meaningless horror that this life dishes out in industrial sized heaps every fucking chance it gets. But I guess it’s no surprise that boobs are running the boob tube. It just really makes me sick when intelligent people act dumb to make really dumb people happy.

We are in Europe right now and that just makes what is going on in America all the more...embarrassing. I mean, what could be more nauseating than the combination of Sarah Palin’s shamelessly self-serving tour of America’s lamest Tea-Party rallying points, our government’s ability to wage a worldwide war against bullshit but it’s complete inability to take care of its own people (especially the ones who had their lives destroyed fighting that war), and a recession that is threatening to make “triple-dip” the next phrase of looming doom? I’ll tell you what: catching up with our buddies in Europe and realizing (for like, the hundredth time) that they live like kings and we like dogs.

But you know what’s even more nauseating than Europe’s superior health care, schools, and infrastructure? Stuffing ten euros worth of “Bremer Knacker” into several of my organs in less than five mintues, because that’s exactly what I did! But Europe is so awesome I didn’t vomit. But always remember, any time anybody starts mouthing off about how great Europe is, remind them, England is here! And I am sick to death with hearing about the “special relationship” that exists between England and America. It sounds like a couple of retards getting together.

Enough Euro-drivel, let’s remember why we are here…

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 39

“Firearm Safety w/ GWAR”

The shows were piling up. We had passed beyond the level of a first-year freak and people were actually calling us back for gigs. With some of our hard-earned gig money, we bought what we considered essential ingredients to a successful Slave Pit—a jam box, a message machine, and a Tokemaster bong. A lot of people don’t know the reason why the Tokemaster is such an first line choice for any east coast stoner’s bong arsenal–and after careful reflection I have decided that this narrative will not do anything to change that.

Not that a few possessions meant any change in our economic level. We were still dirt poor and when money got really short we actually charged dues. And we were always looking for new ways to make cash, as actually “making” it in the Slave Pit using crayons and toilet paper simply wasn’t going to work. So we decided to sell guns to our friends in New York!

Guns were always hard to get in New York and the average NYC thug had to look elsewhere for his or her firearm requirements. One of the best ways was to make some friends in Virginia and have them make the purchases for you, drive them up to New York, and then go shoot people.

At the time New York was still struggling its way out of the debt crisis that had almost bankrupted the city a couple of years earlier. There was nothing Disney-fied about the place. Times Square was a complete shit hole, filled with soggy strip clubs and abandoned movie theaters whose marquees were crowded with outlaw statements waxing pathetic on the portents of the coming apocalypse. A garbage strike had crippled the collection process and as a result huge piles of uncollected feces and medical waste was a common sight. Ranks of gay men jacked off into leaky troughs where starving children were made to lap up gallons of hot man-goo. Ok maybe that last one was wishful thinking.

Spewy and Rocks, during their tenure in White Cross, had played the famous CBGB hardcore matinees many times, and had met and forged friendships with plenty of the original NYC punk rock elite including the illustrious Big Nose (yes, I am using code names here, and will/will not whenever I feel like it) and his girlfriend, Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (abbreviated for the rest of this story to C.E.I.T.G.T.B.A.T.U.).* Both of them were gun nuts, as was Spewy (we used to call him Steven Seagal due to his penchant for walking around with loaded guns), and they had stayed friends through Spewy’s musical journey from White Cross to Unseen Force to finally GWAR. Oh, how the mighty had fallen!

At some point Big Nose and his blonde, beautiful, incredibly famous lead singer girlfriend of a huge band that Big Nose played guitar for (and if you haven’t figured it out by now, you probably never will). It started pretty small, just the odd Glock or two. Pretty soon we were on our way to our latest gig in New York with a SKS (Chinese version of the AK-47), a Mossburg shotgun, and a .44 magnum (just like Dirty Harry’s) along for the ride. But did we have the sense to conceal our hugely illegal imports? If you have been reading this for very long, then you know what the answer to that is! Not only did we not hide them, we took them out of their boxes and played with them the whole ride up. That is until we got pulled over.

It had become a tradition for us to get pulled over every time we reached the New Jersey Turnpike but what made it even better was the fact that it was the same cop that did it every time. Officer Hopp, a state trooper sporting enormous jodhpurs had made it his personal mission in life to bust us for weed.

Every time the Golden Battle Barge, each time sporting more graffiti (and I think by this point a pair of steer horns had been bolted to the top) lurched into the first ticket-plaza it seemed like he was waiting for us. The first time was normal, the second a coincidence, and the third time we had tons of guns. We contemplated shooting him but realized we had no ammo. But we were never apprehended by the man, as Proto-Slave simply stuck the weed in his cholo-headband and wore it on his forehead. As we stood on the side of the road in the spitting dawn, we knew that Hopp would never find the weed, and apparently he was so obsessed with doing so that he missed the weapons entirely, even though the box for the Mossberg, clearly labeled, was sitting in plain sight. We actually became quite fond of his frequent harassment, and it wasn’t until much later we realized that if we painted the bus grey and discouraged our fans from writing stuff like “GWAR sucks huge cocks” on the side of it, we might have a better chance of not getting pulled over. I think we even had a little rhyme about our good buddy, Officer Hopp.

“Hopp cops stop to make the pot pop was a flop, it was hid up-top by a forehead mop!” Or something like that.

So we made it to NYC where we soon were pulling up in front of the brownstone of Big Nose and C.E.I.T.G.T.B.A.T.U. There Spewy and I collected the weapons and went inside to make the deal. Once in, I immediately set about the task of locating the bathroom and jacking off into the soapdish. When I got in there, I noticed an UZI was hanging from the shower spout. I put my dick away.

As I exited and rounded a corner I was suddenly confronted with the form of C.E.I.T.G.T.B.A.T.U., perched on a ladder in front of a huge shelf of books. She was illuminated from behind and was wearing only a night shirt. I had just enough to perfectly imagine every possible curve of her perfect body. It was all I could do to stammer out “Hey, here’s your machine gun,” handing her the SKS. I then came in my pants.

That’s more than enough. See you again in what I say will be two weeks, but we all know will be whenever the hell I can get to it. As they say in Deutschland, Tschuss!

* This is the most elaborate code name I have come up with yet and I really hope somebody gets this joke...not just who this person is but the significance of the anagram.

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 38

Dave Brockie — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:35:03 +0000

OK, my timeline was a little off on the last summation of what this episode was going to be about. I am always so happy after I finish one that I assume that I am going to fly into the next one, and just write up a ton! But I never do that. Instead, I put it off until the last second. I send email after email to my editor until they clog his box, all of them saying the same thing (I will be done in an hour) until the quantity of verbiage in these pathetic excuses dwarfs that of the very story itself.

And really, who should care about this story when our comments section is so lively. I think it is very cool that people are responding to this thing. I especially encourage ex-GWAR and Slave Pit people to write stuff, if for no other reason than to correct my many lies. But remember one thing about this...I am going for laughs here. I see this thing as a great way to get a lot of them. The shit we got up to was hilarious, and it deserves to be remembered. And I know I have forgotten far more than I remember, and sometimes these memories will be hazy. And that is when my imagination takes them over and makes it something it wasn't...for a laugh. I am far more a story-teller than a judge or a reporter, and I will try to abstain from being either of the last two. Generally speaking I will be the one thrown under the bus, by myself usually, but with others if necessary. It will be so funny as we all get crushed to pulp! But if you have anything to add to the narrative, disagree with, or outright call me out on, please do! That's what the forum is for! Who knows? Your comment might make the novel.

But as I was saying, I need to re-do the title from the last one...lets just keep it to...

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 38

Wild Bill, one of the first managers of the band, next to a pile of tires, 1987

One day I received a severed pig's head in the mail. It was Wild Bill's way of saying hello. The pig's head had been sawn off neatly and then encased in shrink-wrap, so it hadn't started to rot. I didn't know how to eat a pig's head, so I threw it away after everybody had a good look at it.

Wild Bill was a promotor/barbecue guy from Indianapolis who had heard rumblings of GWAR and decided that indeed it was the band he had been waiting for. He began to bombard us with faxes, phone calls, and weird things in the mail, like the picture above. That picture hung in the Slave Pit for a couple of years, and at one point every thumb-tack on the cork board had been stuck through his dick. His approach was pretty easy to read -- he had heard that we were wild and crazy and the best way to impress us was to out wild-and-crazy us. Bring on the decapitated pig heads and pictures of your dick! This actually had kind of an opposite impact. From the beginning everyone thought he was a freak.

Nevertheless we allowed him to barge on in, to the point that he drove out to Richmond with his girlfriend. When they showed up I was way bummed. That wasn't the same girl that had been in the pictures! Pretty much the only reason I had agreed with him coming out to meet us was because his girlfriend looked hot -- and even more importantly slutty. I figured if this guy wanted to be our manager so bad there was a good chance he would let me fuck his girlfriend. But when he arrived he had a different woman with him, one that was his current girlfriend, one whose sour disposition quickly earned her the nickname "Stoolie".

Wild Bill really wasn't doing much better. The first thing working against him was that he had sent us a severed pig's head in the mail. The second was that he had been introduced to the guys by me, which made him completely sketchy by association. Plus he showed up and immediately gave me an expensive bathrobe (in front of everyone), then awkwardly and obviously pulled me aside, within earshot of the entire Slave Pit, and whispered loudly,"Brockie, YOU and ME are gonna be RICH!"

Nevertheless we allowed Wild Bill to book us some shows and drive us around, but that only made matters worse. You see, every time that that we came to a bridge or overpass, Wild Bill would suddenly freeze up behind the wheel...his face would contort, his hands would grip the steering wheel with white- knuckled intensity, and Stoolie would have to help him somehow guide his van onto the shoulder of highway and change drivers before we got to the bridge. Luckily we always managed to do it, so I never actually saw what would have happened if Wild Bill had been forced to drive across a bridge, but I am sure we would all have died. The point is it was a complete pain-in-the-ass. If this guy couldn't drive us across a bridge, imagine what flying was going to be like!

So Wild Bill was basically doomed before he even got in there. But in true Slave Pit tradition we didn't get rid of him, instead we kinda let him hang around, slowly blowing him off and refusing to sign the contracts he sent us, all the while probing him for any useful information or contacts. And when I felt I had gotten everything I could out of him, he was set aside.

Sound awful? It was. And I felt bad. But you could only feel so bad for a guy who had shown you his dick before you even met him. I was already on to exploiting the one good contact Wild Bill had given me...a number to one of his old buddies from high school, who had gotten into music law and gone to New York to practice it. He ended up being the in-house lawyer at a little label called Def Jam.

For the purposes of this story he shall simply be called Tavel. Tavel never gained a nickname from the crew, possibly because "Tavel" didn't really lend itself to an obvious disparaging remark. Plus he was our lawyer (or was going to be, as soon as I got rid of Wild Bill)...and you didn't really want to make a habit out of insulting your lawyers. Tavel simply was Tavel, and he was like a super-being to me. From the first time he came to see us, at The Pyramid Club in the East Village, he exuded wealth and power like it was a cologne. Everything about him, from his custom-embroidered Def Jam bomber jacket, to his perfect blindingly white capped teeth, told us there was another world out there, one where we wouldn't have to grovel for scraps. That night he loved us, and just as certainly as Wild Bill was becoming a part of our past, Tavel was becoming part of our future.

The first time I went to meet Tavel at his office I was sufficiently impressed with the Times Square locale to actually soil myself. That still didn't stop me from drawing bizarre cartoons all over some sticky-notes, and placing them where I knew they would be found later, and indeed were for years. Then the meeting started. Soon Tavel's teeth were giving me a headache, so we decided to work together. We walked to the elevator, which suddenly opened, revealing none other than Flava-Flav. True to form, he was sporting one of those gigantic watches he used to wear around his neck. Greeting Tavel with a stream of gibberish, the two disappeared into yet another gigantic conference room.

Wow! I felt good about our new lawyer!

Next : Who knows? I am sick of embarrassing myself pretending I know what I am writing about next. Just be back in two weeks, more or less!

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 37

Dave Brockie — Sun, 01 May 2011 15:28:51 +0000

We are gonna get things rolling with our latest press release—spread the joyous tidings of filth!

THE BLOOD VOMITS ACHIEVE FUNDING GOAL—GWAR DEMANDS EVEN MORE MONEY

They did it! Slave Pit Inc., the production company behind intergalactic metal mutants GWAR, have reached their funding goal of $5000.00 for their latest sick side project, "The Blood Vomits." With just a couple days left until the deadline, $7,120.00 had been raised to create a new episode in the epic story of Mad Dog, Nails, and their stalwart companion, The Vicar. The money was raised by using kickstarter.com, a website that entrepreneurs can use to present their ideas to the public and solicit them for funds. Production is set to begin immediately. Check it out for more details!

Said Oderus Urungus, lead singer of GWAR, "I heartily approve of our slaves desperate and pathetic attempts to delude themselves into thinking they can do anything other than scrape dried fecal matter off my armored war-suit. But I can't help but notice there still is some time to pledge more money...so empty those wallets, steal those credit cards, beat the homeless. Any extra money raised is ear-marked to provide "shards" for the production crew, so you can be sure it is going to a good cause!"

But Oderus's alter-ego, Slave Pit President Dave Brockie, had this to say — "We are pleased and delighted and very grateful to our amazing fans and the people at kickstarter.com. Slave Pit has always loved producing side projects, like the X-Cops and DBX, and this is every bit as exciting. The concept of artists getting non- recoupable advances directly from the fans who support them should make a lot of people nervous. This kind of thing, when combined with the limitless and free access that the internet provides, ushers in a new level of empowerment to artists everywhere, and I am sure this is just the beginning."

With The Blood Vomits, the GWAR-b-que, and the Crack- a-Thon, Slave Pit is getting ready for another year of madness, and that's with not even mentioning GWAR's tour schedule, which includes an appearance at the mammoth Download festival this June in England. Hail GWAR!

Techno and the author, somewhere in the Dairy, the Dim Time…

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death Part 37: "The Sweet Stench of Suck-cess" or "Did I Use That Title Already?"

A funny thing happened on the way to the Slave Pit the other day. Well, actually it didn't happen on the way there; I just always wanted to make that reference*, having always been fond of the play. Never heard of it? It was a popular movie as well, starring Zero Mostel. No idea what I am talking about? A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was a musical-comedy set in ancient Rome, and had been the first real stage production I had ever witnessed. It had a huge impact on me, because it looked like being an actor was a lot of fun, especially at the end when everybody applauded you and your cast mates. It was just the kind of delusion-inducing ego-massage that a completely insecure persona such as myself craved no less than air! OK, so what transpired actually happened inside of the Slave Pit. (Our new, glorious Slave Pit, which is already humming with semi-frantic activity. The new place is by far the nicest studio we have ever had. It actually has air-conditioning, which almost feels like a blasphemy. But fuck, I dither...**)

Blob was going through stacks of photos, trying to find ones where he looked tall, when he called me over to look at one.

"I can tell that is Techno..."said Blob, his florid cheeks more livid than usual. "But who is that other dude?"

