Dave Brockie: They treated me well. It was so much fun. I really think that Oderus, as a horror character, has really not gotten the credit he deserves. We tend to do a kind of comedic thing, but Oderus can be pretty damn horrible. I think he's destined to be right up there with Dracula and Frankenstein one day and for the people of RUE MORGUE to give me an opportunity to come up there without the band and do the Oderus thing was really, really fun.
I sat around and signed a ton of autographs mostly, but the most fun thing I did was judge the costume contest. I just tore-up anybody that I felt had a costume that was store-bought looking or unoriginal at all and basically just did stand-up for about an hour. It was really wonderful. I met a lot of really incredible people and everyone was completely respectful and awesome to me. I want to be doing more of those in the future. It would be very cool.
DB: Well, unfortunately, they have a policy where they don't repeat any guests for three years or something like that, so there's always a fresh group of guests at the convention. So, I don't expect to go back to the RUE MORGUE one next year, but there are lots of other horror conventions out there, maybe we can get Oderus out to those.
BL: I imagine that wasn't your first convention.
DB: No, we used to do DRAGONCON all the time, but it really was kind of a pain in the ass because it wasn't well organized. We would play a show at DRAGONCON and we would end up not playing until four in the morning. It was just very unprofessional. I understand that DRAGONCON has gotten much better, so maybe we'll take another shot at them. I always had a great time there; it just seemed like they really didn't know what they were doing though. I mean, obviously, they know what they are doing to some extent because they've kept it going for so long.
BL: You're a Canadian, right?
DB: Yeah, actually I'm from Ottawa.
BL: Was it college that brought you to America?
DB: No, we moved here early. I grew up in America. I came to America at the age of four. So, even though I'm a Canadian citizen, I'm definitely an American just by nature and spirit, that's just how I came up. Let's not have any illusions about being a Benedict Arnold, here. Even though my passport says I'm from Canada, I'm an American, true and blue.
DB: Well, I grew up in the D.C. area and wanted to stay in-state because it's much cheaper to go to college if you do it in the state you live in. The best art school in Virginia is V.C.U. [Virginia Commonwealth University]. I wanted to study art and it was in Richmond, Virginia. It was a good thing I did that, too, because that's where I met all the other crazy people and we came up with GWAR. I was doing that while I was going to college, too, and it was, actually, twenty-three years ago.
BL: Does the South seem to give GWAR a harder time than anywhere else in America?
DB: No, no, not really. We would occasionally have problems. North Carolina was a huge problem for a while; they gave us some trouble in the early nineties around there, on the PHALLUS IN WONDERLAND tour. I actually got arrested and had obscenity charges against me for a short time, but we managed a plea bargain and groveled our way out of that predicament. We were actually banned from North Carolina for a few years.
If you try to criticize GWAR in that way or you try to charge GWAR with breaking the law or anything like that, you're really running the risk of making yourself look like a complete idiot. It's similar to accusing Homer Simpson of being stupid. So, basically they've learned their lessons. They aren't going to waste their time trying to mess with GWAR. They know we don't have any money, anyway. If they are going to try to get somebody on an obscenity count, it's going to be somebody like Marilyn Manson, who's got millions of dollars, we're just little 'ole GWAR. One of these days, you know, what I just said is going to come back to haunt us.
BL: How did the splatter/horror element come into the live performance of GWAR?
DB: We wanted to just combine everything that really turned us on and put it into one experience. We loved rock and roll, we loved punk rock, we loved heavy metal, and we loved horror movies.
I, personally, was just a huge George Romero fan when I was coming up in high school. I'll never forget the day that the original DAWN OF THE DEAD movie came out. We waited in front of the theater all day, thinking there was a twelve o'clock show. We, of course, found out later that there wasn't going to be a showing until seven o'clock that night. We stayed out in that parking lot all freaking' day. It actually had an X-rating at first and we were only sixteen years old. We had all the fake college I.D.'s and we bought all these college T-shirts to wear; so they would think we were old enough to see the movie.
Basically, we took all of those influences and other people in the band brought other things to the GWAR mixture. Some of the other guys were into wrestling or comic books and all this other crap. We just kind of merged everybody's ideas all together and came up with this idea called GWAR. We just took all the kinds of art that we really enjoyed in our own lives and put it in a context where we could actually perform that kind of thing and damn if it didn't work.
DB: It was the family thing, definitely, I think. I grew up in a house where my mom was very liberal and never tried to stop me from doing anything I wanted to do. My older brother was a very big influence on my life. He had all kinds of crazy tastes and was just a few years older than I. He basically just pointed the way and I started to get into stuff that he was into.
