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| Dave Brockie in his Slave Pit office |
I was summoned to the Slave Pit. Despite the interest of other writers in doing the Gwar story, the band wants the mothership to handle the invasion. And why not? Gwar, to Richmond’s seeming embarrassment, is the biggest band in town. They are bigger than Single Bullet Theory, they are bigger than Ten Ten, they are more successful than anyone you want to name from here.
Who else has a CD available through the Columbia Record Club? Who else had a Grammy-nominated video? Who else is going on widely successful world tours? Who else gets on Beavis and Butthead? But they are a bastard child, local but not talked about. They are our secret shame.
Head Gwarster Dave Brockie peppers his phone conversation with belches, so I decide showering before reporting for duty at the Slave Pit would be unnecessary. I drive to the unpublicized, unmarked building on the north side of town and, as instructed, lean on my horn for a couple of loud blasts.
Dobermans run to the fence. A head peers down at me from the window. Someone comes to the door and interrogates me. Despite the building’s ramshackle appearance, there are intercom phones on the wall. The great man himself is informed of my arrival. I am ushered upstairs, where Brockie is holding court like any corporate executive in a simply furnished room full of electronics, printers, fax machines, phones, stereos, desktop computer, drafting board. It is orderly without being anal. Brockie, fielding phone calls and faxes like a typical CEO, lets loose a loud fart which begins the interview.
I thought what we’d do first is what’s going on with Gwar now, what’s here, and then go back in time to your days at VCU. Is that where it all started?
Where what started?
Well, Death Piggy. Wasn’t that the first band you were in?
The first band was Nuclear Dogshit when I was in the 9th grade. It was a cool band, a punk band. I was 14 years old.
But what was the first band that put you on the map?
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| Photo by William Pickett, Death Piggy |
In Farmville, the only thing to do on the weekend was drive down to Richmond. It was the closest thing to culture within 100 miles. Wow, VCU! Lots of chicks here! Lots of punk rockers! There were none in Farmville. This was 10 years ago before punk became the pussified fashion it is now. You could get your ass kicked quite literally every day of your life back then if you walked your talk, and I did. I’m proud of that. I’m proud of getting kicked in the head continually! Look at this nose!
It’s crooked!
Eight times it’s been broken. I’m proud of the blows I took. I started hanging out with the local hardcore scene. I immediately ran into the Richmond wall of, “Oh, you’re not from here? You suck!”
Where are you from?
Northern Virginia and Canada. I subtracted myself from the scene here a long time ago. I have little interest in playing shows here except Gwar and X-Cops now. But I used to do little performance things, the F-Minus Art Players, little plays. I used to love to do stuff like that in Richmond, but it’s such a pissy attitude now.
People I respected right off the bat, people like Mike Rodriguez, Penn Rollins, were such dicks to me when I moved here and I’ll never forget it. I had weird shit and dressed up. I had a wind-up cow. It took people a long time to even pretend to like me. But they can all suck my dick.
Years ago I realized there’s an entire world out there. The whole world doesn’t focus around Richmond. That’s an attitude left from all the rich, white bastards who run this country. They think this place is special because it’s near Jamestown, we settled the states here, we fucked the Indians in the ass from here, the CIA’s in Fairfax, DC’s right up the road. That makes me hate this state more than anything in the fucking world and I think it’s funny that Gwar grows like a malignant fucking herpes in their midst.
Then why do you stay here?!
Because I travel six to eight months a year, but I’d be out of here in a fucking heartbeat if I could. This town has so many shitty, narrow-minded fucking attitudes. I’m not even talking about the music scene, I’m talking about the governor! The government! The ABC! This whole thing about the penis thing! Well, I have a little perspective on that matter. I’ve seen it happen six or seven times. This time it went to a new level. They actually had a hearing about it. I’ve seen clubs get burned to the ground because of who knows why? VCU. They’ll be after us over here now, I know they will.
Well, aren’t you big enough to relocate somewhere else?
We could, but everyone’s family lives around here. It’s not a money thing, it’s a family thing. People’s mothers are starting to get old, starting to die. A lot of people don’t want to move to Los Angeles. They need to take care of their families. Gwar cares about their mothers!
I’m going to Los Angeles tomorrow to slap the monkeys, knob-twiddlers, and parasites into line, the ones who rely on the artists to make tons of cash for them. Look at our calendar! All this blue is X-cops touring, all this red is Gwar touring! Nine months of touring! That’s why I can handle living in Richmond. I have a great studio here. I don’t generally go out. People usually ignore me or ask me stupid questions. I’m such a pariah around here, it’s gross.
What do people ask you?
Are you on crack? That’s a big one. Everyone thinks I’m on crack. All I do is work on my art.