For all our conflicts over the years (he thinks I am an over-bearing ego maniac, I think he is an un-educated boob), Blob still needs me to verify faces, confirm names, and supply him with phone numbers. We also tour together, do shows, make videos, and work on props and costumes all the time. During these exchanges we pretend that we like each other. Sometimes.

I stare at the picture. That is undoubtedly Techno, grinning a grin that disguised the raging torrent that was his soul. One time Techno had gone out in a lightning storm, holding a iron rod and standing in the river. It was supposedly an ancient Norse right designed to tempt the gods into destroying you...if you survived, you were the chosen one. So there was the chosen one, but who was that guy next to him? He looked like a real dork. Stupid grin, dumb hat, poorly constructed prop clutched to his chest...

Holy fuck! That dude was me!

I stared at the picture and felt the sadness I always do when I see Techno. He was kinda like an older brother you really looked up to, constantly tried to please, and never seemed to reach. My relationship with him had started out well enough but rapidly had soured on me and GWAR to the point where he bailed to Detroit. But there were never any hard feelings from us, as was evidenced by the rapidity with which he was re-absorbed into the workings of the Pit, an entity he had created but had quickly grown to the point where we had several top-gun artists, all every bit as talented and full of ideas as he was.

I didn't think about it too much -- his energy and talent were unmistakable, and I was happy he was back. And even if he never played well with others, you will never hear anything but respect for the man come out of my mouth. Without him, there would be no GWAR, and without GWAR, I would have been working construction years ago. But at the same time tension, conflict, and craziness between the members was always a big part of the GWAR experience, and my constant clashes with Techno were unfortunately not confined to the stage. And it would be remiss of me to not report history as accurately as possible. At least as far as my drug-smeared consciousness will allow me. To whit:

One day Techno and I were riding around, looking for weed. He had only been back a few weeks and so far everything was fine. Maybe he had learned to miss us in the lonely hours he spent as a security guard in some aging Detroit automobile factory. Or maybe not. He had created some of his best comics yet using the labyrinthine backdrop of the crumbling manufacturing halls as his backdrop. As we searched for "wisdom" (also referred to as "wizzy", yet another addition to the ever -- expanding Slave Pit vernacular), we talked about how Sleazy had stepped up in his absence to play the Techno-Destructo character. When Techno had returned, we decided to go with two Techno-Destructo's, both bent on destroying GWAR (after they had beaten the shit out of each other). We did it that way for a while, until finally Sleazy's Techno had mutated into Bozo-Destructo. It was funny and pointless and blatantly creative, and I figured we had handled a potentially tricky transition in a diplomatic and just fashion.

"That was when I decided that I hated him," Techno said.

I was stunned. Had I really heard that? Hate? Yes, I had. Techno hated Sleazy because he had played his character in his absence, and here he was telling me about it. I was blown away. I knew there were feelings of jealousy and insecurity but this something else...and I just couldn't understand it.

Hate? Isn't that something you reserve for people that rape your Mom? Isn't that the emotion you call upon when your hate-fueled lust for vengeance upon the gang of criminal midgets that murdered your entire family drives you across three continents just to drive your thumbs into someone's eyes? Isn't it the opposite of love, the supposed strongest of all emotions, and therefore every bit as powerful and rare?

I was deeply disturbed. For Techno to hate Sleazy over something as stupid as that? First of all I wondered how the hell we were going to get these guys, both very important parts of the Slave Pit, to work together. I wondered if Sleazy even knew Techno hated him...and I wondered how long it would be before Techno hated me as well, if he didn't already. It did not bode well, but unfortunately it was the same old song.

Why is it that we as humans gravitate more naturally towards the negative rather than the positive? Why do we hate more readily than love? Unfortunately one of the constant and sad realities of working with GWAR was the constant in-fighting and pettiness that has dogged the entire project since it's inception. It was so strong that, as I have mentioned before, I really had no interest in being the lead singer, although I knew the job was made for me. Why? Because I knew whoever had that job was going to catch so much shit from the art department that their life was probably going to be pretty miserable. But I wasn't going to be the only person who was the object of scorn, and Techno certainly wasn't the only one that was going to give it.

By the time we had reached the spring of 1988, the festering polyps of personal drama had thoroughly entrenched themselves...everything from The Bishop resenting Thuglass for starting to go bald to the classic band members vs. artists as to what was the true selling point of GWAR. At that point not many people would have said the music and indeed that continues to this day, but hey, you try getting people to pay much attention to the music when you have the greatest show on earth!

I was disturbed by this, but at the time I didn't realize how much I contributed to the problem with my attitude of completely ignoring it until it built up to the point that it exploded in some idiotic demonstrative public display that completely eroded any support I might otherwise of had.

In short, we were a group of deeply neurotic and fiercely independent individuals who, in order to succeed, had to somehow find a way to work together without killing each other. And with the release of our first album, the classic "Hell-o", just around the corner, we had to figure out a way to do it fast.

In two weeks (yes, I realize I was a couple late on this one): The real Sleazy P.! Running guns to the members of Blondie! And the shit hits the fan as two amazing women enter my life...and "Hell-o" hits the streets. All of this in the next episode of…

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death Part 38: "High-Butt and the Great Pumpkin"

*Another goal achieved!

**One of the things that is really cool about writing a project like this is that you can do that thing with an asterisk that makes people have to look at the bottom of the page, or even better makes them have to go all the way to the end of the chapter in order to find and read the special note, thinking it will impart some treasured yet obscure gem of GWAR-trivia, which at times it will, but more often than not will leave readers with a sense of disappointment and a growing inclination to ignore such literary distractions in the future. It is then and only then, after asterisk after asterisk of completely useless information, that I will finally deliver a doozy truly worthy of the punctuation, and divulge the full details of the gay love affair.***

***That never happened.

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 36

Dave Brockie — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:55:50 +0000

Hey everybody! We are back! But you have the entire episode to read my stuff, so before you do, check out another one of the fine products offered to you by Slave Pit Inc. Check out The Blood Vomits!

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death Part 36: "Don’t Expect Too Much From This One, We Are Just Trying To Get It Going Again"

I was living large. So large in fact that my car took up several spaces on Broad St. That’s right, my car was an old school bus. When not being used as a tour vehicle, the Battle Barge was often my ride, and on occasion my crash pad. It was very convenient to drive the bus somewhere, get wasted, and pass out in it. By this point, and due to Spewy and his welding skills (that’s right the nicknames are back), the Battle Barge was far more comfortable than its early, "pea-pit" days. The back of the bus now had a metal cage to store the props (which increasingly were stored in boxes), and even a little cube that housed "the urine-cone". We had a little sitting area behind the driver, and I would regale the guys deep into the night with readings from Robert E. Howard’s Conan series, or Micheal Moorcock’s classic Elric of Melnibone novels. And we played D&D, confirming that part of the legend.

But best of all, we now had metal frame bunks, with custom cut foam pads. With a few curtains and a couple of push-pins semi-privacy could be attained, or so I thought. The complete opposite could not have been more true as me masturbating or fucking girls in my bunk became a common sight on the Barge, with me being completely clueless to any other aspect of the situation other than needing to drop a load and fall asleep as quickly as possible -- regardless of how many saw or heard.

There are so many memories of this time. So many things come back so fast that it’s really impossible to hope to get it all right, and do all the characters justice. Everybody needs to get their credit. From the beginning GWAR was always about tons of people helping. In fact our earliest shows quickly had become huge affairs due to the fact that every cool artist in town piled in to help. I mean, we had 30-40 people helping on the first Shafer Court show. So in a sense, the 1988 version of GWAR was a slimmed-down version of what we had done before, and the closest thing we had been to a real band yet.

Spewy and Rox brought us some legitimacy from their White Cross connection. They were the closest thing Richmond had to a "big" punk rock band, and after the demise people were still interested in what was up with the guys. Unseen Force had gotten a bit of notice as well, even though they had ended up in court, which was really weird back then especially for a punk rock band. But the timing was right for us and it was quite a coup to get Spewy onboard. But he wasn’t the only musician that kicked ass...they all did. And that was a sign right there.

Beefcake, Rox, Thuglas, they were all excellent musicians who could have gotten involved with any number of other bands (actually Thuglas was always in about three other bands at all times) but chose GWAR. We were no longer a joke or a second string project -- everybody who was aboard was aboard 100%. We already had the look, now we had the band. El Duce had spread the word, and The Alter-Natives had helped too. Actually I think it went like this: The Alter-Natives had told Greg Ginn at SST about GWAR, and he had shown the GWAR video to the guys in Nig Heist, and Mugger had shown it to El Duce, and El told everyone, and there was no way he killed Kurt Cobain or anyone else. There are a lot of El Duce stories coming up in this book and I think they will be amongst it’s highlights) We had an album in the can and the attention of the scene. People were calling about gigs, pictures were showing up in Thrasher...we had a BUZZ.

Around the end of 1987 I invested in a couple of things that were necessary: an answering machine and a yearly planner book. With these two essential tools I began plotting 1988, the year where GWAR would "Slay America", as I wrote in one of the first pages of the soon-to-be filled but at that point empty workbook.*

I had finally bailed on living at the Slave Pit on the corner of Broad and Laurel. It was just getting too intense. People were getting beaten regularly right under our windows. One night I watched a guy kick a car window into someone’s face, the next my friend got jumped and beaten by a block of wood with a piece of string around it. The assailant had swung it around his head like a mad carpenter and smashed it into my friend’s skull. These attacks were usually racially motivated and involved 10 dudes kicking the shit out of you. I somehow avoided it for years but my luck finally ran out one day as I was returning from my bullshit job at the redneck sign company.

My skateboard had lost a wheel and I ran afoul of a group of young ruffians. As if getting up at 6:00 am to work with asshole rednecks all day wasn’t bad enough, now I had to get savaged by youth gangs on my way home. But despite my best attempts to whore, drink, and diddle myself into oblivion, GWAR was giving us a shot at something more than our crummy lives. Ever since I was a little kid I had known I wanted to be an artist, I just didn’t know what kind. For years I had thought I would be a cartoonist, then art school deluded me into thinking I had a place in the fine art world. Since I had graduated my life had been a series of hovels, shit jobs, and poor personal hygiene. It was awesome, but there had to be more. GWAR gave me the chance to escape the biggest fear I had in my life...that when I got to the end of it there would be nothing to be proud of. No matter how self-obsessed or selfish or smelly I got, no matter how many kids I didn’t have or wives I didn’t make happy, that there was one thing that I could leave behind that marked my legacy in a way that I was proud of. And increasingly, that thing looked like it was going to be GWAR.

Well that’s it. Let’s see if we are REALLY back, not Tiger Woods back...and the way to do that is to meet back right here in two weeks. Bye now!

* The tome survives to this day, thanks to the Muselman, who for some reason had it, and who had passed it on to Blobby, who in turn gave it to me. I hadn’t seen it in 20 years and it’s been a real help in this book. It’s full of doodles and drawings so maybe one day I will scan some pages for you.

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 37

Dave Brockie — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 20:16:13 +0000

Hi! Dave Brockie here! Did ya miss me? I missed you! But there will be plenty of time to catch up later...right now, we have to get to...

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Episode 37

Finally, the New Chapter is Done!"

Thats right, I finally got it together. After a few weeks off, I am back, and I have written by far the best, longest episode yet. Man, this one is great. You are really gonna love it! What? You thought I had abandoned you? Ceased caring about my bi-weekly deadline and deserted my fans and my story, right when people when people were starting to get shitty with each other?

Never, dear reader, never! Never would I toy with you in such a manner, thinking you exist merely satisfy my narcissistic and deeply self-obsessed sense of humor (though that is a large part of it). Did you think I would take you this far, to have GWAR standing on the edge of the beginning of our soon-to-be semi-success, just to snatch it away from you? Much like the way VCU has snatched barstool bragging rights from the likes of the entire nation until the end of time. In fact I even got on ESPN.com and babbled about it...check it out.

I would never do something like that. This is an amazing story you people have supported for time eternal (what, the column has been going on for what, 20-30 years now?) We saw men die on the moon, hell, we saw women. We saw the birth, and death...and birth again, and again and again and a whole bunch of other shit...of the inter-web-net. Almost as epic as the story about the The Blood Vomits! What? You never heard about the Blood Vomits? Well, you have truly been missing out. Catch up with these medieval morons here.

O.k., all caught up? Good. because I only have a couple more things to do before we get into this episode. Like this. And this!!!

O.K., we are finally done. Nows it's time for....

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Episode 37

In two weeks, that is! APRIL FOOLS!

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 35

Dave Brockie — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:33:34 +0000

I pissed off a bunch of people last time with my potty-mouthed commentary and I even retracted the original title because a certain person that it was about thought that it sucked because her friend called her up and said it did. Well, I am not trying to embarrass or belittle any of my GWAR-brethren, just get cheap laughs at the expense of others ... especially me. So I called the affronted super-chick and asked exactly what was wrong (knowing full well what was) and was more than a little offended myself when I discovered that she hadn’t even read it herself! Not because she hadn’t had the chance to check out the facts firsthand before she started blowing me up with hysterical texts, but because she hadn’t been hanging on my every word since episode one!

Look, nothing in this thing is anything but TRUE (except the stuff I make up), but I do recognize that some off this stuff could be embarrassing and inflammatory -- shit, I hope it is, that’s the reason that people read it! But I’m not out to win any popularity contests, and I’m certainly not getting rich here, I mean, why start now? So why the hell am I doing this? Why the hell do I do anything? I suppose I am doing this for a lot of reasons but by far the biggest: to remember all the stupid shit we used to get up to and laugh about it because it’s fucking funny. If that pisses you off don’t read it. But perhaps you can take comfort in one thing -- nobody is going to look stupider than me. Especially around Episode 68!

But I don’t think anybody is going to be mad at me over this one. So let’s get on with the episode I have been dreading writing about ever since I started this thing.

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 35

“I Get Gang- Raped in the City Jail”

Say hello to my brother, Andrew Murray Brockie. I think it was taken when he was 16 or 17 (yes, he was always overtly hairy), and you can tell by the brick wall background that it was at Robinson High on one of the few days that Andrew actually went to school. Openly gay, he had a really tough time of it at the learning-coliseum and eventually stopped going altogether. It was a real loss for the world that my brother couldn’t find a way to contribute to it other than by blowing load in anonymous men’s beards in one of the many bathhouses where gay people had engaged in all kinds of anonymous sex until AIDS put the kibosh on the whole party. He was so smart that he scored near-perfect on the SAT, good enough to get him in the "Who’s Who of American Students" even though he failed to graduate.

Andrew contracted HIV around 1983. Nobody knew much about "the gay cancer" and neither did I. All I knew is that it took a long time to kill you, and I was sure that modern medicine would figure it out before it got Andrew. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

If you have been following the twisted tale since the beginning, you know that I give Andrew a lot of credit for helping open up my tiny little mind (in that huge fucking head of mine) and getting me going in the right direction -- that of a complete malcontent. He turned me on to bands like T.Rex and Iggy and the Stooges, and after that it was an easy hop to metal and punk. When I had been hanging around the D.C. punk scene, my brother’s house on Capitol Hill had been a rallying point for me and my friends. My brother and his crew of young gay D.C. professional types were always happy to see me and my combat-booted crew descend on their house and proceed to eat everything inside of it. My Mom knew that whenever I would disappear into the city Andrew would be there to keep an eye on me, as much as that was possible.

