Blood and Guts: Remembering Oderus Urungus of GWAR
The metal monster born Dave Brockie died 10 years ago today
It was always wet work. It will always be wet work.
Both for the band called GWAR and for the mosh-mad audience in the pit. GWAR was and is a heavily costumed, heavy metal bloody mess.
Leading that band for years was a former art-school student, Dave Brockie, known to GWARworld as Oderus Urungus. He died 10 years ago on March 23rd from what was ruled accidental heroin overdose. He was GWAR’s lead singer-songwriter-ringleader and, at his death, the remaining original member of the band, a group that had dozens of players, ever inclined toward musical mayhem and theatrical savagery. It was low-brow and it was, well, maybe a little high-brow. Or maybe it was just no-brow. Beavis & Butt-head were fans. So were a few left-wing metal-heads.
This was the original premise or schtick: GWAR was a team of interplanetary warriors, descended from aliens stranded in Antarctica, hellbent on the enslavement of the human race.
I saw GWAR several times over the years and interviewed Brockie once. It was an interesting interview scenario where the he gave me the option of talking to him as Oderus Urungus (foul-mouthed, in character, growling) or Dave Brockie, the relatively sane and witty man behind the mask (and body armor, and buckets of blood). I chose to speak with Brockie. (This was reminiscent my interviewing Christopher Guest as Guest or Nigel Tufnel; as it turned out, I spoke to Tufnel first and then Guest a week later, neither person acknowledging the other.)
First, an amusing anecdote: Before a 1990 GWAR show at a Boston club, the Channel, I was in the outer bar area, knocking one back. The red-haired woman beside me at the bar took off her jacket and revealed a mostly bare and bloodstained back. Either she’d recently been in a horrible accident or she was . . . GWAR Woman!
She was GWAR Woman aka Slymenstra Hymen. In less than an hour, she’d be onstage sporting a bustier that made Madonna’s look circumspect, swinging maces and axes, walloping and beheading various other GWAR members, all of it choreographed to a ferocious speed metal/punk rock soundtrack.
Skip ahead a few years, to a mid-90s Lollapalooza bill in western Massachusetts. I was wandering around the crowd pre-show, as was she. I smiled, stuck out my hand and said, “Slymenstra?” I paused and added “Slymenstra Hymen?” as if there were other Slymenstras not named Hymen out there looking like they’d walked out of The Road Warrior. We had a laugh. (Since, GWAR she – real name Danielle Stampe – has gone on to do set design for film and music videos, including working with Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, a slight change of page from the GWAR days.)
Anyway, back to GWAR, 1990, at the Channel. It’s an all-ages afternoon show. And it was an afternoon of blood ‘n’ gore ‘n’ a whole lot more: It was Alice Cooper times 10, your favorite splatter movie transposed to a rock ‘n’ roll setting, a sadomasochistic circus from hell, a decadent demi-monde populated by the same sort of amoral goon squad that ran wild in, yes once again (I can’t get away from it) The Road Warrior. It was also a lot like professional wrestling. Fake, but totally. completely over the top. A place where “That’s disgusting!” was uttered by people with wide grins on their faces, secretly hoping GWAR would up the disgusting ante.
GWAR – then a 14-or-so person conglomeration of musicians, dancers and art-school refugees from Richmond, Virginia – was formed in 1988. They called themselves Scumdogs and they were more elaborately costumed than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (An apt reference at the time.) It was then, I thought, unlikely that GWAR will spin off a line of action toys. Too many spikes and chains. Too much hardware. I was wrong about that. Of course, there were action figures. Just action figures not made for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles demo. Now, in 2024, you may purchase, among other shit, comic books, a L’il Raspy Plush Toy, Cuttlefish of Cthulhu, a Balsac the Jaws of Death mask, multiple varieties of t-shirts and cans of OderusAle.
Back to live action … You know how theater people say that if there’s a gun on the wall in the first act, you can bet it will be fired by the third? Well, with GWAR you can bet that if a character wanders onstage — the pro-censorship “Granbo” in a wheelchair, a 10-foot human-chomping dinosaur, a dazed hippie — he or she is going to be bleeding profusely by the end of his or her stint. Various GWAR folks gushed quarts of fake blood all over the stage and into the front rows, composed of folks only too willing to enjoy the massacre. If I’m not mistaken, Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett got his head lopped off — at least that’s what happened to a chap in a bald mask sporting a black T-shirt with the word “Oil” on it.
VIDEO: Oderus Urungus reads Goodnight Moon
Music? Well, GWAR’s five musicians played songs such as “Vlad the Impaler,” “Sick of You” “Maggots Are Falling Like Rain,” “Bone Meal” and “Slaughterama.” They’re probably “about” what they seem to be about, but clear, articulate vocals were not really part of the plan; the music was a soundtrack for the mayhem. And I have to admit I’m one of those who, despite being sent album after album by their record company, never exactly played the band much at home or in the car. A grisly feast for the eyes, an assault on the ears.
How nasty did the show get?
Well, for “Have You Seen Me?” GWAR trotted out two dancing milk cartons, one of which had a drawing of a child and the tag, “Have you seen me? Call 555-I’MDEAD.” And one of the pro-morality crusaders GWAR trotted out ended up with a fate that was, shall we say, worse than death.
The question most often asked about GWAR is: Would the music make it without the theatrics? My answer is, no, but any fan’s rejoinder could properly be a valid enough: So what?
