GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death
: Part 54

The latest episode of the GWAR diaries takes a moment to talk details about the upcoming GWAR-B-Q, and then takes us back to 1989 when the band had a nerve-wracking time crossing the Canadian border…

July 30, 2012; 10:05 AM • by Dave Brockie

GWAR-B-Q 2012 IS GETTING CLOSER EVERYDAY—SPECIAL “MEAT AND BEAT”
TICKETS GOING FAST—OH, AND BROCKIE HAS ANOTHER EPISODE READY

In what is shaping up to be the most amazing social event in the history of the human race, the Slave Pit has released their official “commercial” not only to promote the event, but to assure their warped followers that no effort is being spared to make this the greatest GWAR-B-Q ever! Shot on location and also in their top-secret studio facility, the commercial was directed by long-time GWAR slave Davis Bradley and is available for viewing at your number one source for all GWAR-B-Q information: www.gwarbq.com

In case you didn’t know already, Ring Dog Rescue and Slave Pit Inc. are proud to present the 2012 GWAR-B-Q, being held Aug. 18th at Hadad’s Water Park in lovely Richmond, VA! Tickets are available online at www.gwarbq.com or you can pick up physical tickets at Plan 9 Records in Carytown or Vinyl Conflict Records in Oregon Hill.

We are down to our very last few “meat and beat” tickets, so snatch them up quickly—here’s the final running order, as best as we can tell at this point:

SET TIMES FOR GWAR-B-Q 2012
GATE OPENS: 11:00 AM

Gate opens: 11:00 AM

SET TIME • BAND STAGE • SET LENGTH

11:30 AM – 11:50 AM • Black Naked Wing • 2nd • 20 mins
11:50 AM- 12:10 PM • The Burial Man • Main • 20 mins
12:10 PM – 12:30 PM • Mutawa • 2nd • 20 mins
12:30 PM – 12:50 PM • Antietam 1862 • Main • 20 mins
12:50 PM – 1:10 PM • Highness • 2nd • 20 mins
1:10 PM – 1:40 PM • Lionize • Main • 30 mins
1:40 PM – 2:05 PM • Lost Tribe • 2nd • 25 mins
2:05 PM – 2:35PM • Ghoul • Main • 30 mins
2:35 PM – 3:00 PM • Occultist • 2nd • 25 mins
3:00 PM – 3:45 PM • Strike Anywhere • Main • 45 mins
3:45 PM – 4:15 PM • Murderess • 2nd • 30 mins
4:15 PM – 5:00 PM • The Casualties • Main • 45 mins
5:00 PM – 5:45PM • Valient Thorr • 2nd • 45 mins
5:45 PM – 6:45 PM • GWAR • Main • 60 mins

One of the days premiere events is GWAR’s special “Meat and Beat” session, which is available to any worthless mortal who can shell out enough for the premium ticket and will start at 1:00 PM! Said humans will be allowed to bathe in the presence of their undead overlords, the mighty GWAR. That’s right, the entire band as well as the Sexecutioner, Sleazy P. Martini, Bonesnapper the Cave-Troll, and Sawborg Destructo will be available for signing stuff, taking pictures, vomiting on you, etc. in a special “Meat and Beat” session that will last just as long as it takes to kill every single one of you! But that’s not all! One of those lucky humans will be picked (using super-secret “picking” technology) to actually appear on stage with GWAR and get slaughtered by them in front of their drunken friends. And if that human just happens to be a female(s) with giant boobs, then so be it!

Throughout the day raffles will be held for awesome products like snowboards from Capita, skate decks from Sined, signed band merchandise, and much, much more! The raffle tickets will be sold at the GWAR merch tent. Winners will be announced from the main stage by a variety of infamous weirdos (like members of GWAR, the local music and art community, and visiting Cyborgs). Winners to the raffles will be announced at 2:35. 3:45, and 5:00 from the main stage.