After I went off to school, Andrew blew his way through several unsuccessful relationships in various parts of the country. These invariably involved him and an older professional type who would gradually grow sick of each other and then part amidst an explosion of caterwauling and long distance requests for money. My Dad was getting close to retiring with his new wife, after settling with my Mom out-of-court, so he was less and less involved with the continuing saga of Andrew. As we were both adopted it was sometimes easy to feel that our Dad didn’t really consider us his children.

Two things happened that ended the “Andrew flitting-about-the-country-sucking-dude’s-dicks-and- having-them-ram-dicks-up-his-butt” period. First of all, his friends started dying. Over a period of four or five years basically everybody in Andrew’s D.C. social scene was dead. The exception was Tony, who was a caretaker at the Washington Cathedral. He had been offering me a tour of the place for years, but I always demurred due to an irrational fear that he would ask me to suck his dick -- and that because he was always so nice to me I would be somehow obligated to do so. Tony was not getting sick, and neither was Andrew. Even though every single one of their friends had died, it still hadn’t really sunk in that my brother had a death-sentence hanging over his head. But then the second thing happened, and that, coupled with the growing number of funerals my brother was attending, finally ended Andy’s continent-spanning cock-fest.

He got sick.

So, he came home. In a weird way it was a good thing. My mom was getting older, moving into her sixties, and she was lonely. She was an old-world bride and a one man gal, and was going to remain true to my Dad even though she divorced him. She wasn’t about to be moving in a new boyfriend. Not that she had become a shut-in or didn’t still embrace life with passion. She had a job at a local law firm as a receptionist where her beautiful English accent earned her the affectionate nickname "The Voice". And she had some good friends, but living in that big house all by herself must have been pretty lonely. I did my best to visit and be an attentive son, but when I look back now I see a tremendously selfish and insensitive lout who could have been a lot more helpful but was too busy being a churlishly self-absorbed dumbass. So when my brother came home it gave her something to live for, even if it was something as terrible as helping Andrew to die.

Wow! This column used to be hilarious! And it will be again, after my brother kicks off ... but that’s not for a couple of years, which could be decades as far as this is concerned. Whatever happens one thing is certain: we will be back in two weeks!

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 33

Dave Brockie — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:00:04 +0000

Hello there, everybody! Missed an episode, slept a lot. You’ll do that after four months of non-stop GWAR shows. So what do I do with my spare time? Go to New York and break things!

GWAR Bar: Oderus Urungus Defiles Happy Hour

Well,we are back in effect and we are gonna go extra hard this year! Unless of course I lame out as I am known to do from time to time. But here’s this one, anyway!

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death

Part 33: Embarrassing, Dangerous, Painful

Techno Slave, Sexecutioner, Flattus Maximus, and Beefcake the Mighty, somewhere on tour, 1987 (thanks to Danny Black for the pic)

The show at the Revival Hall in Philadelphia was an eye-opening experience for us. It was one of the first times we played a big city as a headliner and actually got a good crowd. Everybody from snotty punk rockers to greasy metalheads wanted to see the band that everybody was talking about. Thanks to El Duce and The Alter-Natives word was spreading about the fucked-up band from Antarctica (by way of Richmond). And we were eager to expand upon our modest success. We had an album in the can, a Slave Pit to work and practice in, and a Golden Battle Barge parked outside that would take us anywhere a gig beckoned -- at 45 miles per hour, of course. But sometimes gigs led to situations that were embarrassing, dangerous, and painful.

EMBARRASSING

We had made the trek all the way to Atlanta to play at the infamous Metroplex. El Duce had lived out behind the club in an old abandoned railway car and had convinced the club owner (whose missing girlfriend was featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries) to book us. It was one of our first headline shows and there was even some money involved. And even better, The Meatmen were playing the night before we were. We decided to go down there a day early and see if we could drum up some support for our show at theirs. Nobody really knew who the fuck we were and we drew more than a few dubious glares as our Battle Barge heaved into view, slewing into the parking lot with a shower of gravel. The plan was to throw on the costumes and run around the show a bit, but of course as soon as I saw the ugly crowd of semi-hostile skinheads I chickened out immediately, and instead embraced the indolent pleasure of swilling beer and chasing ass. I abandoned the plan, but somehow I still managed to talk Sleazy into throwing on the Techno suit, even though memories of the Chinese Dragon Disaster I had thrust upon him were far from old. He stumbled around the club for a while, drawing jeers. Nobody knew who the fuck he was and soon they began throwing trash. Sleazy could feel the situation disintegrating and tried to reverse fate with the desperate gamble of actually running up on stage during The Meatmen’s set, which he did just as “Crippled Children Suck” came to its thundering conclusion. The applause slowly faded as the audience stared on with a mixture of bewilderment, pity, and rage. Completely out of place and utterly unsupported (by me), Sleazy’s (as Techno) dramatic entrance had assumed the dynamic of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. Tesco Vee took one look at the costumed clown, made an insulting remark, and proceeded into the next song, completely ignoring the chagrined cyborg, who shuffled off.

DANGEROUS

We didn’t learn from this episode, and indeed repeating our mistakes with mind-numbing regularity is a time-honored Slave Pit tradition. But when Sexy came up with the idea of walking around on the Virginia Beach Boardwalk to attract people to our show at the Peppermint Beach Club, for some reason I didn’t worm out. Instead I joined Sexy in a booze-fueled romp through downtown Virginia Beach, which was crawling with gangsters, rednecks, and drunken sailors. We didn’t have any Grammy nods or international tours back then; in fact we had no clout whatsoever…but we were about to get clouted. Approaching a group of menacing troll-people, Sexy began to mouth off about humanities insignificance, and was quickly punched in the face.

“Get them faggots!”screamed their Trog-like leader.

Exercising the better part of valor, and avoiding a flurry of blows, we ran for our lives, dodging a hail of beer bottles, rubber feet flapping all the way.

PAINFUL

One of our early sick-outs was the classic “Oderus Gets Raped in the Ass by a Dead Dog”scene. After getting beaten on for a good part of the show, Techno would gain his revenge by savaging Oderus’butthole with the snout of a deceased canine -- Pookie by name. I would paint latex on my ass and stick corn flakes in it It looked gross! Then Techno (played by Sleazy back then) would carefully stick the snout between the skin of my real ass and the gross rubber one. When he did the fake ass-rape action, the latex would bunch up around the dogs snout…and it looked really fucked up. We had done the scene a few times and it was becoming a standard. It was a real crowd pleaser! Then one night Techno was buggering Oderus with the dead dog, but not really…until he slipped, or something. Maybe it was his way of getting back at me for the Chinese Dragon disaster, or the Meatmen abandoning, or maybe it was me backing up suddenly, but at any rate the fiberglass snout of the filthy dead dog prop got rammed about two inches up my butt.

And on that note we bring this chapter to a close. We’ll see you in two weeks (yeah, right…) for the next…episode…of…

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death!

Dave Brockie is the voice behind Oderus Urungus, bellicose lead singer of GWAR, Richmond’s most lethal export next to tobacco. Check out his website at www.oderus.com and keep up with GWAR at www.gwar.net

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 32

Dave Brockie — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:40:06 +0000

CLICK HERE FOR A GWAR X-MAS DELIGHTFUL FREE THING!

Season’s Beatings from GWAR! We are currently wrapping up what has been an absolutely circum-navigational year for the hardest working band in show-biz history with a run of shows in Australia, New Zealand, and finally the U.S. Then we will finally be done with our light tour schedule and be able to enjoy a well fagged-off break. But before we do (and I really am going to write about recording “Hell-O!” this time, like I said I was going to the last couple times) I have an important announcement for those of you who just don’t know what to get your Mom for X-mas. My first novel has finally become a physical reality…check out the press release for “Whargoul”, and then read Episode 32 of “GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death”. Muzzles off!

DAVE BROCKIE, A.K.A. ODERUS URUNGUS OF GWAR, PUTS OUT HIS FIRST NOVEL, THE WAR-HORROR EPIC “WHARGOUL”, AVAILABLE NOW AT AMAZON.COM

For many years Richmond, Virginia. artist/musician Dave Brockie has been known to the world as GWAR’s pig-snouted and bellicose lead “throat-thing”, Oderus Urungus, playing to semi-packed houses around easily 35% of the world. Never one to shy away from using GWAR’s success as a way to gain attention for a bewildering variety of side projects, including a glut of bands (X-Cops, Death Piggy, DBX), a variety of bizarre performances (F-Art Players, Chippy the Chippopautamus, The Crack-a-thon), and a slew of demented drawings and illustrations (see some here), Brockie has now added literature to his already bulging quiver of artistic arrows. Eleven years after its completion, Brockie’s sprawling epic of modern war and ancient necromancy, Whargoul, has finally been released in book form by Eraserhead Press.

Ok, that’s enough blatant self-pluggery,  on to the self-buggery! On to Episode 32 of

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death

This week...

Shitty-Disc Records

I’d never been to New York until Thuglas, GWAR-Woman Three (number one being The Temptress, number two being Surfer Girl) and I went up there in the early spring of 1987 to meet with the Pot Jew and try to score some cheap publicity. Walking around with our asses hanging out had worked at the Easter Parade -- why not in New York? We piled into Thuglas’s faithful red “crime van” and hit the road. I don’t remember much of that trip other than that I decided it would be more effective if I made the other two wear costumes while I walked around wearing a stupid wig and a Hawaiian shirt, pretending to be GWAR’s manager. I noticed immediately that we had far less impact on the denizens of the Big Apple than we did on the boob-esque bumpkins of Richmond, even with GW2’s hot ass bouncing around Times Square. But we received a warm and pot-drenched welcome from the Pot Jew at his studio, the semi-legendary Noise New York, located just south of Canal Street and right next to the heart of Chinatown. His studio was upstairs from some kind of hat factory and was stuffed with overflow from the place. He had an apartment on the same floor and assured us it would be totally cool for us the crash there, despite the fact that his wife seemed less-than-thrilled at the prospect, as her glares and occasional screams from unseen rooms were livid testimony to.

We returned to Richmond and after a few more weeks of frenzied songwriting we were ready, more or less. Again we loaded up Thuglas’s (great seeing you in Melbourne!) crime van with Hoseby, The Bishop, Spewy, and myself, threw in our battered gear, and set off for Noise, N.Y. Also in attendance was the Weed-wolf, who was the closest thing we had to a sound man/ producer (before the Pot Jew) and accordingly had horned his way into the venture. Plus he had a tape filled with weird noises (smashes, crashes, animals in pain…) which we were unsure of how to use on the album but wanted to try anyway. After all “samples” were just about as unknown as CD’s back then! The best thing about this tape was the breathy, oozing-with-raw-sex voice of his girlfriend, Tits Migilicutty, (who I had always lusted after, but that was really nothing, after all, at that stage of my over-sexed and under-fucked life if the sole criteria of a woman being hot was me lusting after her then this world would be FULL of hot women) saying the words that are the last thing you heard on the album -- “it got so big”. If we had only known just how big it would get, and what we would have to do to get it that way, maybe we would have packed it in right there!

But in addition to his studio skills, obtrusive attitude, and large-titted girlfriend, The Weed-wolf had an additional bonus which often proved vital -- he usually had pot!

I did my best to keep my patented Richmond “cooler-than-thou” vibe going on, but in reality I was completely blown away. Not even a lifetime of hype could get me ready for New York. Just the first sight off the Manhattan skyline, glimpsed from the northward-bound Jersey Turnpike, was like sighting the skeletal remains of some far-off, immense and glittering beast, whose towering rib cage was still draped with great swaths of decaying, corroded flesh, studded with a dizzying array of pore-like windows and doors, decaying water towers, garish billboards and the like, all bursting with pus and scabby with age. As we went through the Holland Tunnel it was like being ushered into the bowels of some monstrous, ancient necropolis, still swarming with the legions of parasites that tended to its eternal funerary rites. Reigning above all was the sinister outlines of the World Trade Center, its twin towers jutting into the diseased sky like massive tombstones over an open grave. The first time I ever saw it saw it, I knew it was going fall down. How different is the skyline of Gotham today, where once again the Empire State Building is king, and awaits the return of Kong.

We loaded in and got to work, and almost immediately began to notice things were not going to be quite as cool as we had hoped they would. “Crashing at his place” was actually crashing in the studio, an un-padded and spartan environment that afforded us little comfort. Pot Jew's apartment was a no-go zone, at least for us…but he would disappear into it with maddening frequency, disappearing for hours as a steady stream of pot smoke came from under the door, which we desperately tried to inhale. You see, this was one of those times when Weed-wolf didn’t bring much pot with him! When Pot Jew would finally emerge, stoned, nervy, and shiftless, we would plunge back into work, at least until Pot Jew’s bitch wife piled into the control room, screaming at everyone, but mostly him. Soon Weed-wolf and Thuglas were fulfilling a surrogate producer role, and at night I would curl up under the console to the sound of PJ’s (Pot Jew, if you are an idiot) wife screaming him to sleep. Not an ideal studio situation, but I was still happy to be there.

That week I finally started hanging out with The Bishop. His wide-eyed high school veneer had quickly been replaced by the cynical and sarcastic, yet always humorous, bastard that we know and loathe and love today and would one day go on to quit the band while making everybody else as miserable as possible. But for now (then) it was great fun to walk around crumbling 1987 New York (pre-Disney, a complete shithole), drink cheap beer, and listen to him make fun of anybody else in the band that didn’t happen to be around. Always up for cruel fun, I jumped right aboard. Basically, anybody older was fair game, especially Thuglass and Hoseby, the truth of the jest being painfully unapparent to me. The Bishop was fresh from high school and I was already on his list. It’s weird, but at that point just about everybody in GWAR was older than me!

We sailed through the basic tracks, mostly because the considerably more experienced Thuglas, Hoseby and Spewy knew what they were doing and wanted to get the fuck out of there as soon as possible. They worked so fast that they recorded large sections of the album with the window wide open, and in fact you can hear street sounds and sirens on much of the record. We only had one week to get it all done so I shut about the alarmingly tinny sounds PJ was getting, and busied myself getting my lyrics together. I loved writing fucked-up shit and this was a great chance to show everybody I deserved my job, even if I had never wanted it and then gotten it simply because there was no better choice. Classics like “I’m in Love with a Dead Dog”, and “Jémme Apelles Jacques Cousteau” flew from my flair pen as I huddled at the two dollar burrito hut which had become my primary source of nutrition (we were forbidden from using the kitchen). When it was my turn to do my thing I knocked it out fairly quickly, mostly due to the fact that time was running out, the weed was completely gone, PJ was getting pissier, and everything was sounding like it had been recorded over the phone.