I went down to the ODC one night with Heavy Duty, a motherfucker from New York who has more power in his pinkie finger than every fucking, half-assed dipshit in this town put together, and they wouldn’t fucking let us in because we didn’t have our IDs!
I talked to Tommy Rodriquez about getting the X-Cops on a show and he went, “Hfffffff!” like I had asked him to come over and summon Satan with me! The Vapor Rhinos suck! The Beex are the only good band; I love the Beex. They have more balls than any band ever will. The Vapor Rhinos can suck my dick. They’ll never be anything. Penn Rollins is my friend now, but all those guys who thought I was a fucking fuck-up can all kiss my ass, so fucking hard. That’s why we formed Death Piggy!
I was in the hardcore DC scene for years. I was there when it started. I saw Henry Rollins’ old band, SOA even before he was in Black Flag. I know what was going on. I was already sick to death of that straight-edged attitude, being beaten up for slamming the wrong way. I moved to Richmond and it was cool, but because I had such a weird attitude, a wind-up cow, would pour mayonnaise down their pants, people dissed me hard.
I get it all the time still. People are so jealous of what we’ve achieved. I just want to fucking spit in Peter Bell’s face. Who the fuck is he? I’m a Grammy-nominated musician! I have toured the world eight times now. He can suck my dick in hell for eternity!
People say do you really use musicians in Gwar? We’ve sold half a million records, asshole! Projects are the lifeblood of this organization. I have X-Cops, Gwar, solo projects, spoken word, surrealist histories, sort of Ween meets Tom Waite. It’s rad! It’s all about music, man! People ought to open up their fucking minds and see it!
In Richmond, the scene will always be a bitter, fucking grunge shithole, the same attitudes their fathers and the cops have. My advice to any musician who is worth a shit is to get out of town. The ABC has shut down every club.
I have a lot of friends and we do our art. But I got real disaffected with the scene and stopped going out. I read about it in the Journal now. There’s new good bands out there that I’m missing, but I’m too busy making my own music. I love Avail, I love Donkey Balls, I love Frog Legs. I have their tapes and they rule! They’re very creative! I wish I had more time to support those bands. People will come out in force for that shit. Avail is doing really fucking good.
How many people are working here?
This is a professional punk rock complex we’ve got, eight bands practice here. Twelve to 30 people work here, depending on the projects. We’re working on three music videos now, two for Gwar and one for the X-Cops, two 48-page, full color graphic novels, self-published, self-distributed. We have two world tours which will stretch into 1996. We have a T-shirt shop. We’ve got the shit! This building is an armed fortress of artistic rebellion and social reform!
If anyone ever doubted us when we said we were going to make Gwar last a million years, they should finally realize we were not fucking around. Gwar will outlive us. No matter what happens, those half a million records will exist after I’m dead. Not just Gwar, all this other stuff, and everything we make, we make because we want to fuck with the system. We are their sworn enemies and this is war. The Oklahoma federal building bombing is not going to be taken lightly and I’m fucking pissed off about it.
Who’s side are you on?
I’m not on anyone’s side, but I’m very interested in why they set that bomb off. What are they trying to prove? The government will not let us know why they did it, but it was revenge.
I’m a pacifist, a follower of Gandhi. I don’t believe that might is right. I don’t believe physical power is the bottom line, but it is in their world and that’s what I’m dedicated to destroy. The federal building in Oklahoma City was used as a staging area for the whole Waco tragedy. The morning they blew it up was the second anniversary of the botched raid. That morning, guys in paramilitary outfits laid a marker at the Waco site.
The Branch Davidians did not kill their own children. The federal government killed those people on purpose or they fucked up so bad, it was an accident. But I think they did it on purpose. Why didn’t they have a fire truck around? But that doesn’t give anyone the right to blow up the federal building.
But it shows you just how fucked up things are. The government murdered John F. Kennedy, and they’re doing it more and more, and one day they’re going to come for you unless you get in line and spend your life doing something you hate, which 90 percent of the people have to do.
We’re so lucky! That’s why we want to be artists! We want to be free! And they don’t want us to be free! I hate them with every fucking ounce of my life. I hate them so much, I would die, but not violently. I’m going to work myself to death with a smile on my face. These are our weapons of war, albums, ideas, comic books! We don’t need guns! We have pies, not bombs! That’s our war! When everyone finally realizes it, we’re going to get into politics. We’re already laying the groundwork. We will offer the people an alternative. We will create a populist movement in this country. It will knock their socks off.
You’re going to get into politics?!
Not now. But we’re going to use the same tactics the anti-abortionists use. We will bring people together literally with ducktape and chains, immobilize them, destroy their perfect schedules, terrorize them with humor, make a big joke out it and the joke will be on them because they will look so foolish trying to stop our movement. We’ll fight cops with squirt guns and pies, and when they arrest us, we’ll go limp and tape ourselves all together and make it as expensive as possible to fuck with us and we’ll never use violence.