It started with, like, Monty Python and then moved onto punk rock. Horror movies were also a continual part of the whole aspect. I was always encouraged to nurture my muse. The dark part of my own and GWAR's sense of humor partially came from my parents' experiences in World War Two. My mom and my father were both English and they actually adopted me in their late thirties. So, they were young people during the war and whatever happened to my father, during that time, was so horrible that I never got the full story. The stories that my mother told me about World War Two, living in London during the blitz, freaked me out so bad that I think that's where all the darkness in my sense of humor came from. To think that people did those kinds of things to each other was a mind-blowing experience for a five-year-old kid.
As I grew up and my sense of humor started to develop, I always knew that no matter how funny, how bright or how beautiful something might be, right on the other side of the wall, there was something horrible. Death, destruction, disease, or war, you know. So, it's a little like a balancing act, you know? I wanted to somehow take both sides of the fence and merge them into one thing. As I got older, I found myself gravitating more toward the dark comics. People like, George Carlin and Richard Pryor, and in the later years, guys like Bill Hicks. I started to realize there were artists out there that did that kind of stuff. I drew a ton of inspiration from them. To answer your question . . . I blame World War Two (laughing).
DB: Yeah, I touch on it constantly in my art. I don't think we learned a goddamn thing. I feel that World War Two made more problems than solving them. Just look at all the problems we're having in the Middle East right now because of the borders that were drawn at the end of that war, without any concern for the people who lived there. The United States and Britain drew up a new map of who gets what in the Middle East, without any concern for people who have been living there for thousands of years.
As a result of that, we have this thing called the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which is the root cause of this whole war on terror. There is this whole religious war that is going on between the Muslim world and the Christian world and, to me, it seems like people don't see or know that's what the whole thing boils down to; they seem to just go ahead and believe whatever bullshit that the government is telling them.
I take what I do damn seriously, of course, it's presented in a humorous context, but GWAR, one of the things we are here to do is teach and because of my interests and sense of knowledge on a lot of these things, GWAR gives me a platform to broadcast from and I realize there are people out there listening. Hopefully, GWAR is having the same effect on young people that artists had on me when I was young because that's where you figure out what kind of a person you're going to be your whole life.
DB: (Laughing) Not really, you know how that exactly happened? We were filming the GWAR movie SKULHEDFACE and there was this scene where we were doing a fake commercial for a horror movie called "Lawn Jockey." It was all about a lawn jockey that came to life and started killing people. There's a scene in there where the guitar player from GWAR and I play cops and we are just kind of in the background dressed in full cop uniforms. Pete, the guitar player for GWAR at the time, said we should do a band where we dress up like cops and it was born right then and there, to be quite honest.
BL: It may be too early to ask, but how is your new tour, VIVA LA BANDS, going for you?
DB: They're great. One of the first things we did on this tour was, from a suggestion by Bam Margera, was to make a Don Vito [Bam Margera's uncle] character that gets mauled on stage by GWAR. We were into the idea and so we went ahead and made this horrible Don Vito character and we have this hideous Bam baby that comes out of his giant belly. Unfortunately, they get abused and murdered horribly. Far from being offended, Bam and Don Vito actually recorded dialogue lines for us to use in the live show.
This tour and all of the bands on the tour are a lot of fun. Having the main support slot, for us, is really exciting because there's not as much riding on us. We're set up, we do our soundcheck and we wind up with a lot more time to indulge in other projects and work on my art, hang around the bus and drink beer. Next thing you know, we do our set, it's about fifty minutes, we take everyone's head off, and then we can hang around and steal CRADLE OF FILTH's beer while they are on stage. It's a perfect way to end the whole "Beyond Hell" touring cycle. It's been about two years straight of touring for us. We got more shows in the United States and Europe off this album than we've gotten off any album since "Scumdogs of the Universe."
You've got these complete weirdos from Europe, VEINS OF JENNA, I guess they're like the GUNS AND ROSES of Europe or something and they are great fuckin' guys. They love America and are just freakin' out because they are on this tour. You've got CKY, and they play with a lot of heart. I had never really listened to them that much and then on this tour, I really started to pay attention to this particular band. They are on this tour because they are a kick-ass band, not because the drummer is Bam's brother. That's the stupid way of looking at CKY. They have a lot more to offer than that aspect and they really play with a lot of heart and soul. Then you have GWAR, of course, we rule. Then you have CRADLE OF FILTH, the freaks from England, you know. So, you've got four, very different groups playing on the same bill and everyone seems to get along great.