Finally we had finished the entire album and I decided to celebrate by blowing my last bit of money at the three dollar Chinese food store and listening to the rough mixes. Both experiences left me violently ill, and I proceeded to projectile vomit all over the bathroom and the hallway leading to it. Gripped by severe food poisoning, and wondering why GWAR didn’t sound more like Black Flag, I was all too willing to accept PJ’s explanation of it’s “just a rough mix”. I think even the Weed-wolf abandoned me at that point, and even if he didn’t, I am pretending he did.

I left New York the next day and met the guys in Philadelphia where we were playing for the first time. I was flushed with pride as I leapt on to the Golden-Battle Barge and jammed the rough mix tape into the boom box, around which everybody was gathered. How their delighted faces turned crestfallen and grey as we made our sonic journey into bad-sounding-ness. In short, they hated it, and my use of the “rough mix” excuse didn’t work as well as when Pot Jew had said it…

Crushed, I said fuck it and was about the business of getting set for the show, taking care of the guys, and collecting the money. So much was going through my head I almost passed out. I knew the record sounded a little thin but, fuck, we had been working with a hippy! I had no doubt we were going to get a good mix out of it and I had every confidence in our performances, art, and song-writing.

Fuck, I have to stop writing now I have to be onstage in 15 minutes!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all! See ya in 2011 with the next episode!

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 31

Dave Brockie — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 19:30:03 +0000

It's been a busy time for your favorite group of swaggering undead warlords. Here we see my alter-ego, Oderus Urungus, gracing the cover of the new Decibel Magazine! It's the perfect capper for a year that has seen GWAR savage the world in an unrelenting assault, appearing on everything from the shores of Australia to the Jimmy Fallon show (and he was a bit stand-offish; Dana Carvey was way cooler). But enough of the bullshit, I am actually going to write about what I am supposed to for once!

Slave Pit Evolutions

Shimmy Disc records was a New York-based, fairly obscure art-rock label that flourished briefly in the mid-to-late eighties. Honestly, I had never heard of any of the shit (like King Missile, Crackhouse, Bongwater and many more), and didn’t really like it when I did, but my buddy Rebby (that’s an example of someone already having a nickname) turned me on to it, urging me to send a video tape to it’s founder, the semi-legendary producer Mark Kramer, (we could never really come up with a good nickname for him, unless you use “The Pot Jew”, which I will…). Within two weeks we had sorted it out; we were going to New York to record a real album.

But first we had to write it! As it stood we only had about eight songs, and in those punk rock days that was nowhere near enough. The first true GWAR song was "AEIOU", (we started with the vowels), and classics like “Rock and Roll Party Town” were soon to follow. And for our first couple years of being infamous local jokesters we stuck with the hits like “Üaintshit” and “As Pure as the Arctic Snow”. But this was a whole fucking album, and back then 16 to 20 songs on an album was not uncommon. We had plenty of work to do.

As the band settled into our new practice space at 801 W. Broad to begin the task of writing the rest of the album, the art department began setting up a new Slave Pit and reabsorbing old member Techno. Considering how much things had changed in the year he had been gone, that was gonna be interesting. Techno had never played well with others. And that made it hard for him to accept the fact that GWAR was a group effort. GWAR, in his mind, was always “his baby”, despite the fact that GWAR never would have been GWAR unless tons of people had contributed countless hours to it. It was that environment that had driven Techno away and one that had become our credo in his absence. I wondered how he would deal with it.

The guys had stepped up in his absence. I will always credit Sleazy with making two of the biggest innovations that brought GWAR out of the “stone knives and bearskins” era, or as we used to call it, “The Dim Time”, and into the future of a real, working rock and roll band. Sleazy was the new Hetman at the Slave Pit and had earned it with good deeds. I held him, and still do, in high esteem. The first was The Chernobyl Cockroach, the first Slave Pit prop to be made of latex rubber. Latex had many advantages over the traditional cloth and glue covering technique that made the backbone of those first generation Slave Pit costume pieces. Latex was flexible and bounced back to form (more or less, and dependent on several conditions) after being crushed. And getting crushed was an inevitable occurrence to any Slave Pit prop, whether it was getting slammed by a giant hammer onstage or thrown into a giant pile in the back of the Golden Battle Barge after a show. It was more expensive to be sure -- back then we used to buy it for 70 bucks a gallon at The Art Market (or “Art Mark-up”, in Slave-Speech). Sleazy cut that shit with water and carefully doled out every drop to the hide of the creature whose body, 25 years later, is more or less intact, somewhere in the bowels of the Slave Pit costume loft. Latex would go on to replace the old ways completely, and we scrambled to learn the ways of this weird new material. I would smear latex mixed with flesh-colored paint all over my face, and then decorate it with cigarette butts and Corn Flakes. It looked pretty cool, even though it would sweat off after the first song. I was so ignorant of the capabilities of the stuff that I just poured it into molds I had made (poorly), where it would just skin over and never dry. Many times I recall the pained recriminations of my Slave Pit fellows as they witnessed me wasting hundreds of dollars worth of materials. But Sleazy and Sexy and The Muselman put the shit to good use. Rubber pieces replaced old ones, and soon Sexy had a new mask for a brand new character he was creating. Our old buddy Spike had played a character loosely known as “The Executioner”. He had stopped hanging out with us, and Sexy had taken over the role. He changed it into “The Sexecutioner”, and added the famous headpiece. In its most basic form, it looked like he’d pulled a sack of raw meat over his head. I was madly jealous, and started to think about a similar upgrade for Oderus.

Latex had the extra plus of looking hard but not being so. I’m not saying that getting slammed in the face by a rubber mace feels like getting hit by a pillow, but it was a big improvement over a rock solid lump made out of wood glue-soaked strips.

The second and even huger development that Sleazy brought was that of spew. We had fucked around with blood at shows, much to our folly. It’s how we had gotten banned from the old 9:30 Club. Our shit was pretty primitive, just some sandwich bags filled with Karo-syrup. It was sticky and gross and limited in range. It ruined fun fur and was impossible to clean up with anything less than boiling water. I don’t know where he got the contact, but Sleazy had an alternative called Karogeenan. It was a food additive made out of seaweed that came in these five gallon tubs filled with a colorless, odorless gel. When cut with water and food coloring, it looked exactly like blood, and even better, it dried up and flaked off on its own accord. It’s the perfect blood and to this day I don’t understand why people don’t use it as such more often. But Sleazy wasn’t done. He had pioneered the “spew” with the Arm-Rip gag, in which a hapless stage tech got his arm pulled off, and then, thanks to a hidden hot water bottle and some tubing, squirted a jet of blood across the stage. But then he got the brilliant idea of using old fire extinguishers to propel the blood. A “decap” would stumble out, look stupid, and then get his head knocked off by The Sexecutioner. But instead of a half-hearted water bottle squirt we now had hydraulic pressure—and our famous spew, much to the chagrin of club owners everywhere, was born!

But that in itself brought dangers…not so much for us but for our fans. One night at one of the original Rockitz shows, Sexy knocked the decap head deeply into a packed house. That’s right, we used to knock the heads into the audience rather than into the backline. And we also used to use plywood when we made them (the old ways died hard), which led to plywood decap meeting drunken fans face at considerable speed, which led to a deep cut and lots of blood, which led to the dubious tradition of our fans never suing us for sometimes hurting them very badly.

Yes, we had made great strides since Techno had departed, and upon returning, I am sure the Slave Pit little resembled the one he had founded years before. And I think maybe we had forgotten that none of this ever would have happened without him. Probably the hardest thing for him to take was the emergence of Sleazy taking over the role of Techno–Destructo…even though we let Techno be Techno again. We merely claimed he had a not-so-identical twin brother that went by the same name. But the damage was done. Sleazy had been doing it for the last year, and he was tapped to sing “Techno’s Song”on the new album (actually “Hell-o” was in the can by the time Techno returned. In this sprawling epic, there are bound to be some mix-ups).

Of course back then I was my usual clueless self about any hard feelings Techno might have had. I was oblivious of the deeply rooted problems and on to the fun stuff. Maybe if I had been more aware I could have done something, but I doubt it. People are the people they are and usually nothing can change them. Techno settled into his first project, building the “Death Bulldozer” that Oderus was to ride on the cover of the new album, which at that point was being called “Hell-o!” I was happy, writing songs like “I'm in Love With a Dead Dog”, and getting ready for my trip to New York. For the moment, everything was happy-time in GWAR Valley. And that lasted right up until the moment we played our new album for the rest of the guys.

Wow, I still didn’t get to New York! It’s like when I start writing this stuff I start remembering so much shit I never get as far as I would like. Ok, in two weeks I’ll be back from tour, and ready to hit you with episode 32 of “GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death”, and this time it definitely will be about recording “Hell-o”in New York with the infamous Pot Jew!

Next time: “Shitty Disc Records”

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 30

Dave Brockie — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:00:41 +0000

We’ll start this episode with a contest. See if you can answer the following question. Late one night, the GWAR bus hit:

1) A deer

2) The Travelocity Roaming Gnome

3) Something that emitted a hideous scream, then thrashed off into the bushes, leaving behind a puddle of steaming blood and a half-full Wendy's small coffee, which somehow ended up perfectly placed on the bumper.

4) All of the above

Greetings and welcome to all the faithful fans, friends, and followers that have followed this tormented tale for 30 episodes. It’s often rushed and sometimes skipped, but writing these chronicles has proven to be a modest success thus far, at least as far as that I have not abandoned it out of laziness or frustration, which knowing myself as I do, was originally my biggest fear. But new concerns have replaced old ones. The column has gotten harder to write now that I am through with the pre-GWAR years of my life. It goes from being a one-man debacle to an outlandishly crafted attempt to tell the stories of many people, and how they came together (while circle-jerking into a soapdish) to make GWAR. Out of respect to them, I really want to make a decent attempt at getting the facts right. Ok, enough of that, let’s get back to the half-truths, rumors, and outright lies that make this column great!

That’s why I have brought in the services of Blobby, my long-time and stalwart Slave Pit colleague. He has always been known, in the GWAR vernacular, as “The Recorder”, the guy that serves as the repository of all things GWAR-related, from original tape spools to obscure articles. His compendium of the majority of GWAR events and timeline of all the shows has been an invaluable resource (and his ruddy cheeks are to this day a source of great amusement for me). So 30 episodes later we are still going strong -- and we haven’t even got to the first album yet. I am hoping that this “Internet” is around for awhile because I am thinking I am not going to get done writing this thing anytime soon.

First, the general GWAR update. Right now we are about 1/3rd of the way through our “Bloody Tour of Horror”, messily crushing the moistest regions of America under our clawed (and flaming) hooves. Then it’s off to Australia and New Zealand to molest the minds of those dwelling in these exotic locales, despoil their livestock, and perhaps violate a hobbit. Busy, busy, but never too busy to keep up with my journalistic commitment to keep this city from being completely overwhelmed by the demented peckings of that Chris Bopst character! So let’s get on with it. Welcome to the 30th episode of…

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death:

Part 30 “Once Again the Title I Thought I Was Going to Use Doesn’t Really Fit Anymore”

I stood there with the phone to my ear, scratching my balls with my removable pirate-hook. The voice at the end of the phone finally stopped talking. When it was done, we had a record deal.

It hit me! We were going to New York to record an album! This was the perfect way to get into the pants of the hot waitress that worked next door!

I skated over to the Slave Pit and then went to the pizza pub next door where the object of my lust was usually working. Confirming she was there with a surreptitious peek, I then bust into the place, run right by her (being careful to completely ignore her) and slid up to the pay phone. Here I made several phone calls to imaginary people who I loudly blabbed to about our new record deal, our exclusive producer, and how I had set up everything, all the while making sure she heard every word. Then I sat down and had a couple celebratory beers, chatting her up in the process and suggesting we hook up after work. We did, and I ended up at her apartment, where we had messy sex for at least several minutes.

“So this is what it’s like to be signed,” as thought to myself, as I rudely pawed at her undergarments. As soon as I had blown my load I realized I had yet to tell any of my band mates the good news -- that we had been signed, not that I had blown my load.

“Gotta go to New York, baby,” I blurted out as I leaped out the window, barely pausing to go through her purse, denude the fridge of beer and food, and take the nicest bud out of her weed stash.

But the band was not the only entity that was getting ready to travel. At this point Techno had been gone for about a year or so. Sleazy had taken over the character of Techno-Destructo and was pretty much our lead man in the shop. As far as I knew there were no hard feelings, but I think we all were pretty disappointed Techno (oh that’s right, I said I was going to stop with the nicknames. Well, I lied…) had left us. His departure was more of a surprise than anything, and we had not let it slow us down one bit -- in fact GWAR had been kicking ass with no sign at all that losing our co-founder had been a bad thing. We had rebuilt the costumes, re-tooled the band, and now we had a record to make. GWAR’s rumblings were spreading across the country, so much so that Techno began to hear them at his new job as a security guard at a Ford plant in far-off Detroit, where he would spend hours drawing the catwalks and machinery that were his new environs. If I thought his departure was a surprise, boy, was I in for a surprise when he returned!

One day I was standing on the porch of my Spine Street (better known to the world as S. Pine) abode, waiting for the Weed-Wolf to wake up and get me high, when my attention was drawn to a giant cloth and glue robot stumbling down the street. Towering over all but the biggest ghetto-palms on a pair of five-gallon bucket feet, I was confronted by the onrushing figure of Techno-Destructo, screaming at me in that “viking redneck” accent that only the co-creator of GWAR and original creator of the Slave Pit could muster.

I was astounded and amazed! I had heard vague rumors that Techno was considering returning to us, so I wasn’t completely unaware that this could happen. He was hating his job. He had come back to do some video with us and it was high-fives and dick-rubbing all around. The door was wide open for him to return, and we would welcome him…and suddenly there he was, clomping drown the street in his robot suit, ass hanging out, screaming what I could only vaguely understand as the surreal nature of what was happening drowned out everything in a wash of gurgling background noise.

Out of nowhere, Techno was back…but was that a good thing?

Next up, I swear to God I will actually write about recording our first album! But right now I have to rock the house with my dick hanging out!

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 29

Dave Brockie — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:00:42 +0000

Sorry about missing an episode, but we have been pretty damn busy. After spending most of the summer sacking European venues and then wandering battlefields, we decided it was time to come home and get our shit together. Our new album, “Bloody Pit of Horror” is out November 9th, so there was much evil afoot -- mostly getting settled in our new Slave Pit and getting ready for the new “Bloody Tour of Horror”, which will span three and a half months and shall see us blow load in weird places like Australia and New Zealand. In fact I am on it already! But there is plenty other cool stuff coming up as the two-year long GWAR 25th Anniversary begins to lurch towards the final stretch, and the finish line beyond (which is sometime early next year, I think). First off, we are web-casting live from Milwaukee our first pay-per-view GWAR concert event. Check gwar.net for details. And even crazier, the impishly cute Jimmy Fallon is letting us on his show October 28th! And this won’t be an Oderus panel-appearance; this will be the whole fucking band, playing the opening track, “Zombies March” (also soon to be a video from Fangoria) from the latest and devastatingly sick new album that, yes, despite my constant hypocritical accusations of Rob Zombie, the title of is stolen from a classic Italian horror film (of the same name).