Every year the GWAR-B-Q holds the “Spew-O-Lympics”, and in this year’s Olympiad it seems more appropriate than ever to pit our fans against each other in a display of skills ranging from the drunken to the sublime. This year the “Spew-O-Lympics” will consist of three events.  The first event, “The Rope Swing” will be open to everyone and will be judged by longtime GWARtist and man inside of GOR GOR, Scott Krahl.

The top ten competitors in event one will move on to the “Pillow Launch”, another judged event where competitors will be launched into the air by a celebrity jumper, hopefully a really fat person!

The top five high scorers from event two will move on to the final event—the “Race of Death!” The competitors will race head-to-head, carrying eggs while being showered in spew from GWAR’s hideous biledriver.  The top two will go head-to-head for the gold in the GWAR-B-Q version of the “Sperm ‘n Slide”!!! Then and only then the winner may claim their prize, which is going to amazing, we just haven’t figured out what it will be quite yet. Maybe free tickets to next years GWAR-B-Q? Because there IS gonna be one!

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM • 1st EVENT: ROPE SWING
3:00 PM • 2nd EVENT: PILLOW LAUNCH
4:00 PM • 3rd EVENT: EGG RACE/SPERM & SLIDE

But that’s not all! We just found out that Red Bull is bringing a half pipe to the GWAR-B-Q!!! So feel free to bring your deck and break your neck, you WILL be signing a release form.

But enough with the free publicity! Set the time travel machine for Jan. 1989, and get ready for another episode of…

— ∮∮∮ —

GWAR, Me, and the On-rushing Grip of Death
Episode 54

“Anally Violated by a Dead Dog”

I was reading one of those “tell-all” rock star books and realized how similar they all are, usually being rambling narratives of the said rock star’s booze and coke bloated debaucheries. I really don’t want my sordid tale to read like all the other sordid tales, but hey, us rock stars are a shallow lot, by and large. But I am fairly confident it will be not do so because:

A) I was always way too low-budget to have a coke problem, and…
B) I can actually write my own story.

Not to say that this WON’T be a meandering missive of my alcoholic adventures, it most certainly will be!

1988 had ended and as 1989 began our biggest tour ever was coming together quickly. The first tour, though poorly attended at times (all times), had done much to spread the word of the smelly barbarian band from Richmond, VA, and the country was full of people promising themselves that next time GWAR was around, they would not miss the band that had covered their friends in fake blood from head-to–toe. Reports of ruined furniture and kidnapped girlfriends added to the mystique. The band dressed up like monsters and at one point the lead singer had a dead-dog rammed up his butt. The legend was growing! The dead-dog butt-rape scene was always both a joy and a terror to perform. The original dead dog, Pookie by name, was fashioned from hard foam and covered in cloth and glue strips. The snout was…stout.

The scene involved an enraged Techno engaging a listless Oderus in a bout of combat hot, after which the victorious cyborg took his horny revenge by raping Oderus up the butt with a dead dog. There was no way to really fake it, he just placed the snout between my ass-cheeks and mimicked the action. I clenched my butt and clamped my hole, and hoped that a variety of things didn’t occur, like for instance some slam-crazed kid didn’t run into him from behind, forcing said dog-snout into my Hershey highway. I don’t care what you may think about me from my lyrics, but I DO NOT like having things rammed up my butt, so I lived in fear of pseudo-necro-bestial-anal-penetration.

One particularly greasy night, I think maybe Sleazy was mad at me (someone was ALWAYS mad at me) because the fake fuck horribly became a real one. To any fan in the crowd, or even to Sleazy, it was just a typical dog-rape scene, but for me that hideous moment when my butthole opened told me that two inches of fake dead-dog snout had been shoved into my poo-chute. It didn’t feel good, but it was a job. Not that GWAR was a paying gig in those early days. We were no longer collecting dues from grumbling employees, but didn’t make enough to pay anybody much of anything either. There was only one way to do that and that was to get out on the road and play shows, and 1989 would prove to be the busiest year for touring thus far.