The GWAR provocateurs submerge themselves in a splatter-rock shtick that wants to rub you wrong. It’s basically a mind-warp: Rock theater taken over the edge, ultra-violence and rock-horror shtick played up to the max. For all its bloodlust — most of the characters brought onstage lose life or limb — but it is a smile-inducing, quasi-perverse spectacle. They’re sure to ruffle PC feathers — even as Sylmenstra often asserted dominance over the men-creatures — but they’re even more sure to make you cringe and recoil at their audacity. It is, remember, a passageway into overkill city.
For GWAR, that show had to be a considered a success. They packed the club, they got to exorcise a load of demons, they had fun on the extreme fringes and they didn’t get busted for obscenity, as they did in North Carolina earlier in 1990. They even got to protest their own show. Before the curtain lifted, several GWAR members paraded about the stage with signs like “Make Love, Not GWAR” and “You Call This Art?”
Well, as the Cramps’ Lux Interior once sang in “I Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Gorehound”: “I don’t know about art, but I know what I like/Surfin’ in your blood on a Saturday night.”
Seven years later, Brockie and I had a talk about all this and more.
As time goes by, some veteran rock bands add new chords, time signatures, different sorts of story-songs. GWAR adds buckets of blood.
The horror-show of a band is up to about 100 gallons a show of the icky fake red stuff, and Brockie noted they seemed to add about 20 gallons per show for every new tour. Halloween season was revving into high gear soon and GWAR would be on the road Halloween ‘97, supporting its seventh and latest album, Carnival of Chaos.
As GWAR was Grand Guignol with guitars, we naturally talked about Alice Cooper. (GWAR denying a Cooper influence would be like the Beatles or Stones dismissing Chuck Berry.)
“Alice Cooper and Monty Python are two of my biggest influences,” said Brockie. Good point on Python: Remember The Black Knight sketch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the feisty knight keeps getting limbs chopped off while vowing to fight on?
GWAR’s agitated punk/metal throb was, in concert, very much a soundtrack to skits. Straw men in the form of conservative religious and political leaders often bore the brunt of the attack.
It could get pretty nasty up there, so I had to ask: Was there a message behind the mayhem?
“We do want to leave it up to the viewer in a lot of ways,” said Brockie. “Going to art school and listening to our professors, I hated being told why I should like things. But GWAR does have a deeper meaning.”
Brockie suggested GWAR’s slash-and-slay style was primarily meant to attack society’s rampant hypocrisy and pious morality. “We are reacting to what we see. We live in a violent society; therefore we’re going to reflect that. . . . We’re going after the sacred cows. It’s a neo-pagan event where you can work out your destructive energy in a nondestructive way.”
Was it art? What was art to GWAR?
“Art, at its best,” said Brockie, “forces a change in people’s psyches, those who pay to see it. Is it subversive? Revolutionary? It’s a total categorical rejection of a lot of elements of society. . . . There’s a great self-parodying aspect too, turning the magnifying glass on ourselves and music that spawns us.”
Lest we get too highbrow, Brockie was happy to drag us back into the sewer. The new stage show “revolves around a giant toilet that we spend the show trying to unclog,” he said. “The toilet becomes the narrative device for the propulsion of the set. It will end in a battle — it always ends in a battle — with the most gigantic rubber monsters we’ve ever put on stage at one time.”
Counterpoint: Couldn’t this, perhaps, just be seen, no matter what the subtext or intent, as lowest-common-denominator schlock-rock?
Brockie rose to the occasion. “We like to cover all the bases,” he said. “We like to start with the lowest-common denominator and work our way up. We were just a bunch of crazy art-school dropouts. This exploded in our faces and exceeded all our wildest dreams.” To date – this was ’97 – they’d sold about 700,000 albums. (Recent figures have it at 820,000 over 15 albums. Their latest album is 2002’s The New Dark Ages.)
GWAR was incapable of toning it down or being tamed. “We have a Princess Diana doll,” said Brockie. “We’re bringing her back one more time.” It’s not just an exercise in bad taste, stressed Brockie, of the queen who’d been killed in the car crash not long before this show.
“The system of royalty is antiquated. People get smashed every day in car accidents and nobody cares. Her driver was drunk, she was riding without her seat belt, and Elton sings the fucking song and goes on tour.”
VIDEO: GWAR “Sick of You”
Now, with Brockie dead, where be GWAR?
Still alive and kicking at the pricks, of course. The show must go on. (At the annual GWAR-B-Q in Richmond, in 2014, Oderus Urungus was given a Viking funeral, with his costume burned on stage.) Death is something GWAR has dealt with more than a few times over the years. In 2012, for instance, GWAR was prepping for their Return of the World Maggot Tour. I didn’t talk to Brockie/Urungus then, but did go to the GWAR website where he said, “We are finishing this last spate of shows as a tribute to fallen Scumdog Flattus Maximus, and will be playing as a four piece behind the screaming assault of [rhythm guitarist] Balsac,” he said.
Flattus, aka Cory Smoot, died in 2011 from a pre-existing coronary heart disease. Continued Oderus: “In this way we shall give all the U.S. bohabs ample chance to fall to their knees in a sobbing heap when confronted with the reality of Flattus’ departure…and a chance to say farewell. Then GWAR can move forward, and we shall.” (The Urban Dictionary will tell you a bohab is” a fan of GWAR who is really too much of a fan.”)
So, yes, GWAR still stalks the concert stages, and this month is in the midst of a Canadian/North American Age of Befuddlement tour. Tomorrow, on March 24th, they’re in Lawrence, Kansas, two days later in Davenport, Indiana and then Pontiac, Michigan.
And late last year, Balsac The Jaws of Death announced he was writing a GWAR movie called GWAR Must Die.
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I really like this article … Slymenstra Hyman
Brockie birthday is tomorrow August 30 I still cry every time I think about him .. long live your memory… I love you… Danielle