And it really does sound sick. We tuned down to the point where it sounds like the guitars are throwing up. But that’s not the only evidence of our changing universe. Things have changed quite a bit since I started this writing thing almost a year and a half ago. At that point I re-dedicated myself to all things GWAR and pledged to make the next two years the greatest and perhaps last attempt yet at getting this band out of the underground and into the mainstream, (at least the part where you make money) which seems to be the best place to give these old road-dogs a shot at a health and retirement plan. And so far I would have to say we were doing pretty well -- Red Eye, Fallon, cracking the Billboard Top 100 -- these are all indications that the cult of GWAR is growing every day. But can we finally get this beast out of it’s shit-smeared lair and down to the bus stop? Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

It certainly doesn’t seem like it after playing a gig like last night's. We should have known we were in trouble as soon as we pulled up. I asked a local crew member where we could park our bus and was informed that he “was not my Dad.” This enraged me so much that I followed him into the club and demanded satisfaction, at which point he denied everything. I huffed and puffed, and then fucked off back to the bus, hurling myself into my bunk in a spasm of demonstrative pique. When I later returned to the club I discovered it was more a flashy, trashy disco shithole, than a beer-drenched, rock-and-roll shithole, and that made it even worse. There was so little room on stage that we basically had to cut half the show, and getting ready for it was even worse. The only dressing area available was located at the bottom of a 30-foot spiral staircase which emptied out into a small maze of useless rooms, all too small and cluttered to have any function whatsoever. Everywhere you looked you saw nothing but boxes of ashtrays, file cabinets filled with old contracts, a confusing array of pipes and ventilation vents, and finally an alarming amount of rat traps. Our “dressing room” was a tiny chamber filled with jit-smeared couches and an ancient collection of old show posters, which had been defaced with every dripping penis and gay remark which could be Sharpied onto them. Everything was dirty, shabby, and bad, yet somehow the management had the balls to have put up posters imploring the bands to “keep it nice”.

Fuck it! We rocked anyway! And now, back to the continuing adventure we can safely say is called...

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

Part 29 “The Cum Before the Storm”

Slave Pit weapons collection (and Dimetridon), circa 1987. If you look
closely you can see someone stuck a broom in there.

It was 1987. We were firmly entrenched in the Bush years and the mood was one of nervous expectancy as waited for whatever he was up to with his C.I.A. cronies to actually happen. We’d spent three years coming up with the greatest band in rock-and-roll history and become something of a small town success story in the process. But finally the word was getting out on a national level. Not only was El Duce spreading tall tales about this band from Antarctica, not only were the folks at SST checking out the GWAR videos the AlterNatives had brought with them, but then out of nowhere Thrasher magazine published a photo of a GWAR concert along with the totally false claim that we had started a riot in our hometown.*

There was Oderus, and GWAR Woman, and The Sexecutioner in a grainy black and white photo showing a scene of confusing carnage…in an international magazine that’s circulation was in the hundreds of thousands. It was the first major press event for GWAR and years later would be revealed as one of the biggest ways that people had come to know of GWAR.

But there were other people talking about GWAR. My friend Rebby Sharpe (yeah, I am not really going to be using the nickname thing anymore unless I really need to) had been talking about us to her friend Kramer in New York about her weird friends and their crazy band. Kramer ran a obscure yet pertinent art-rock label called Shimmy-disc. He was best known for his work with Ann Magnuson and their band Bongwater. Ann was also doing a band called Vulcan Death Grip that had a vague GWAR-ness to it, and she would go on to later appear in that movie Small Soldiers. For a while, she was the most famous person we knew.

Rebby told me to send Kramer a video. I did. More on that later.

We spent the first half of the year settling into our new Slave Pit, the old Joy Massage building located in what is now the Aladdin’s Pizza building …jeez, how much can one building take? To be Richmond’s premiere jit-parlor, then home to GWAR, and finally to deliver such delicious food? Well, that explains why they sometimes tear down what appear to be perfectly good buildings. Makes you wonder just how long it will be before the scythe of time chops down the reign of that most excellent edifice and harborer of all things vile, 801 W. Broad, our first true post-Dairy Slave Pit.

We thought we were pretty cool. We had the “golden battle barge”, which we drove around town on various errands, usually involving weed or pussy. We’d park it on Broad Street or dump it over in Oregon Hill, then walk to our fort, our beloved Slave Pit. Our crimson-walled paradise squatted a floor above the throb of Richmond life, and we observed numerous beatings from it’s windows. One night while we were doing just that, I got the great idea of pushing a huge plaster skull out the window where it plummeted to the earth and exploded on the sidewalk, right next to a group of late-night revelers who were more than a little pissed but couldn’t seem to figure out where it had come from.

There were at least five bars on the block so there was never a lack of action. Bands played pretty much every night at Rockitz. Every year V.C.U. offered us a whole new crop of “hotties”, and we were still young enough to know their names. We were already local legends and were smug and conceited about it. I was rapidly ballooning into a loud-mouthed egomaniac, and why not? We were young and snotty and fresh out of the school of Hardcore, which we were already getting sick of. We had to come up with alternatives. That’s why we created GWAR. Because we were sick of everything else.

And it was really a great idea. That’s why so many amazingly talented people were drawn to it. So much so that while they did all the work I could fuck off and have fun with Richmond as my personal pussy-hunting ground. And hunting was good!

I remember encountering the lovely “Meow-Meow” at the Village (the old Village) in the early afternoon, bringing her over to visit the Slave Pit, and fucking her by nightfall. Two days later I was blowing her off as I banged her friend in the stairwell.

I was shameless and without class. We referred to women as “load barges”, who existed for the sole purpose of sucking, jacking, and fucking us, and then allowing us to shoot “load” all over them, which they, as “barges”, were obliged to accept.

We had our own Slave Pit vernacular and code words and slang for everything. Pot was “wizzy”, or “wisdom”, you were a “Ramses” if you held the bong for too long (because the Egyptian Pharaohs had those beards that looked like bongs stuck to their chins). Beers were “glugs”, food was “glop”. And of course there was the word that eventually found its way into the Urban Dictionary, “bohab”. From the beginning a bohab was a person that was HABitually BOring. It came from the proto-hab, the one called Bob the Slob, also called Bo-Hab the Slow-Hab. He was a friend of ours who used to come over and lick envelopes and tragically drowned when he years later drove his car into a swollen stream during a hurricane. He was a lot older than us but was a really nice guy who always shared his “wizzy”. So the term was an affectionate one and never was meant to be a negative title, indeed some of our greatest friends and supporters are pure bohabs, or “habs” as it was eventually shortened to. Indeed, we all have a bit of the hab about us -- “bohabing” (sucking up to your betters) is something we all both indulge in and despise about ourselves.

I was still living on Spine Street with The Weedwolf (keeping the old nicknames in cases where they are funny) and Mantis (Scott Krahl). One night I was dreaming about New York City. I had never been there before and was driving around the city in a taxicab. I remember having to shit. Suddenly the phone rang, shattering my poo-smeared reverie. A series of hoarse shouts from the other room confirmed the call was for me.

“Who the fuck is it?” I yell back.

More muttering. Shuffling sounds. For a moment I think I can go back to sleep. But then...

“Some dude named Kramer. Wants you to go to New York and record an album.”

I had to get up.

IN TWO WEEKS: Noise! New York on two dollars a day! Growing dissension at home, growing list of gigs on the calendar -- all this and much, much, more of the same in the next episode of GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death, Part 30...

"Everybody Hates the New Album"

*I believe this was somebody mushing together the Schafer Court GWAR and Death Piggy shows. Death Piggy had caused a near-riot during our notorious “Pie-Fight”show.

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 28

Dave Brockie — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:00:13 +0000

To say that the origins of GWAR were crude is a considerable understatement. Unidentified GWARrior outside Rockitz, circa 1987. Note: Flock of Seagulls on the marquee!

Before I get started with this latest bi-monthly installment to what has become, next to minor-league sports, Richmond’s most cherished semi-recurring event, I would like to take a moment to piss and moan about people who stand WAY TOO FAR AWAY from the counter when they buy stuff. It happened to me last night—I was in Walgreen's buying a bottle of wine, a 200-pack of Benadryl, and a Cosmopolitan when the situation confronted me—there were two girls standing about ten feet away from the only open register, talking amongst themselves (about me). I was pretty sure they were in line; it was just that they were so far away from the counter that it felt awkward to stand behind them. And then one of the worse variations on this predicament occurred—somebody got in line AHEAD of them because they were so far away from the counter in the first place, and even worse, this person was a bedraggled crazy woman who immediately started screeching like a cockatiel on crack when the girls politely informed her that she was actually supposed to be behind me. Then it got even worse! A concerned employee opened another register, creating another opportunity for potential homicide…why? Because there is no set course of action on who gets to step up to this register first—is it the person who has waited the longest, or the person who is the closest? Or perhaps the craziest homeless person? But at this point it was all too late, I couldn't hang, and I threw my evening’s entertainment to the floor, exiting the store more quickly than Tia Tequila leaves an ICP show.

But enough of my personal hell, let’s be off to my personal hell—

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death, Part 28
"Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show!"

Look, I never said this was going to be particularly accurate as far as the time line was concerned. But thanks to Blobby, a loyal GWARrior you have yet to meet, I have managed to gain access to an actual document containing a record of all the major events and shows in GWAR’s history. This should keep the narrative pretty tight and ensure that I don’t miss many juicy nuggets. But I'm happy to have managed to stay on track so far. Because you see, it’s a lot easier to track the diseased efforts of my solo career, but now we are reaching into the group debauch of an elite group of miscreants whose exploits are still running strong after 25 years. And as this is a historical tome, we want our history accurate whenever possible. This isn’t fucking high school!

The new GWAR made it’s debut in July of 1986 at Rockitz, and I can’t remember much of it so it must not have sucked too bad. What I do remember was taking the couple hundred bucks we had earned the night before and piling into the Battle Barge for our first real road show. We drove to some crummy bar in Nags Head where they pulled the pool tables together and told us it was a stage. There was this little hot redneck girl running around in these tiny jean hotpants, and of course I immediately forgot the whole reason I was there and bent my full effort into trying to fuck her. The show was a disaster—about ten people showed up, and we were paid in coupons for free appetizers. I never ate so many hushpuppies in my life! But I didn’t care, as we had wrangled an invite to (lets call her…Rotten-Twat) Rotten-Twat’s house where she lived with her construction worker boyfriend, who was luckily out of town. I was pretty sure I was going to fuck her, even though she kept disappearing to go get fucked by Hoseby or Sleazy, I was never sure which one. By the time I finally nailed her it was basically like fucking one of them. But I was happy, laying there on her blow-up mattress, scratching my-soon-to-be infected cock. Happy until—

“SHIT! MY HUSBAND’S HOME!”

As the dagger-beams from her husband's 4x4 pierced the Venetian blinds, I leapt from our love nest, nearly breaking my neck as I slid across the room on a three-foot wide cum (I hope it was cum!) slick. Desperately I searched for my pants and slid them on just as Billy-Bob entered the room. By now I was cowering amongst my passed-out band brethren and was pretty sure I had gotten away with it. Billy-Bob came in and immediately began screaming at Rotten-Twat about having an entire band over but became calm after she blew him. We ended up talking and drinking with each other for a few hours, and not once did he notice that I was wearing his pants.

Sleazy after the "big hair injection". Yes, that is rope glued to couch-cushion foam.

Just a few days later we were playing Rockitz again. Back then it seemed like we played Rockitz at least twice a month, and actually that was essential as it was the only way we could pay off our massive tab of tuna steak sandwiches and pitchers of beer which were our only sustenance for months. But this was not just any show—we were playing with the Mentors, led by their legendary drummer/frontman El Duce. The Mentors had quite the rep in the hardcore scene both as outrageous performers and some of the first punk music that was starting to sound metal. In fact it could be argued that they weren’t punk rock at all, just foul, and as soon as their smoke-belching 40-year old tour bus pulled into the parking lot I was on it, missing load-in and drinking beer with El for hours. We hit it off immediately. I had heard all the stories about him and was not too surprised to discover that little of it was true. El was a kind and funny man who loved upsetting uptight punkers with his “rape-rock” shtick—which was a total joke. In fact, he just loved upsetting everybody, like my half African-American friend who accompanied me that day. He worshiped El, that is until El started calling him a “high yellow." They had a great show that night, and both Sicky Wifebeater and Dr. Heathen Scum were in fine form. We hung out for hours, listening to El’s stories about what a dick Henry Rollins was. I made a lot of good friends that night, including El’s roadie, Horndogger, who would turn up again and again over the years, always with coke.

But their was a lot more to this destined meeting than high-fives and beer-bongs. Before The Mentors left, we loaded them up with GWAR shirts and video tapes, which they proceeded to wear everyday for the rest of their tour, while showing anyone who would watch (and forcing those that wouldn't) the videotape of this crazy band from Richmond, Va. We didn’t know it, but the rumors of GWAR were starting to spread across the country.

But we were clueless about this for now, as we were too busy adding any element of drama we possibly could to our lives in order to make it seem like they were really unique and important. Even though we only had a couple of shows under our belt, the band dynamic was becoming clear. First of all, we were "King Shit of Turd Mountain," and you couldn't teach us a thing. We were altogether too eager to become jaded, cynical, and bitter, and leapt to ourselves with alacrity. The Bishop hated Thuglass, mostly because Thuglass was a good ten years older than the oldest GWAR member, but also because The Bishop wanted his friend Dirty D to play guitar. Thuglass in turn looked upon The Bishop with a disdain reserved for people younger than him. It led to many nasty remarks and snarky responses in kind. Spewy was turning out to be a big blob. Instead of giving me the solid band-pro attitude I had first brought him on for, Spewy began to turn into a giant amoeba that constantly whined for veggie pizza. He was powerless against the vicious needling we soon all began to indulge in heaping upon him. Meanwhile our drummer, Rox Hoseby, didn’t say much. He was so completely dispassionate about everything that you were never even sure how you felt about him. And then there was the art department, which, despite my promises to the contrary, ended up doing all the work and quickly became hostile and resentful of the band members, with good reason! We were dicks!

In two weeks! I am not going to tell you because I am a big fat liar who always ends up writing about other stuff! So see you in two weeks for Episode 29 --

"Why Did You Piss on Me?"

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 27

Dave Brockie — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:52:44 +0000

Ahhh…the beer of Europe…in Europe. We have just completed not one but two swings through Europe, playing tons of festivals and guzzling gallons (I mean liters) of beer. The halfway point of our completely self-promoting two-year long 25th anniversary “slay-a-bration" has been reached, and everything is looking great. The new album, “Bloody Pit of Horror” is in the can and ready to be released on November 9th. The longest tour in our history, including our first dates in New Zealand and Australia, is starting in under a month, and somehow I have found enough time to deliver another episode of...

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death” Part 27
“The Golden Battle Barge”

So we had assembled what I considered to be the finest bunch of musicians that the Richmond punk scene could muster up, and because nobody else wanted the job, I stayed at lead singer. We had all settled into the task at hand and began practicing in Spewy’s basement. Up until that point GWAR only had a few songs: “Üaintshit”, “Rock and Roll Party Town”, “GWAR Theme” and a couple of others. And the way we played and practiced was every bit as haphazard as the way we wrote music. But when we locked ourselves in Spewy’s basement an amazing thing happened... we actually started writing some good music. “I’m in Love With a Dead Dog” was the first fully realized composition, and more were soon to follow. The band was a actually sounding like a band, at least until the point when I opened up my fat mouth.

