The next four hours are like rough seas on the Carnival Cruise Line. I hang on the rail the whole time because if I move, I lose my spot, and it's a good spot, scientifically selected in advance by guys from Mystic Biscuits and Digits who studied the terrain based on previous Gwar shows, computing the exact distance you need to see yet not get slimed.
Their computations are on the mark. Toward the end of the show when Brockie points a hose upward, we can see the haze of red droplets heading our way, but they dissipate before impact.
X-Cops play first in order to give them time to change into their Gwar costumes. Their music is loud with titles like “Paddy Wagon Rape.” They heap abuse on the restless youth of America jammed six-deep at the barricade. Guys are brought up on stage and clubbed until their faces are bloody (an illusion, although I can’t tell how they’re doing it). The keyboard player in charge of ominous noises stays back at the soundboard.
Another guy is beat up and shot to “You Fucked Up.” We can make out the lyrics to that song. They go “you fucked up.” X-Cops leaves the stage at 10:23 and Hose Got Cable comes on at 10:37, getting us momentarily excited by tuning up to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But then they don’t cover any Nirvana. What sounds like a warm-up turns out to be their first song, one that never seems to quite get started. They play with their backs to the audience. At one point the drum kit needs an emergency application of a lot of Scotch tape.
The crowd at the barricade is now 21 bodies deep and 20 wide in anticipation of Gwar, four-deep at the upstairs rails. We spot members of Letters from Earth and Bucket in the crowd, but we can’t move to see what other local bands are in the hall. The comic book-sci fi crowd is down on the first floor in force. Hose Got Cable has broken one of its guitars to bits. They go off at 11:12.
“How much did they suck? Did they suck? They sucked,” the Digits-Mystic Biscuits contingent around me decides.
After another long break, Gwar finally takes the stage in their monster costumes, their stagehands scurrying around naked except for dicks-on-steroids cod pieces.
“This is the biggest collection of losers since the Nuremberg Trials,” they announce to the devoted, who I bet don’t know what the Nuremberg Trials were. As Oderus Urungus sings to loud music, he moves frequently to the edge of the stage so eager hands can bat at his fierce looking, yard-long penis.
Somebody is disemboweled and intestines are ripped out and eaten. Somebody’s head is split open and their brains are eaten. Oderus shoots a stream of green liquid out of his penis. None of it is particularly gross because it’s so obviously fake, like Pee Wee Herman Meets Night of the Living Dead, but as theater of the absurd, it is vastly entertaining nonetheless.
If Hose Got Cable, then Gwar Got Hose. There’s ample Galligar-Gwar warning because you can see the stagehands plug in the costumes when a squirt-down is next in the script. But tonight the script has gone wrong. Being a first-time Gwar attendee, I could not tell, but Gwar veterans tell me later the show went badly amiss. Brockie is obviously frustrated.
“I made one mistake and now I have to suffer for the rest of the set?” he says to the band. Something isn’t functioning. But the show keeps rocking to Brockie’s repeated confessions that he has deviated from the script and is ad-libbing.
Three Neo-Nazi skinheads are decapitated and blood spurts out of their necks. Then Slymenstra Hymen impresses the hell out of me by doing a fire dance without burning her hair off or setting the Flood Zone stage ablaze. Smoke pours through the hall.
She rips a gigantic bloody tampon out of her crotch and tosses it into the crowd, which tosses it back. Then she has one of those Maximum MaxiPad Heavy Days right on the stage in one cascading splat and breathes fire. The entire Flood Zone has literally heated up. You can feel it at the back rails. We are damned impressed.
A big-headed Michael Jackson dances out to “Beat It” and is encouraged to jerk off. His feeble effort gets his dick lopped off and he sprays a ton of alternating red, green and blue liquid into the audience. In a patriotic display, it becomes red, white and blue all at the same time.
There’s a transvestite space alien, and then a big monster which looks like a giant uterus with pointed teeth in the cervix and two octopus-like ovaries attached by fallopian tubes on either side. The ovaries are sliced off and then a Hitler head comes out of the cervix and does battle with Oderus. He cuts it off. More blood spews.
Finally, the big worm World Maggot, which has been sitting quietly in front of the drum set, comes alive and stretches out. Girls and members of Hose Got Cable are jammed into its jaws, and then the
This concludes the show, but whatever the encore is normally, we never find out. Something has gone amiss with Brockie’s costume and he rips it off before leaving the stage. When he comes back wearing nothing but the huge dick G-string, the rest of the band has to match him by pulling off their costumes.
Gwar veterans tell me the encore numbers were more Rawg than Gwar, Gwar’s uncostumed counterparts, and it is uncharacteristic for Brockie to break character in a Gwar show. They say he began doing it from the first miscue.
There’s a delay in getting the drummer to return at all. It’s hard to tell whether the anger and frustration on the stage is real or part of the act, but if it was real, that might explain why Brockie pulled off the last piece of his costume and paced the stage restlessly, completely naked, sometimes singing, mostly fulminating, and at one point, pulling a bag of golf clubs and taking a few practice swings.
(I glance across the Flood Zone in a news flash panic and my photographer, having exhausted her allotted time on the perch, has climbed down. Shit!!! She’s on the floor somewhere, her view blocked by uplifted hands. A photographer from France is up there now shooting away. France gets naked photos of Prince Charles and Dave Brockie. This is not fair! It is our punishment for Euro-Disney. I am way too far back to get a clear photo with my dinky camera and the room is still full of smoke from Slymenstra. My worst fears are confirmed when the film comes back a few days later. Brockie is barely discernible in the haze and my negatives are mysteriously missing, so you’re all going to have to take my word on this.)
Did he feel the show had not been up to its usual standards and offered himself like a naked Christ as a human sacrifice to the audience? It was the most amazing dramatic theater ever, and there was almost no response from the floor. Does he always do this?
No, the people around me shake their heads, silent.
Is that his real penis?
Seems like it.
The problem is if you’ve been strutting around for over an hour in a yard long monster dick, suddenly
What he intended to do next will forever remain a mystery. One of the guitar players is repeatedly yelling that he needs a beer. An empty beer bottle goes flying onto the stage and the band immediately becomes a Kennedy Assassination tableau, all pointing up at us as if we were the Texas School Book Depository.
Hey, it wasn’t us, we point back. It came from down there, the Grassy Knoll, and we all point down. The last thing we would have done is thrown a beer bottle at such a magnificent spectacle. But the band is in an uproar about this Single Bottle Theory that has killed whatever is left of Naked Encore, and they’re convinced it came from upstairs. They’re not going to play anymore, they scream.
Brockie is handed an apron or shirt to cover himself. He announces the cops have arrived, drapes himself, and the show ends suddenly as they scurry off the stage. The people upstairs rush to the windows to see if cop cars are on the street, but there’s nothing.
The place empties out and cool air whooshes through the windows, finally breaking the heat and smoke from Slymenstra’s torches.
“Brett,” I say to the major domo Cassis, who has come in with the clean-up squad. “Did you see that? What was that all about?”
“What?”
“Brockie was naked on stage. Can you do that in Richmond?”
“I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything about it,” he says wisely. “Did you throw the bottle?”
“No! It came from downstairs!” We would never throw a bottle at something we were going to vote for in the polls.
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