LISTEN:
Adam Doc Fox (ADF)
Thanks for taking some time , so I want to jump right in, you’re playing an awesome music festival in Ohio, Sonic Temple, so what should fans expect from the GWAR live experience at the festival?
GWAR lead singer THE BERSERKER BLÓTHAR (GWAR)
Well, you can expect GWAR to do what GWAR does, which is come on stage and put on the most legendary punk rock, shock rock show, that you have ever seen. I mean, you know we may not have all of the fancy bells and whistles of your star sets, of your ridiculous multimedia extravaganza of emptiness, but what we have is straight up your ****, pump rock ‘n’ roll in a shock rock style, man. GWAR has an aesthetic. It’s like going to watch a crappy horror movie except you get blood sprayed all over you. And you can watch us bring people out and put them down like rabid dogs. Celebrities, politicians, whoever — it’s a band that has a storyline, we got a narrative, so every show is like a little little rock ‘n’ roll musical. I’m not gonna say opera, because it’s not that lame.
ADF
So that’s a sense of y’all’s awesomeness on stage, but there’s gonna be some fans that really know your stuff. What from the early albums do you still love play? We all grew up with Scumdogs of the Universe, Hell-O, America Must be Destroyed, The Toilet Earth — should fans expect any kind of stuff off the old old albums?
GWAR
Do you know like when you get to the end of the album, and it just kinda like skips, like ‘cus it’s hitting the little paper part in the middle? That’s the part we like to play.
ADF
Hahahahaha
GWAR
Seriously, we love doing old old cool songs. I mean, that’s the whole thing with this band is it’s fun and our material is fun. No matter how many times we play, Sick of You, somehow, we have fun doing it. And I mean, that’s probably the biggest difference in our band and other bands is, our band rolls out on stage [we] don’t see people trying to look cool and thinking about other people looking at them as they look at your band. We see people having a good **** time and you know that’s what we do. And we love playing, Have You Seen Me off of America Must be Destroyed, and Rock ‘n’ roll Never Felt so Good is always a fun one. Lately, on the last tour we did America Must be Destroyed, which was awesome; we had never done that live. To my knowledge — I think maybe when the record came out. We probably did it like a few times, but this was the first time we did it in many, many, years, and that was really a lot of fun. I love bringing out the older stuff, even stuff off of Hell-O, our very first album, we do that stuff, too.
ADF
Yeah, that’s what’s insane. 40 years, or as you call it, 40 shocking years. So I want to hear it in your own words, the origin story behind GWAR. You’re essentially aliens, but not really, you’re from the Scumdogs of the Universe fighting force, so just tell me exactly how you all came to earth?
GWAR
So the quick and dirty version of it is, GWAR were a group of outer space elite warriors, who were in service of a being called, The Master. It was a chaotic universe, where all kinds of crazy battles and alliances had been formed. And we were part of a fighting force that was within the army of The Master. We were the Scumdogs of the Universe, sort of the worst of the worst, kind of an F Troop, if you ever remember that old show? We were the bumbling cops; we were not the best soldiers. And so we were banished to Earth because we made one too many screw ups. And here on Earth, Earth was really kind of treated like the western front, like well, let’s send them some place where they can’t do any real damage. And that’s where we wound up, and it turns out we were able to do quite a bit of damage, especially once we learned how to play rotten music. And that was all part of the original film that GWAR was based around, which was Scumdogs of the Universe. So yeah, that’s the narrative.
ADF
You get to earth and start playing music and it’s amazing and you have all these influences, even how you described yourself, variations of metal, shock metal, punk, postpunk — tell me about the bands that influenced you all to create your sound, from black metal to Black Sabbath, The Misfits, just give me some influences behind y’all’s sound.