The art department was busy throwing down as we established new characters to fit our new line-up. Up until that point the look of the characters was pretty much decided by whatever costume pieces you grabbed, first-come, first serve, and our revolving door line-up had created all kinds of obscure GWAR-iors that would be lost to history without my pot-addled memories. Hans and Stephan Orifice, Corneilius Carnage, the Slutman Brothers, the Executioner, all were destined for the trash-heap in the great re-making of GWAR that occurred in the first half of 1987.

The Bishop inherited the bent-I-Beam helmet, a beautiful beaten copper breastplate fashioned by the Mantis, and a Roman-style skirt that remains the look of the character to this day. As much as he wanted to be called “Squidman Shitsucker”, we wouldn’t let him, and he became “Beefcake the Mighty”. Wherever we could, we based the characters on some element of the real person’s personality, and The Bishop’s natural girth lent itself to the name “Beefcake the Mighty”. Spewy was a vegetarian, known for his hideous farts, so in GWAR he became “Flattus Maximus”. Hoseby was a very low-key person with a poker-face from hell, and therefore became the equally enigmatic “Nippleus Erecticus”, a character with no discernible personality whatsoever. Thuglas stepped into the “Jaws of Death” and became Balsac, which was fine with us as the bear-trap jaws completely obscured his face, his bald spot, and the fact that he was considerably older than the rest of us.

The back-up characters had been coming together for the preceding couple of years and finally crystallized as Sexy became “The Sexecutioner”. Our old friend Spike had been playing “the Executioner” before then and was basically Oderus’s helper in the killing and molesting of things. But Spike had moved on and Sexy took it over, adding an “S” to the front of the word – and thus “The Sexecutioner”was born. Hoseby’s girlfriend had been dancing for another band he was in -- the infamous MuddHelmut -- so it seemed natural for her to take over duties as GWAR Woman, who at this point still didn’t have a name. Once you added the Slaves, and the various villains and victims they also played, we had a the beginnings of our mythos, a “proto-pantheon” if you will, though at that point we had no idea just how big our little fantasy world would become.

Sleazy had pretty much become the leader in the Slave Pit and right off the bat he had a dramatic effect on the evolution of our look. Believe it or not, we didn’t always spew; in fact after the notorious “hobby horse” incident and the banning from D.C. we had received because of it, we hadn’t done shit with blood since then. But Sleazy saw a way to do it that would look great and wouldn’t end up with us paying for ruined monitors. He had access to this stuff called “carrageenan”, which was a seaweed extract which was usually used to thicken dairy products. It was tasteless and colorless and when mixed with food-dye produced an amazingly realistic blood that stuck to stuff but would dry and flake off without fouling the surface. It was a huge improvement over the karo syrup we had been using. But that was just one of the several huge improvements that Sleazy brought to the table.

Sleazy also introduced us to latex rubber and all of its joys. He had created the amazing “Mutant Cockroach” for the first Shafer Court show, and soon had applied the technology to all kinds of GWAR props. Sexy took the ball and ran with it and had soon built the first full latex mask for the Sexecutioner. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, in fact you could have gotten the same effect by wearing raw meat on your face, but it was a step in the right direction. I still didn’t have the full Oderus mask-thing happening, but it wasn’t far-off. I wanted to wait and see if Sexy could survive an entire show with that thing on his head before I made one for myself. So at that point I would take raw latex and paint it all over my face, and then as it dried texture it up with cigarette butts, corn flakes, and cotton balls, then hand paint it for the show. Time allowing, I would do the same thing on my ass as well. It looked great but would usually fall off halfway through the first song as I began to sweat profusely.

Sleazy was also pioneering other areas that were vital. He created an effect where a tech dude ran up on stage and tried to help Oderus with his microphone. He reached out with both hands for the mike, which Oderus grabbed and pulled away from him, ripping one of the dude’s arms off in the process. Feigning agony, the character would squeeze the hot-water bottle which was kept under his armpit. Dyed water-blood shot a good three feet! Now, in these days of us blasting festival crowds with double Biledrivers, that seems like a pretty humble effort, but back then it was fucking mind-blowing!

But he wasn’t done yet…the next thing he did was get his hands on some old fire extinguishers which he filled with water and dye. Before the shows we would find whatever gas station had an air pump and charge the tanks, then hook them up to the hoses in the costumes, and our famous “projectile spew”, destined to soak millions, was born!

So we had a band, we had an art department, and we had a killer studio. But unless we wanted to be destined as Richmond’s ultimate bar band, we needed a better way to get around than borrowing Spewy’s van. So we went in search of transportation, and found it in Flat Rock, Virginia. There Spewy knew an old man, who went by the moniker of “The Old Man”, with a huge lot full of old school buses for sale. Not having any cash, we instituted a system of “dues” where everybody was expected to kick in 20 bucks a month…that’s right, back in the old days you actually had to pay to be in GWAR!

So we scrimped and saved and stole and pilfered until we had the thousand bucks we needed to buy our dream vehicle. “The Golden Battle Barge” (from Moorcocks “Elric” series) became our tour bus, after a few modifications. We ripped out most of the seats and piled a bunch of moldy mattresses and cushions on the floor. This was “the Pea Pit”, and everybody slept, ate, jacked-off, and fucked in alarming proximity to each other. Right behind that was “The Squirrel Cage””, where we would just throw the stinky costumes in a huge pile after the show. And at the very back was the “Urine Cone”, a funnel attached to a tube that would deliver your watery piss to the surface of the rushing highway below. Some random graffiti, a huge GWAR mojo, and a pair of steer horns glued to the roof completed the picture.

I was pretty stoked. Losing our band and our best artist had been a tremendous setback, but we had stuck it out. We knew that the idea of GWAR was too good to let it die, and we really didn’t have a lot going on besides it. Death Piggy was pretty much over, my painting career wasn’t going anywhere, and working construction was looking more and more like my future. GWAR was maybe our last chance to do something awesome with our lives. And now we had a band, a bus, and a studio, everything we needed. It was time -- time to hit the road, time to ram GWAR down the countries throat…it was TIME FOR DEATH…

In two weeks, El Duce and the Mentors! Shady managers shooting up in stairwells! Even shadier managers smoking sheet rock and insisting it got them high! All this, and …this…in the next fudge-packed episode that shall be called…

“Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show!”

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 26

Dave Brockie — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:00:04 +0000

(Here's a picture I got of a painting on the roof of the BeergaBurgerba-- oh fuck it...anyway Hitler used to hang out here, with this guy checking out the show. It looks disturbingly like somebody I know, especially the two spiked shoulder pads and the love for beer!)

About a year ago, when we decided we were going to have a two-year celebration marking GWAR's 25th Anniversary, we knew we had to deliver the goods, and in doing so take full advantage of this milestone. It was/is our best and maybe last chance to get GWAR to the level it deserves -- complete and utter domination. Not until the 50th Anniversary will we have a better chance to remind people how great we are!

But I think even the most optimistic of the GWAR slaves is surprised at how well the party is shaping up. At the end of the U.S. "Lust in Space" tour, we jumped right into working on our new album, establishing gwar.tv (with the Crackathon, remember?), and bringing back the GWAR-B-Que! Then it was off to Europe to crush festival after festival, and then it was the latest news...our new album, "GWAR's Bloody Pit of Horror", is set to drop world-wide this fall (TBA but in November), a huge U.S/ Canada tour is in the works in support of GWAR's second studio epic in as many years...a tour that just had Australia and New Zealand added to it!

But that doesn't excuse my lameness in neglecting this column, so let's get back to the riveting, semi-monthly spectacle that has been forgotten as...

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death Part 26
"The Bishop"

I had populated the new GWAR with the "crumbs of the crop", true gems of the local punk rock scene, semi-stars, drunks and junkies to the man. My final and greatest score was "The Bishop", local bass player and notorious malcontent. The Bishop was the almost the perfect musician for the Richmond scene, immensely talented yet sour about it. Throw in scornful of others and generally bellicose, yet still projecting a youthful cheerfulness that enabled him to get away with murder, and you had the tip of the iceberg that was The Bishop.The only thing he had working against him was the fact that he was from Hopewell, scene of the famous Kepone spill and a horrible smelling paper-plant. Despite it's proximity to Richmond, Hopewell got none of it's cool points, and fortunately that made him just as much of an outsider as I was.

Plus he was fat. Not like disgustingly obese (not yet, anyway...), but very fat as fuck. Big-boned at least. Big, FAT bones that needed beer poured on them constantly. What, with my over-sized head and delusional outlook we bonded as only fellow mental and physical freaks can, skipping practice to indulge in endless games of Cyberball at Station Break, during which "The Bopst Show" would occasionally show up at and kick both of our asses.

(Yes, I have changed the character's name from "Asshole" to "A-Hole", to "The Bopst Show". Keep up with this shit!)

I'm not quite sure how he got in the band. He was at the time still in high school, playing with a band called The Guilty, an erstwhile but ultimately banal sorta-punk outfit. I didn't want to go at him directly, because I didn't want to feel bad later about him not going to college and ruining his life, so I left most of the wooing to Sleazy, done over pitchers of beer at Rockitz.

Around this time we finally moved into our first real Slave-Pit since the eviction from the Dairy. Located at Broad and Laurel, we had a ringside yet birds-eye view of the nightly carnage as the bars spilled into the streets. For $450 a month we got the whole upstairs level (and after some creative expansion/ lock-picking, the cellar as well) above what was back then Labor Pro, was before then a massage parlor, and is Aladdins Pizza today (You Ring, We Bring!). The walls were painted a garish red and there were several inner chambers that those of us requiring housing quickly took over. The Pit (an upstairs Pit, at that...) was right across from Rockitz, where most of the cool bands played, right next to Ivory's, the most violent club in town, and right around the corner from the Grace Street strip. To say that it was the perfect set-up for all kinds of debauchery was a considerable understatement. With that on our side, it was was pretty easy to get The Bishop in the band.

Getting The Bishop cemented our line-up in a way that I felt was a mother-fucking Dream Team of punk rock power. Despite my gigantic skull, I anticipated a huge step-up in the level of hot slut-dom (and music) this new GWAR would bring to the table. As far as to what it was going to sound like, it was pretty wide open. I was still flying my punk flag, and really hadn't listened to metal since Double Live Gonzo. But bands like D.R.I. were bringing it into punk, and the early results were sounding good. As far as the then-current metal gods, I loved Motorhead, but they were pretty much the exception. I wasn't really into Maiden or Ozzy, and for the most part the double kick had always in my eyes and ears been associated with the self-indulgent excess of 70's hair bands or Rush-esque prog-rock crap. But now it was starting to sound pretty cool. And some little band from California named Metallica was starting to make a big noise. Metal was back (again) and though I wasn't quite ready for it in our band but I could see it going that way.

Spewy really had a lock on that early punk/metal style, as his previous band, Unseen Force, was livid testimony to. Thuglas had a great dirty-metal guitar sound that sounded great in contrast to Spewy's noodle-driven Gibson SG, (which has always been my favorite-sounding guitar in spite of all models being cursed with the amazing snap-off-if-you-look-at-it headstock. Spewy's had about nine or ten glued patches in his and somehow it still lived). Hoseby was a machine whose relentless toms suited us well (he was responsible for the classic "Horror of Yg" drums). But it was The Bishop that brought us the wild card...young, fervent, and just an insanely good bass player and singer, with a completely warped persona to match. My only worry was that I was going to suck!

And I really needed not to. Because I had been doing a lot of sucking! I had blown it on guitar, after years of publicly deluding myself that not only could I play it, but that I was actually good at it. After that I had got the singing job by accident. I drew some pretty good cartoons, but as a fabricator I certainly had not distinguished myself. It wasn't that my ideas were bad, it was the execution of them that lacked. For instance there was the time I spent a few days knocking out a spike-covered pair of boots for Oderus, only to have all of them get knocked off the first time I used them. But despite my flails, I was good at talking my way into things, and soon had a job through the Muscleman at the Science Museum. Even after getting caught urinating behind a display I soon managed to bring home some side work from the Children's Museum. They wanted to pay me 300 bucks to build a Chinese dragon that could put on by children to run around in for an upcoming festival for inner-city kids. This was my chance to make a cool dragon out of scrounged materials, then blow all the money on beer and weed.

I bought a couple of ten-gallon buckets of construction adhesive (who wanted to spend all that time sewing?) and set to work finding my other supplies. This was one of my last Dairy projects so of course I turned to the labyrinthine tunnels of that place to find the materials I needed to glue together into a lightweight, durable structure that little kids could play with easily. So of course the thing to do was to gather moisture-bloated and half-rotted wooden struts from various forgotten corners and bend them into hoops which I duct-taped together after the glue refused to stick to the moldy surfaces. Then I covered the already alarmingly heavy structure with a huge piece of vinyl which I proceeded to glue thousands of cut-out vinyl scales to. Just moving it across the room took like three people and caused several of the hoops to crack. By the time I had attached the over-sized dragon head, made out of plaster, I knew the project was in serious trouble.

But what to do? I had to have the thing ready for a horde of screaming kids first thing the next day. Somehow I talked Sleazy and Sexy into helping me bring it to the event and show the kids how to use it. The only problem with that was the fact that the "dragon", and I use the term in the loosest of manners, was a broken and disheveled heap of upholstery scraps lying in a puddle on the Dairy floor. So when the appointed hour came, I was nowhere to be found, save for an apparently hastily-scribbled note (it had actually taken hours to write through the elaborate lie), attached to the completely inadequate puppet's ineptly-fashioned hide. It told of a family medical emergency that simply demanded my presence, so much so that I was forced to slink away in the middle of the night and take a bus to northern Virginia.

The next day was a complete disaster. For Sleazy and Sexy, that is. (I am going to change these code-names soon, these ones are just too obvious) By the time they had managed to get the thing out of the building every hoop had snapped and the duct tape was running low, as I lay snoring and oblivious, many miles away at my Mom's house. Back in Richmond the day was spent by horrified parents watching the creature flatten the groups of disconcerted inner-city youths that were forced to play with it, until their splintered palms dripped blood, blood that was rudely smeared across their weeping faces faces in vain attempts at staunching the flow of bitter tears. Whitey had betrayed them again. And from the hateful message I got on my Mom's answering machine (back then they were huge things that recorded sound on clay tablets), it seemed that the six pack of Black Label I had promised the boys (a lie, anyway...) was a completely inadequate measure of comfort in the face of the shame and embarrassment my betrayal had brought upon them.

I endured four months of phone calls imploring my to return to the Children's Museum to "fix this fucking thing", which I ignored to the syllable. The creature ended up in the dumpster, along with what was left of my reputation as a fabricator or even a semi-responsible person...

Two weeks from now...maybe...it's...

