Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (35 of them)
five months pass...
one year passes...
Dave touched people - sometimes in uncomfortable places. Not like "show me on the doll where he touched you," though he probably would have laughed at that... No. GWAR was (and maybe is, I don't know if they will continue or not) satire set to loud guitars and even louder showmanship, shock rockers who, if you stripped away the show still could play (no, really) and if you stripped away the playing wrote songs that used humor to expose their targets and, sometimes literally, cover them in the blood and shit they deserved.
My first exposure to GWAR was in my parent's house as the band was exposed in one of those video magazines that were all the rage in the pre-internet late '80s-early '90s. I think it was Sheet Metal but it may have been Hard & Heavy.
Saw the band for the first time in 1991, I think, the first show I attended at the Marquee in NYC. I wore a white tee-shirt that was spattered with "blood" that, amazingly enough, was warm and a little salty! Those fucks thought of everything!
To date one of the things I am proudest of was going to Richmond, Virginia where I did an "Unmasked" story on them. I got to talk to them as art school geeks instead of Antarctica aliens, see the compound where they brought their insane ideas to life, and sleep in Slymenstra Hymen's bed.
They were my son Matt's first concert when he was 5 at the Electric Factory in Philly, around Halloween. We stayed towards the back, and when he got upset he couldn't see, we stood him up on a table between us. Thankfully it wasn't the Michael Jackson show, so all we really had to explain was that Hitler was shooting a fire hose at the crowd. A fire hose, yeah! That's the ticket!
That show was such an impact on our family that when I made a mixtape CD for all guests at my wedding a couple years later, it included that favorite at all nuptials, "Sick Of You."
I drank a shot of Maker's Mark even though it is 9 AM and I just took my Vicodin, in honor of Dave. He was creative, insane, brilliant, hilarious and I am glad I got a chance to meet him a few times.
was lucky to see them a couple times...one of the guys i worked with for awhile had been a roadie/member of the slave pit for awhile, when they came through town he got us on the guest list and i got to see my friend get eaten by a giant vagina. great show.
later on we talked to their management and got them to come by on an afternoon before a show and play the game Dance Central, you could tell they were tired as shit but when the camera went on they were totally and and funny...kind of defined them to me, taking time out of their day for no money to come do something silly at a video game magazine...
RIP, it was a hell of a thing you did Dave
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHB0xzR8sL4
two months pass...
four months pass...
I watched this morning...wow both "West End Girls" and "People Who Died" are really great, I kind of got choked up at the end, which is a really weird thing to say about GWAR (unless they were actually physically choking me, which would make more sense)
― chr1sb3singer, Wednesday, 29 October 2014 14:02 (nine years ago) link
five years pass...