GWAR
I think one thing that sets GWAR apart is that we don’t try to be cool. Why bother, right? We’re just a bunch of dungeons and dragons players, like you know, Warhammer dorks, and we’re proud of it, we’re not wearing leather pants and avoiding any corn dogs cause people think we’re ******* * ****. When you talk about GWAR, you have to talk about culture and not just music, right? The band is very influenced, obviously by Arthur Brown, Screaming Jay Hawkins, all of just the aesthetic of shock, Kiss, obviously, but with GWAR, it goes back to, [we] know we were a band of eras, so a lot of the people that helped start the band were into a different stuff, that really kind of influenced our sound early on. You had a group of young guys working with a group of artists, that it turns out were more into stuff like The Tubes and and Parliament and Devo. Part of that not being cool is like embracing the side of punk rock that was always really a little bit about novelty music, right? You have the sort of “one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater” stuff. In case you haven’t noticed, there is a shocking dirth of humor in rock.
ADF
Hahahaha
GWAR
And it’s stupid, and part of the reason I think people don’t pay attention or don’t embrace it, is that the music is used, or that the culture is used, for people to identify with and feel, and sort of gain your identity. I listen to Slayer; I’m a tough guy. I listen to Hatebreed. GWAR is something for the kids that, they might listen to that music, too, but they’re not afraid to ******* crack a smile. And that’s what it’s about. And when I said you have to look at culture, too, I mean that the band is bringing in sounds from, you know, horror movies, and sounds from just, comedy. We’re actually talking about doing a comedy record, like, I think that would be really fun, like sort of the old Cheech and Chong style.
ADF
Two more quick ones and then I’ll let you get out of here. Thanks again for the time. What comes to mind when somebody asks you about a crazy show or an insane crowd or somebody that got blood sprayed all over them and like totally freaked out? Are there any over the past 40 years that jump out?
GWAR
Well, I always try to tell people the story of Taco Land in San Antonio, Texas. Legend in the history of GWAR, in the early days when we were riding around in a school bus and people legitimately didn’t know what to expect. So we were playing in the places that like, little **** punk rock bands will play at, and one of them was Taco Land. And I’ll just never forget it because predominantly it was a Mexican restaurant, we were playing on the floor, and the audience was almost entirely migrant Latino farm workers, so not even like punk rockers. They couldn’t even get in the door because basically, during the lunch crowd, right, which was the sort of like drunk dudes that are in there drinking and having a torta. We start bringing in all this crazy **** and so they go and tell their friends like, man, you gotta see all this **** that’s down the street. By the time we played, before the doors even opened so the punk rockers could get in, there was like more than 100 Latino farm workers and their women like hanging out. That that to me is the show that I’ll never forget, just because they went bananas. When we started playing, it was like a saloon riot in the movies, people taking swings at each other and kicking each other’s throats and boobies coming out, it was just a celebration.
ADF
All right last one, the famous quote, “death cannot kill GWAR,” what does that mean?
GWAR
Well, like most things involved it means absolutely nothing. But yeah, it’s true. There’s been a lot of death in this band and we’ve lost a lot, but we’ve kept going, and I think part of it is that there is an aesthetic that we all share, that we all want to share with people who who like shock rock, who like horror movies, who like to laugh. And we know how to keep that going, it doesn’t really depend on one person or one personality. It’s more like the spirit of the band is our commitment to doing that.
ADF
Hell yeah, The Berserker, thanks so much! I’m Adam Doc Fox for Source Media, Richland Source, Ashland Source, Knox Pages and Source Brand Solutions. I’m done, but is there anything else you wanna add, about the tour, the show, anything you wanna plug, merch anything like that?
GWAR
Well, I wouldn’t mind plugging your ***.
ADF
Hahahah, I knew I shouldn’t have asked that, I knew I was setting myself up.
GWAR
We got a delicious little pigtail that would just look so good in there. I dunno, it’s a 40th anniversary. We’re gonna be touring with Static X, we’ve got an EP that’s coming out, we’ve got a lot of good stuff happening.
ADF
Hell ya, thanks and I’ll see you at Sonic Temple in May!