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death Part 27
"The Golden Battle Barge"

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 25

Dave Brockie — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:16:11 +0000

Out of one Pit, into another… the NEW Slave Pit costume loft! Notice we actually store our stuff in plastic tubs. There are some nasty things in there! And yes, that is the old dead Pope...

THE GWAR-B-Q IS BACK!

Aug. 8th at the Bike Lot shall see an auspicious event in the annals of Richmond and Slave Pit history -- after a 10-year break (because of 9/11, man!), the GWAR-b-q is back! Tons of bands, food, tattoos, beverages, and of course, sweltering heat. And as part of the entertainment we are proud to present a special set featuring many of the old members of GWAR, including the legendary Mike Bishop--the original Beefcake, Death Piggy guitarist Russ Bahorsky, and that lovable loudmouth, Christopher Maynard Bopst. 25 years of Slave Pit music...using the actual original members whenever possible. Should be pretty damn fun! Get full details at www.gwarbq.com

But I didn't sign on to this column so I could use it as a platform to plug my various side projects...not today anyway. It's time to get this oft-meandering but always written in English epic back on track. So this is it! We are really starting this thing again. So rest assured this is not another attack on the mean old men of the Republican Party, disguising itself as a rambling travelogue.

GWAR, Me and the On-Rushing Grip of Death Part 25
"I Don't Know What to Call This One"

Sleazy and I eyed each other from either side of a rubble-strewn chamber, somewhere deep inside the bowels of the Richmond Dairy. The jig was up -- the Alter Natives had left for California to record a record for SST, so I was out a band. The Slave Pit was getting bulldozed in the huge refurb the Dairy was getting, so we were out a studio as well. The "Dairy-Daze" were over. But the worst was yet to come...because at that point it seemed like GWAR might be over as well.

One filthy day as I was stumbling around the Dairy, trying to avoid the Pete the Piss-Troll and the homicidal rednecks in the basement, I walked into our beloved Pit to discover all of the costumes were gone. Techno's pick-up truck, loaded with all the pieces he'd made (and a couple that he didn't) was at that moment (we thought) barreling towards Detroit, where he had a job as a security guard waiting for him. I didn't get it. Techno had always, despite his Dairy-dwelling, held normal jobs and was a reasonably normal person (despite his beet-red skin and white-blond mohawk). I took his departure as him trying to find a little more security in his life. Despite creating the costumes that inspired us to come up with GWAR, GWAR was never really his thing. In many ways, he was.a lot like the character he played on stage, Techno-Destructo, meaning that he hated GWAR a lot and me (Oderus) most of all. Techno had a real vision of what those costumes were for and increasingly he was realizing that it wasn't going to happen with the current cast of idiot drunks. So he bailed.

As it turned out Techno had just stashed the shit with his folks...good thing he kept it a secret because we would have gone over there and busted that shit out. As it was, when confronted with our dilemma, Sleazy didn't bat an eye, he just said:

"Fuck it. We'll build new shit!"

And so we set our plan in motion We bounced out of the Dairy and ended up in the old tobacco warehouses past Shockoe Bottom. We had the Muselman to thank for that.

The Muselman was a graduate student at VCU that had been drawn into GWAR through Spike, a cohort at the Sculpture Department, where he had also studied. You see, it was really VCU that was most responsible for the creation of GWAR. If it hadn't been for the cultural mecca of the VCU art school, none of the people that created GWAR would ever have come to Richmond. Unless of course it was for the fine crack and transvestite hookers that swarmed all over Broad Sreet. on any given night.

Muselman was an amazing sculptor with a low-key yet smoldering intensity. He, as much or more so than any other Slave Pit artist, typified what came to be known as "throwing down" -- getting in the Pit, setting up your "glugs" (beers, usually Black Label but increasingly so Milwaukees Best), and building shit for hours and hours. That's what it took and what it will always take to do GWAR. Tons of hard work, in hot, sweaty rooms, standing for days on end on hard-ass cement floors, swilling glugs, slathering yourself with toxic substances, cutting and carving foam, applying cloth and glue coverings, doing fiberglass, etc., etc. We used to cut foam with electric carving knives and then slop cloth and glue onto whatever it was we had created. We had a "hot wire" we used for cutting hard foam, which worked great except for the cyanide gas that was created when you melted your way through the stuff. The shop was always a disaster and nobody could ever find their scissors.

But the Muselman brought a new level of skill and craft to the Slave Pit. His shit looked so nice. And whatever he built lasted forever. With him, Sleazy, Sexy, Spike, myself, and increasingly Mantis and Boner, we set about re-building all of the costumes and getting GWAR going again.

I helped in the shop, but not much. That was probably good, as my sculptures had a tendency to suck. I was a GWAR- toonist, meaning I did a lot of the drawing, but my primary job was to get a new band together. So I went with what I knew-- the local punk scene. I went straight to Spewy.

Spewy had used to play bass in White Cross and then guitar in Unseen Force. Both of those bands ruled and White Cross had even toured. He was a big, mellow, and most importantly friendly Richmond local, who was in the midst of a messy break-up of his latest band. He lived in a big house on Grove with his girlfriend The Ice Princess, and I would hang around over there until somebody fed me. I skated over there one day and put it to him, and he responded favorably. He got on the phone and the next thing I knew I had Hoseby as my drummer, notorious drummer of White Cross. Hoseby was a known hood who never changed his expression except when playing drums, when his lip would pull back slightly. Plus he had the best naturally spiking hair ever, which I was very jealous of.

It was a great start! I had two local legends and a warehouse full of dudes building new shit...but the line-up wasn't set yet.

I didn't want people from other bands. I wanted people who were ready to throw down for GWAR, as their number one priority. I needed to do something here! I obviously wasn't going to pay the bills as a painter, and my construction gigs were getting fewer and more odious when they did occur. Working with idiots is hard for me. I needed to make GWAR a success, or my life was going to suck . The Alter Natives, for all of my jealous rantings directed at A-Hole, had inspired the hell out of me. Hell, EVERYBODY was piling into vans and hitting the road. Death Piggy had given me a little taste of success. GWAR and Shafer Court had given us a fabulous glimpse into what the future could be. But I needed a damn good band before I could go anywhere. My next move was a solid if not very daring one. I picked up Thuglass, the original Balsac. Nobody knew much about him except he was a little older than the rest of us and that he played a wicked guitar; his solid chops would off-set Spewy's sound nicely. So I decided to overlook the bald-spot and stories of crack-abuse. Thuglas was in!

Of course I was seeing this all through beer-colored glasses. I had no idea about the deep and distressing problems that all three of these people had. My "dream team", would turn out to be a total nightmare, and within a few years all of them would be gone. No, not dead, just out of the band.

I was happy with the progress, but the band was still incomplete.I still didn't have a bass player. For GWAR to step up, and nothing less than the best bass player in town would do -- and he also had to be the fattest. And I knew just where to get him.

Tickled pink? Well, don't you worry, there will be more pink-tickling coming in just two short weeks, when the next, all new, on time, every other Friday appearing, and actually about what it is supposed to be about episode of "GWAR, Me and the On-rushing Grip of Death." Don't miss the next one as I tell the story of the reborn GWAR trying to take the step from Richmond joke band to actually touring the craziest show in history. So, see ya in two weeks with:

"The Golden Battle Barge"

Europe is different…again

Dave Brockie — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:58:27 +0000

Dave Brockie is back! Sort of. GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death will resume in two weeks. Until then, Dave gives us an account of his most recent tour in Europe, with a little insight and opinion thrown in there for good measure. Enjoy!

Welcome back...to me! That is correct, I have returned to this place, this perch, this palace of pimply prose, to once again import and impair upon you...me! Dave Brockie, shameless self promoter and your guide to things both nasty and not so. I am currently in Europe on tour with the mighty GWAR, hence the title of this story.

The image above is the view from our parked bus this morning in Holland. Despite their recent World Cup loss, the Dutch were happy to see us, but not half as happy as we were to see them!

And speaking of Europe, it's different! Here's an example... did you know that people in Europe call their countries different things than we do, and they even call OUR country different things too? ALL KINDS of things, and some of them are extremely rude. Everything is at least a little different, like this replacement computer keyboard I got in Lindau, Germany, after a dog vomited on my original one. It's like it was made for a different language or something!

So even though I wasn't even in Europe for most of the time I've been gone, I will still use it as an excuse as to why I missed the last few installments of GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death. Now where were we?

Hmmm...it seems I kinda might have forgotten what I was writing about. Maybe I should go back and read the last few, or maybe I should have them read to me, while I just lie there on the couch playing Nazi Zombies for hours. I love that fucking game. I have it on my iPhone, on the bus, and in my living room. I am so glad I still play video games with the same fanaticism I enjoyed in my snot-nosed youth. In fact that game is the real reason I haven't been doing shit on this thing.

Every time I come to Europe, I ask myself, didn't these people lose World War II? Or at least get the shit blown out of them? If they did, then we need a war like that...one we mean to lose, so the rest of the world will give us money so they can have a good future trading partner. Because if you judge the worth of a culture by the standard of living that the people enjoy Europe rules and Holland is one of the crown jewels.

And not just because of the weed...or legal prostitution, or assisted suicide, or strict gun control, or tons of other stuff that makes life better for the Average Joe, and that will take decades to get in the US...and we will be smoking legal weed in the US a lot earlier than the day we give up our guns, as ridiculous as that sounds. And it is.

That's a huge thing over in Europe. You can't get your hands on weapons. So the chances of getting shot by a gun is pretty fucking small. You are much more likely to get knifed or get the sharp end of an afro pic in your eye. And that's considering you are actually more likely to be abducted by aliens than be assaulted in Europe, unless of course you were fighting World War II. And while we are on the subject, didn't we make our nation a gun culture because it needed to be one at the time, like when we were protecting our families from bears, or massacring Natives? Do we really still need to do that? Because I tell you what, it feels pretty good to walk around late at night in a city, and not worry about the very real possibility of being robbed at gunpoint. And NO, it doesn't make it better that I have the right to carry my own weapon and maybe get the drop on my assailant and blast a chunk of his brain-case off. This is not the Wild West, the US is supposed to be a civilized fucking country, not a war zone...

I come over here and I look around, and I see the way these people live...they live very well... and I think about all the Americans that have died in European wars...that continue to die...for what? So the losers of the greatest war in history can live like kings while our country looks like a third world shit hole...and we are pouring money into...Afghanistan??? Fighting a bunch of cave men???

This is the bullshit we have waiting for us at home. The Republicans are busy tearing the Prez a new one, for the war, for the economy...same old shit, hell, did they at least cap the oil spill?

Did anyone ever stop to think that maybe the biggest reason, and maybe the ONLY reason, that the world wide economy has tanked is THIS STUPID FUCKING WAR? That maybe if we stopped shoveling billions of dollars into a flaming pit, if we stopped getting a lot of people killed and maimed and fucked for life and instead spent that cash on making this country as cool as Holland, then maybe everything would be ok?

But NOOOOO, all the Republicans can do is bitch. It reminds me of when Jimmy Carter was in office, one of the smartest, wisest, most capable Presidents we ever had. I mean the man was brilliant, and is still brilliant, well, he can still tie his own shoes; he just wasn't nasty enough to be President, and he was attacked relentlessly, his entire administration, until he was basically run out of office. Sure, brother Billy didn't help matters much when he pissed all over the runway at Andrews Air Force Base.

But I don't give shit! Republicans, shut the fuck up...you had eight years to sort it out and you failed us. Yeah, I know you were doing pretty good, but the rest of us have been eating shit too long. Let the man work, for is that not the fairest measure of a man? And unlike some people in our recent electoral history, at least he won the damn election fair and square. Shut the hell up FOR ONCE, and let the man do his job, then maybe, just maybe we might be able to get out of this ever increasingly unendurable black hole, which we struggle to escape the gulf of horror that 9/11 cast over our world. It has enveloped us in its deadly cloud just as surely as the people of Manhattan were engulfed in the pulverized debris of the destroyed Twin Towers. And I am fucking sick of it!

Life doesn't have to suck, just ask the people of Holland...

Here is the oven from the bunker. Himmler used it... to make bread.

I don't know where that came from but it was on my mind. So we will try to lighten it up around here. The other night we played at a huge concrete bunker in Aachen, Germany that has been converted to have a club down in the cellar. The fort was built in 1941 by the Nazis to serve as a an air raid shelter and later as a headquarters of the Siegfried Line. At one point, Heinrich Himmler, head of the S.S., held a big event here, right before the Americans attacked the place, kicking off three weeks of bloody street battles. At one point a 1,000-kilogram bomb hit the place, and the exterior is all chewed by the spattering steel. We played a great gig here.

Sometimes its rough going down memory lane when the past of today's present is pretty damn interesting.

Wow, I am all over the place today! But fret no more!!! For now it is time, now for, once again, and all that shit, the latest, the greatest, the not written quite yet but about to be, 25th Episode of...

GWAR, Me, and the On Rushing Grip of Death!!!!

In two weeks here at RVANews.com!

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 24

Dave Brockie — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:10:15 +0000

Every time I do something stupid I write about it on my website. Much to my shame (and your amusement), it is one of the most popular pages. In fact, people can't seem to get enough of my stupidity, and encourage more of it. Here's a sample...

Incident on Hull St...

May 19th, 2010 I am running around like a maniac, trying to move the Slave Pit across town while at the same time trying to sort out the details of renewing my passport (extra-complicated Canadian model). The AC is out in my truck and my phone won't shut up. Somebody drives by with their stereo on "lose your bowels" setting, then, after my ass settles down, my radio explodes with a car commercial where by law they have to shove in a million stupid facts about title, tags, etc...so they speed up the voice so the words are there but you can't possibly understand them...and I am just standing there in the street, trying to make sense of this whole fucking spectacle, when I realize my truck isn't where it's supposed to be--it's supposed to be right in front of me, but now there is just a empty parking space. Like a pudding trying to congeal, my mind tries to recognize what is happening and put it in a reasonable context. But I can't. I'm too high!

Then I hear a crash, barely audible over the din which surrounds me. Sweaty and flabbergasted I look up and see the back of my truck, all the way on the other side of the intersection. The pudding solidify s and I finally put it together...I must have not left it in gear, and my truck has rolled off down the street, colliding with a Mountaineer (at the time I was sure it was a Lexus), bouncing off it (more like lurching, it was going all of five miles an hour), and rolling back into the street, where it gains speed and enters the upper portion of the huge hill. And if it goes down that hill, people are going to DIE.

No! Nothing but the word no-- over and over again!

I snap into at a full sprint down the street in pursuit of my truck, my new (used) truck...which appears to be gathering momentum quickly, as for one sickening instant I think I might not be able to catch it. Oblivious to the traffic I run down the street, arms pinwheeling, howling at the the top of my lungs. Tears, sweat and saliva fly everywhere as I feel the full chaos crash upon me...my truck is barreling down the street now and all I can do is watch as a guy comes flying out of the bar further down the street, chases down my errant vehicle, leaps into the cab through the passenger door, and quickly corrals the beast before further accident or injury.