McNamara said that would have stopped the Vietnam war, if everyone just laid down around the Pentagon.
I agree. We see our own war dead, but we don’t see the other side.
Tim McVeigh was the kid on the street who organized the haunted house! That tells me he was a smart kid, but when he went into the military, he got fucked, just like my dad got fucked. My father got shot in World War II; my mom was buried alive for four days in a building in London. War is still a legitimate means of solving our problems! Fuck that! I may have a tank on my door and the name of my band is Gwar, but I hate war. It’s the most sophisticated symbol of mindless stupidity we have. You don’t need war, you don’t need guns.
Don’t you have a gun?
I don’t want to have a gun. I wish I didn’t feel the need for a gun. I almost got carjacked the day of the Flood Zone show. People break into my house. I let “Style” print a picture of me with the gun for one reason, don’t come over to my house! The last thing I want to do is kill someone, but I would do it in a heartbeat if someone I loved was about to get hurt. I’d blow their fucking heads off. But it sucks! I think it sucks that I can’t ride my bike home at night! I think it sucks that I can’t have female friends come visit me at my apartment at night because they might get attacked.
Where do you live?
Around Boulevard and Cary. That neighborhood has gone to shit!
The phone rings again, Brockie is distracted and starts talking about his current favorite band, Thin Lizzy. We leave for the building tour, starting with the computer room.
“We’re changing the face of Slave Pit graphics,” Brockie says proudly. A color drawing is printing out. “We scan in a black and white drawing for the comic and color it in the computer. It has 16 million colors! We’ve only used 15 million!”
An entire colorized comic can be stored on a computer disk and mailed off to a printing plant in Texas for production and distribution. The one I’m looking out will be out in July. They do their own posters by computer, too. There’s a graphics lab I don’t see because people are doing secret things inside. Downstairs, Brockie walks into the rehearsal room and announces he’s fired someone. Everyone laughs.
“You can’t fire anyone!”
“I know I can’t! I was just giving my opinion.” Everyone laughs more.
“He’s going to change the locks!” The band thinks they should make a family tree of all the people who came out of Gwar and went into other bands, and the bands that came out of those.
“Kepone, Alter-natives, there’s tons.”
The foyer is full of black dirtbikes, Gwar mode of transportation. There’s a large, typically bare, but strangely clean, kitchen area, and a big calendar which bespeaks organization. Whoever feeds the dogs has to put an X on the calendar to show it’s been done.
The video production room has a professional looking blue wall, lots of squishy and pointy sculpture in progress, walls of fiberglass castle wall, a heating room where costume parts are cooking, and a loft loaded with wardrobe, heads and body parts. It looks like Hollywood. It’s astounding.
Brockie says their next album is “Rag-na-rok, an ancient Norse legend about the last day of the world, the end of the gods. We developed the music and idea. Cardinal Sin, an intergalactic KKK imperial wizard, a symbol of fascism and hatred with religious overtones, cruises through the universe, worship me or die!”
Brockie runs through the story while the band practices ominous noises in the background.
“We wanted to create a video with this character. A comet is coming to hit the earth Dec. 31, 1999. We’re artists! People have been prophesizing for hundreds of years and we want to take advantage of it. The comet is going to obliviate the earth, everyone will die. Gwar says cool, then they’ll ride back. They have a huge party as the comet gets closer, then when it gets here, it’s Cardinal Sin’s warship! We wrote the music along that theme. We’re not narrating the story but going with the ideas in that story, hating everything Cardinal Sin symbolizes. When you listen to Gwar’s music, you don’t have to know a damn thing about Gwar. The music is about radical change in this world.”
Brockie prepares a letter for me to give to The Ramones that night with his gift, Hitler’s head. He wants it presented to Joey Ramone.
“If I’m being a dick, tell me, get in my face, I need it,” Brockie tells one of the minions he had yelled at earlier. He gives me Hitler’s head.
“Tell the Ramones, their crew and their bimbos to come by and see us,” he says, escorting me to my car like any proper gentleman would. “Take care,” he waves, adding, “Don’t you keep Hitler’s head for yourself or it will come alive! You’ll wake up and it’ll be eating your pussy!”
I put Hitler’s head on the car seat and cringe. No better warning could have been given. I used to get nightmares from “Reanimator.” But that was years ago. I’ve changed. Doing the Journal for two years can change you, being in the Slave Pit briefly can change you. Driving home, I start having sexual fantasies about Hitler’s head. At the stoplights, I gaze at him on the car seat. I stick my finger in his mouth.
-- Mariane Matera
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