Calls were coming in from all sections of the country, and even some from my long-abandoned homeland, Canada. In the first part of the year, we went on a week and a half tour that included some shows in “America’s Hat” where we encountered the joy of crossing a border with a gaggle of mutants for the first time. I am not sure what the border guards thought of us as we rolled up to the checkpoint. The Golden Battle Barge was covered from end-to-end with graffiti and the people within were coated in filth. Back then we rarely got hotel rooms and we were lucky if the clubs had a shower. We would get used to the smell (as the costumes were piled up in the back of the bus in a sodden heap), but we would forget that everybody else wasn’t.

The “smell” syndrome of GWAR continues to this day. I think we are the only band in rock and roll history that has its own unique stench, one that is as recognizable as a rose, only completely disgusting. It’s a combo of latex, leather, and body funk and it continues to haunt me to this day. I was recently asked to leave a green room at Sirius because I was “making the place stink”. A year or two back I did the “Opie and Anthony Show” a couple times…the first time at the beginning of the tour when the costume didn’t smell so horrible, and the second time after three months of touring when it did. I smelled so bad I think one of the guys was actually MAD at me. Did I mention that was the last time I was on the show?

Of course not washing after a GWAR performance meant that anything you got on you during the show was still there, and these substances could be any of a number of things ranging from fake blood to real dog vomit. A quick rinse would take care of this, but scrubbing away the make-up we smeared around our eyes took a little more care and skill. If you used just regular soap it was inevitable that it was going to go into your eye, so you just tried to minimize the contact and therefore the pain as much as possible. Finally we figured out that baby oil took it off pretty much with one swipe. But we would run out of baby oil, and forget to get more, and then have these dark circles around our eyes that of course we would forget were there. When you combined that with the smell and the blood-spattered clothing we were always wearing (which often was emblazoned with the grotesque or obscene imagery of the bands we liked), we stood out like a sore thumb. ¹

On one of those first Canada crossings they made us all get off the bus and come sit for hours in a bleak holding area. The novelty of crossing a border was wearing off quickly as we realized these guys had a real boner for American bands coming to their otherwise unspoiled country. A couple other groups of musicians were being waylaid as well, and one of the guys was sobbing in pain, holding his butt cheeks and trying to stick his ass-crack in the water fountain. From inside we could see them going through everybody’s stuff but we weren’t worried. I had told everybody to throw away (do) their drugs and weapons, and I was reasonably confident they had done so. We inspected the bus thoroughly for any forgotten roaches, and felt we were in good shape, but when the cops came back their manner had grown even surlier. We were separated and interrogated for hours as they grilled us over any prior criminal charges any of us might have had. Failing to produce anything like that led them to their next option—a strip search and cavity inspection!

Now it wasn’t a flash-light in the teeth bend your booty over and spread your ass cheeks wide kinda cavity search, but they checked out my junk and everybody else’s. I took a certain amusement in watching the cop examine my underwear, as he found nothing but dick-lint and the occasional tick. We put our clothes back on and went into yet another room, a small one we were all piled into. After waiting about an hour or four, one of the officers strode into the room, triumphantly holding aloft a large bag full of white powder.

“Who does this belong to?” the cop boomed, far too loud.

As one, we all turned and looked at Rox, our drummer. If anyone in the band had a huge bag of blow, it was him. But Rox, ever the cucumber, just stared at the floor. We all turned back to the officer with uncomprehending stares. There was a LOT of coke in that bag, but as I looked at it more closely it seemed very grainy. It certainly didn’t look like any cocaine I had ever seen…at any rate the cops disappeared once again, and a few minutes later came back and told us that we were free to go.
We were on our way, and for the first time, GWAR was going international! “Death Tour 89”had begun!

O.K. kiddies, see ya in two weeks as I give you the sickest shit from the biggest tour we had done up until that point. We will be back with “Death Tour, 89”. Until them, hydrate!

— ∮∮∮ —

Footnotes

Why the hell does “sore thumb” lend itself to standing out? I mean, if I had a sore thumb I don’t think anyone would notice, much less say it stood-out. ↩

July 30, 2012 10:05 AM 6