Breathless and sweaty, I am freaking out so bad that a small crowd gathers around me, obviously thinking I am on drugs...in fact a man identifies himself as "a mental health professional", and informs me the police are on their way, then asks me if I am on drugs again. Faced with the prospect of cops getting involved, I calm down quickly, then am informed the reason that this had happened to me was because of the Washington Redskins paraphernalia dangling from my rear-view.

Once again I am one lucky son-a-bitch. Nobody is visibly injured injured, and there is not a hell of a lot of damage. My insurance should cover it. For all my freaking out and hysterical raving the situation is exactly the same way it would have been if I hadn't worked myself into a tizzy.

After that asinine incident I have pledged to try to not to stress out uncontrollably any time anything happens. But I won't stop doing stupid things, and I won't stop writing about them either! You can find them on the "Stupid" at oderus.com, oh wait, here it is!

I've been keeping the page going for years so there is quite a collection of stupidity, preserved in hallmark examples of me at my worst. Enjoy, and thank yourself that you're not me!

SO LET'S GET ON WITH TODAY'S PRESENTATION.

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

Part 24: THE DEATH OF THE DAIRY

Episode 24? Did I screw the numbers up and skip 23? Man, the wheels are really falling off this thing. First he doesn't know what number episode it is even though he could look it up in like 20 seconds. Second of all he actually apologized to Surfer Girl, even then not apologizing for the right thing, which was to give her the idiotically un-original "Surfer Girl" for a moniker in this story. In fact Wolfman gave me shit about his name (also incredibly banal and wow, I shifted tenses twice already). So he folds (three) and re-names "Surfer Girl" "The Brown Beast" (it WAS a one-piece, I again stand corrected, there will be no Xbox for a week...). And "Wolfman" now is known as "The Weed-Wolf". Better names, to be sure. And finally he seems to have left his best friend, the ever-sinister "Dr Skull", out of the entire story!

GWAR, on the roof of the Richmond Dairy, circa 1986

How young, how dumb, how fun. Before we bid adieu to the Dairy and the years we spent there, let us remember with profound loin-stirrings the original incarnation of GWAR, which came to hideous life in the murky confines of the Dairy during the what would later be called by GWAR elders "The Years Without Light" or even more famously "The Dim Time". When we last left off, we were getting kicked out of the Dairy, our band was bailing on us and Techno had packed off to Detroit, taking the costumes with him. For whatever reason, GWAR seemed destined to be exactly what we had intended it to be: a joke. But before all of that chaos descended we managed to immortalize that time, with the help of the now-defunct Richmond News Leader!

From left to right, first their character name and then their nickname for this story. Fascinating stuff!

1) HANS ORIFICE OR SPHINCTER (details are sketchy) A.K.A. "Tommy Gun", drummer for the Alter-Natives, his Dad made amazing apple juice that was often our sole source of sustenance in the Dairy. Irrepressible, dashingly handsome, and supposedly hung like a mule, Tommy went on to become the consummate Richmond and then international weirdo--i.e. he was in about a million awesome bands that most people have never heard of. Cares not one whit. Good friends with yours truly to this day, Tommy-Gun was recently tapped to stand-in for the unfortunately dead Bam-Bam at the hopefully upcoming Death Piggy re-union.

2) STEPHAN SPHINCTER A.K.A "Jazzbo" In the band from it's earliest inception, Jazzbo would go on to hate the memory and react like a hackled badger anytime GWAR was brought up. Found love with a mail-order bride.

3) THE SEXECUTIONER A.K.A."Spike" With his Sargent Rock jawline and Rat-Pack demeanor, Spike, along with Sexy, created the "Swamp", by far the most accommodating hovel in the Dairy, and was the original "Sexecutioner". Co-creator of "The Shit Rag", a threadbare towel which everybody used to wipe their asses, then left in the shower.

4) BALSAC THE JAWS OF DEATH A.K.A. "A-Hole" This local radio personality has bedeviled the author for years with his imperious attitude and rugged good looks. For years pioneered the development of a non-sexual "ball-washing" technique he learned in Kuala Lumpur. Sickened by his customers recurrent erections, A-Hole abandoned the cutting edge practice in favor of something that didn't involve massaging other men's scrotum's with his mouth (in a completely non-gay way, of course...)

5) CORNELIUS CARNAGE A.K.A. "G-man" Beloved Alter-Natives guitarist who was also called "Slug" by his less-enlightened (not high enough) friends, due to his early mastery of the relaxation technique which would later be described as "slack". Told Greg Ginn he didn't want him to produce his record.

6) TECHNO-DESTRUCTO A.K.A. "Techno- Destructo", along with Sexy, was the original founder of the Slave Pit and the undisputed creator of GWAR's earliest look. Created the first "spew-dick" for Death Piggy's infamous Wendy O Williams show. Powered through the early days on a diet consisting of nothing but 2-liter bottles of Dr. Pepper and a substance he would create known as "glop", which could also double as construction adhesive. Later got mad and left, only to later return, then get mad again, but this time not leave, then leave.

7) GOR-GOR Not sure exactly who is in here, thinking it is probably Sexy though it might be The Mantis...

8) JOEY SLUTMAN A.K.A. "The Italian Stallion" replaced brother Johnny Slutman who had quit onstage earlier in the story. Left band after alleged hanky-panky (i.e. fucking) with an un-named band members girlfriend. Possessed the "Voice of Power" and did really well on early versions of "A, E, I, O, U" and "GWAR Theme" but quit when he realized just how horrible of a guitar player I was destined to continue to be. Went to Philly and joined the mob.

9)THE TEMPTRESS A.K.A. "Miss Not-Appearing In-This-Story" is as completely forgettable as someone can be. Out there somewhere, doing something.

10) ODERUS URUNGUS A.K.A. "Me" This is the earliest version of Oderus and looks nothing like what the character would morph into. In fact there wasn't a fake dick on anybody at this point! Am happy in this picture because I got to have sex with the girl next to me.

11) CARDINAL SYN A.K.A. "The Weed-Wolf" Though he never actually appeared onstage, The Weed-Wolf was smart enough to be around the day the photographer came by, slip on the most basic costume, and act like he was in the band.

12) AMAZINA A.K.A. "The Brown-Beast" Brought a level of beauty and spunk (and a great ass) to the band, but unfortunately sabotaged herself with the insistence that Gor-Gor be made to wear "Hitler's Underpants".

Slave Pit Rubble, 2010

It's only fitting that we bring the Dairy years to a close just as we vacate our current headquarters on Hull St. and head over to the new Slave Pit on Boulevard. It was almost 25 years ago that the Dairy finally folded, and we stood there, surrounded by piles of rubble strangely similar to the one you see above, wondering what the fuck to do next.

The Dairy was done, the band had bailed, and Techno had taken away our ball. Was this the end of GWAR? All this and less in the next episode of "GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death!!!!!!"

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 22

Dave Brockie — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:00:37 +0000

SURFER GIRL WAS A BEAUTIFUL PERSON, AND I AM SORRY I WROTE CRAPPY THINGS ABOUT HER IN THE LAST EPISODE (even if they were funny).

I am indulging my comments section on this one. As usual I was having fun at the expense of others, and unfairly thrashed Surfer Girl. And I forgot another huge part as reminded by G-Man. So I endeavored to address these concerns. Now, that I have, I wish they'd never posted their stupid comments, they've made a mess of everything! So before this episode evens begins lets go back, apologize, revise history...fuck I wish I had never been born!

I could have spent a lot more time describing the first true love of my life in the glowing terms that she deserved. But fuck it, I didn't! We were both young and gay, and dirty, and had our poor heads filled with all of that art school mish-mush-- it's a lot easier to remember the stupid stuff, snipe away from cover, and hope the featured party didn't read the episode. But truth be told, Surfer Girl deserved better than what she got in the last installment of this sordid tale. That "metaphysical mouth-poop" (language learned from years of art school critiques), was interesting enough to reduce me to a droolingly lovesick puppy for a couple of years..she was arguably the hottest girl at V.C.U. at the time. The fact that she was hanging out with me, known slut and crappy lay (yes, bad sex after an extremely awkward pre-sex ritual) left me so stunned that I had no idea how to handle it or her. It's like she was made out of elemental fire or some otherworldly substance that I put my penis in.

We had feasted on each other's lives. Surfer Girl had been in the band Milk as well, and had even endured the rigors of dairy life. One time her Dad came down, saw where she was sleeping (a ledge) and immediately built her a log cabin in the middle of the Dairy. She was an amazing girl, and we just argued constantly about everything. One night a random comment from a homeless guy led to an hours-long, absolutely useless disagreement...but damn she had the finest ass I had ever seen.

There was a final conflict that ended our romance once and for all. Surfer Girl had built/painted a huge pair of underpants (about three feet across, four long...) that was pin-striped red and black with a huge backwards pink swastika emblazoned on the left leg. She was adamant about wanting Gor-Gor * to wear "Hitler's Underpants" in an upcoming parade appearance GWAR was getting ready to do. The rest of us were equally determined that it wouldn't happen. It was the final act in a romance that spanned a couple of years, but many times later I often found myself wondering what it would have been like if Gor-Gor had actually worn them.

I am a little scatter-brained as I try to get back in the groove of this thing. But as usual life is complete chaos. I missed the last episode because of that crazy Crack-a-Thon thing I was doing in New York. As a personal highlight I sang a duet of "Candle in the Wind" with Andrew WK. We have less than a month until our next tour and I have to move not only out of my house but move the Slave Pit across town as well. Throw in working on the new album, trying to keep up with a mountain of commissions, and my crippling weed-addiction and I am thoroughly discombobulated.

But nevertheless it's time for the shortest episode yet of ...

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

Part 22: Look Ma, No Music ...

Techno had left for Detroit, locking up the costumes at his parents house before he did so. The Natives were getting ready to drive to California and make an album for SST and Greg Ginn. The renovation of the Dairy was slugging along under the guidance of The Vet, a crazed Vietnam veteran who was going to get us all killed in his quest to strip every inch of copper wire out of the Dairy. Then another crew moved in and I almost got stabbed to death in a back corridor with cement trowel. The Dairy wasn't the bohemian playground it had used to be. It was only a matter of time before we got kicked out. Standing with Sleazy in the rubble of the Dairy , we wondered what to do...

"Fuck it, we'll just build new costumes," he said.

GWAR would not be stopped!

Right around the same time I started hanging out with Wolfman, called so because he is a Wolfman. He was also the Natives sound man and also worked at Radioactive Studios, back in the day when bands actually had to go into such a place in order to record their music--on magnetic tape, no less! Gradually I began my withdrawal from the Dairy and into Wolfman's house over on South Pine St., or "Spine St." as it was lovingly called. Mantis and G-Man lived there too.

We would have laughed if you told us then that one day Mamma Zu's would one day spread it's lovely garlic smell across the neighborhood...back then we ate grilled cheese sandwiches at the Pine St. Grill, and occasionally somebody would eat a bottle to the teeth, supplied by the psychotic locals!

BROCKIE AWAKENING ON HIS CARDBOARD BED, SPINE ST., 1985.

The Wolfman grew some amazing pot, and during one of our many bong sessions we came up with what we thought was a pretty good idea--we would actually record the soundtrack to a GWAR show in advance, complete with quad-tracked guitar solos, crank it through the P.A., and lip sync to the whole thing! What could possibly go wrong? The songs actually came out pretty damn good, and a bunch of people showed up for the gig...it worked really good in soundcheck, but for some reason when we did it in front of the crowd it sounded totally different. I was convinced the audience knew we were lip-syncing and that we totally sucked. As usual the opposite was true. People had no idea how the hell Cornielius Cranage could play four guitars at once so I guess the experiment actually went pretty well. But being an overly dramatic art fag I was convinced it was a complete failure. But that was the last project the Alter-Natives would be able to do with us. They were off to sunny California, and I was broke, bandless and sleeping on a piece of cardboard. It looked like GWAR might be over before it had even started. And crack hadn't even been invented yet!

The Dairy was done. Drunk George the one-armed welder had succeeded in collapsing half the building and no one seemed to notice. One day I woke up to a circular saw coming through the wall, vomiting a shower of asbestos-laden debris all over my drummer's girlfriend. Soon I had moved into Spine St. without asking anyone, and slept on a piece of cardboard in the front room. The GWAR shop moved down to Shockoe Bottom inside one of those gigantic tobacco warehouses where we set about re-building all of the costumes. And with amazing artists like the Musel-Man, Sleazy and Sexy and increasingly The Mantis (who was being inexorably drawn into GWAR despite initially thinking it was "stupid"), we were soon suited up again...

NEXT TIME : The scourge of the later part of the 20th century becomes the driving force behind the silliest band in history--join us in two weeks for the next episode --

Police See Some "Crack", Fear It Might Spread

* (the famous and first "camo" version that Techno had built, it still exists in the Slave Pit vaults and hopefully one day the exhibit halls of the Valentine Museum)

RVANews

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 51

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

Episode 51: "My Homo-Brother is Dying of AIDS"

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 50

“The Scumdogs of the Universe”

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 49

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

"Cannibalism and Corn-Nuts, Part II"

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 48

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

"Cannibalism and Corn-Nuts"

Footnotes

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 47

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

“La-La Land”

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 46

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 46

"On the Load Again"

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 45

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 45

“20,000 Colleagues Under the Sea”

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 44

THE SAD AND TRAGIC TALE OF LEE BEATO

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 43

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 43

“Comings and Goings, and Cummings...”

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 42

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 42

Fuck a Chick From Playboy”

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 41

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 41

I Wrote Too Much About My Scumbag Ex-Roomate and Therefore am Going to Wait Until the Next Chapter Before I Tell You Anything Else

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 40

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 40

The Wall of Death

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Part 39

GWAR, Me, and the On-Rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 39

“Firearm Safety w/ GWAR”

Related

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 38

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 38

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 37

THE BLOOD VOMITS ACHIEVE FUNDING GOAL—GWAR DEMANDS EVEN MORE MONEY

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death Part 37: "The Sweet Stench of Suck-cess" or "Did I Use That Title Already?"

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death Part 38: "High-Butt and the Great Pumpkin"

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 36

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death Part 36: "Don’t Expect Too Much From This One, We Are Just Trying To Get It Going Again"

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Part 37

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Episode 37

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Episode 37

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 35

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death: Chapter 35

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 33

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death

Part 33: Embarrassing, Dangerous, Painful

EMBARRASSING

DANGEROUS

PAINFUL

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 32

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death

Shitty-Disc Records

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 31

Slave Pit Evolutions

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 30

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death:

Part 30

“Once Again the Title I Thought I Was Going to Use Doesn’t Really Fit Anymore”

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 29

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death

Part 29

“The Cum Before the Storm”

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 28

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death, Part 28"Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show!"

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 27

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death” Part 27“The Golden Battle Barge”

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 26

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death Part 26"The Bishop"

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death: Part 25

GWAR, Me and the On-Rushing Grip of Death Part 25"I Don't Know What to Call This One"

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death, Part 28
"Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show!"

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death” Part 27
“The Golden Battle Barge”

GWAR, Me, and the Onrushing Grip of Death Part 26
"The Bishop"

GWAR, Me and the On-Rushing Grip of Death Part 25
"I Don't Know What to Call This One"