DB: Well, albums never do as well as you'd hoped because you always figure every one of them is going to be like, the magic bullet; that all of a sudden you're going to sell 500,000 copies and everyone is going to get rich. I mean that would be wonderful." Beyond Hell" certainly hasn't done that, but it didn't tank either. It's done good business and it's given us the opportunity to do good business by touring a lot.
The album is very strong and we are very proud of it. We have done story and concept albums before, but this is the one that consistently carries through really well. The story of GWAR's descent into Hell, fighting all of the monsters down there, and finally confronting the Lord of Hell himself is exciting. Every song is like a chapter in that story and we are really proud of it. Devon Townsend, our producer on that album, helped us get that together.
I'm really satisfied with "Beyond Hell." It's always great to sell more records, but it was definitely a critical success and people weren't tearing us apart for releasing a shitty record. Our last three records have been very solid musically and "Beyond Hell," was actually the culmination of all the ideas we kind of got going on the last two records, "War Party" and "Violence Has Arrived." I think the latest one is our strongest album . . . period.
BL: What are some of your favorite horror films?
DB: I would have to say that my most watched horror movie is the original DAWN OF THE DEAD. I've probably seen that title more than a hundred times on video and about thirty times when it was released at the theaters. I loved both of the NOSFERATU movies, not just the silent version with Max Schreck, but also the Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski remake. They're both fuckin' great.
DB: It's cool. I like playing outdoors when it's dark. The daytime thing doesn't work so well for GWAR. I think it turned out to work better for us than we thought it was going to because it was very colorful. You really could see the costumes very well, but GWAR does look better when it's murky, dark, black, and horrible. We don't mind playing outdoors, but I'd rather have GWAR playing in a big, dark nasty hall any day.
DB: Actually, I haven't seen that one yet. It's this weird habit I have where if I'm in the movie, I'll never watch it. I don't know why that is. It took me years to watch EMPIRE RECORDS. I think we even have AMERICAN HARDCORE here on the bus somewhere, but I haven't checked that one out yet. I heard it was really good, but I also heard that they left out a lot of important bands, especially the ones from the San Francisco scene, like the Dead Kennedys. So, I don't really know what's up with that.
BL: Yeah, they also left FEAR completely out of the film.
DB: Right. How can you leave FEAR out of a punk rock documentary? They were one of the best punk rock bands ever. I mean, they were one of the only punk rock bands that actually sounded good. They were so over the top, also. Lee Ving and FEAR were one of my favorite bands ever and to leave them out of that movie sucks, but hey, you can't put everybody in it.
DB: They produced and mixed the song "Horror of Yig." It was pretty much Jourgensen who did the whole thing for that song. He rode a motorcycle into the recording studio, took this huge bindle of cocaine out of his pocket, chopped up the word "Fugazi" in coke, snorted it all, and then worked for three days straight on that one song. He was just tapping it out on the mixing board.
When he was done, Paul Barker came in and mixed the "Black and Huge" track on the same album, which compared to "Horror of Yig," it was nothing. The thing about all of that is that I wasn't even there. I was back in Richmond and had sent the guys up to Chicago to do that because I had some other shit I had to take care of. I was kind of glad I didn't go.
BL: How's Chuck Varga [The Sexecutioner] doing?
DB: He's doing great. He's still living in New York and doing a lot of work for Broadway theaters. Every time I talk to him he's doing some really crazy stuff. He's got a really great girlfriend who is a performing artist. We miss him. We miss The Sexecutioner. There's even been some talk about having The Sexecutioner come back for a tour, but every time we see Chuck we're very happy, also.
He never died or was going blind, either. There was some weird rumor going around that he was almost dead, he had some crazy disease and he had to quit his job of building props because he was going blind. We heard all of this very alarming stuff about him. Then we were playing in New York and he appeared at the show. He looked healthy as a horse and had no idea what I was talking about when I asked him about his health.
BL: Well, Mr. Brockie, I think I have enough to work with here. Is there anything you'd like to discuss that I never touched upon?
DB: Just that everyone continues to support GWAR. We are probably going to take a little break after this tour and go back to Antarctica. We'll start thinking about what the next chapter of GWAR's storied evolution is going to be. So, you're going to have to deal without us for a little while. You're going to be left to your own devices, so play nicely and GWAR will return soon and make all of your nightmares come true.
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