What is identity? What happens the entire world knows your alter-ego, but for the most part only real fans know who you are? Would you even care, or perhaps even prefer it to be this way? Are you more free to be as crazy as possible under a mask? These questions that have surely come across the brilliant, twisted mind of Dave Brockie from time to time. Dave is better known by his gregarious alter-ego, mutant from another world, Oderus Urungus of the mighty GWAR. Hellbent on sex, blood, mass destruction, murdering celebrities, calling out hypocrisy, and spewing mass quantities fluids on crowds at shows for over thirty years, it’s nice work if you can get it. Along the way Oderus has become an icon, appearing on cable news shows, TV shows (Holliston), and other turns in pop culture. Ghost Cult’s Omar Cordy was treated to a very different personality backstage in New York City recently, when Brockie as Brockie waxed on about his long career, the ups and downs of a being in a constantly working band, GWAR’s recent album Battle Maximus (Metal Blade), paying attention to your fans, and more.
GWAR has been a band for over thirty years and Dave Brockie is road warrior in every sense. Chatting with him before the show, he seems incredibly grounded and happy. He’s also smarter than your average musician that has slogged it our for this long playing in punk and metal bands. He talked first about juggling his personal life:
“Luckily I’m not married, I don’t have any significant others, I don’t have any children-that I know of.(laughs) I think by know if I accidentally have procreated I would have known it. I’ve certainly been the center of a few paternity suits and I was always ready to do the right thing if truly that had happened. Luckily I’ve been smart or fortunate enough or perhaps I’m just sterile, I don’t know. But so far I have not reproduced myself accidentally. Even when I fell down the stairs in LA on to that porn star. No, no kids. Ya know, the fact that my family all lives in England so basically I’ve been able to put all my time and energy into this project. So I don’t have a family I’m leaving behind. Which is difficult I know for most people in bands especially who have kids. So by design I decided if I’m gonna to be the lead singer and one of the leading guys yo make this thing happen I’m going to limit that as much as possible. Basically GWAR is my family and I take my family with me everywhere. It still will wreak havoc on anyone’s life but ya know. That’s what we do. If people start bitching about it I say to them: “Well how about if you were in the military and you had to leave for a year and a half to two years at a time?” Or even worst than that six months go by and your family doesn’t even know where you are? You on a submarine or some special forces mission or whatever. Hardship and deprivation are things we have to go through to chase our dreams. And the crazier the dreams, probably the more you’re going have to suffer in your personal life. So as long as you understand that from the get go then you don’t have anything to bitch about.”
When you have as long a career as GWAR does, it’s easy to forget that they have had several distinct bodies of work musically and perhaps three main eras of the band in terms of styles. Brockie discusses paying tribute to all of GWAR history, every show even though it is hard to pick a set list.
“Because we want to play stuff that’s representative of the band from the many different styles we’ve gone through. 
We like to be able to play at least one song from every album and that doesn’t happen. So often we’ll miss entire albums and we get” oh why didn’t yo play “Fish Fuck?” or whatever. It;s just like 13 records at least 10 songs a record, that’s a lot of freaking songs. It’s hard to pick out the ones you want to play the best. It’s very hard, I mean all those lyrics!? I mean I’m really good at remembering stuff. I have a terrible memory for remembering everything except paying bills or remembering someone’s phone number I mean forget about it. I can pull out stuff like Vicki Lawrence’s ‘The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia’. For some reason, those lyrics will be burned into my brain forever. But even then most of the GWAR songs are so verbose, there’s so many lyrics in them I have no idea what I was talking about. They’ll be like “well this is what you were saying” and I’ll be like “whoa, I wrote that?” So yeah, a lot of review is involved and a lot of rehearsal, that’s just what we do.”
“All Gwar fans have their favorite song, all Gwar fans have their favorite album, and at this point now some of those albums are twenty-five years old. Which is absolutely freaking mind-blowing to me. When I was a kid, bands would come with a few good albums then a few crappy ones and they’d be done. The Beatles only played live for like six years or something like that and Hendrix, his whole career was over a four year period. Granted he was playing in a lot of bands up until The Experience, but his real-time to shine was such a short period of time. Now bands led by The Rollings Stones and others can go on forever. So GWAR’s had this get opportunity to continue to progress and evolve as musicians. I always told a lot of people, that by design GWAR is a band meant to last a thousand years, and one of these days when I get to old to do this anymore I will hand pick and hand train my successor, and “The Son of Oderus” will be born. That way GWAR can continue on into the next century and beyond.”
WOW! That will be uh-
“YEAH! A lot of people are like oh we miss Slymenstra. Sure it was great back in the day we had Sexecutioner. Those were really the glory days of the GWAR. When we had like two tour buses full of people and every song at least three people were getting their heads ripped off. But at certain point we realized we cant keep doing it this way. We have to kind of trim it back just a little bit. If we really want this band to go as far and be as successful as we think it can be, we have to be able to come up with a plan for the future. And the plan is to keep rocking and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of end in sight. As long as were putting out music that is good and as long a people are still having fun with it and first and foremost WE’RE still having fun with it. Then GWAR can continue forever. There so many things we haven’t done yet. We haven done a video game, we’ve been in plenty of other peoples video games and movies but we never had our own. Hopefully that will happen one of these days.”
Why should Mr. Perfect be destroyed?
“Well because he sucks ya know? He’s a representation of the ruling elite and how they want to subvert and enslave 99% of the world. So 1% of it can enjoy 99% of the fruits of earth. It’s a very grim version of our interpretation of the future history of this planet. It’s not really a good forecast for the human race. The disparity between the haves and the have-nots gets bigger and bigger every year. The sins of the past, how this country was built on genocide and slavery are things we haven’t we just kind of glossed them over it and moved forward. This things do need to be addressed because they are festering wounds that have scabbed over but if you don’t deal with a wound correctly its gonna come out someway, somewhere, somehow and I guaranty it’ll be bad. What this country needs is a leader who can really step up and put this things on the table and deal with them in a logical fashion. I think a lot of people thought Barack was gonna be about that. Were still not really sure whats goin on with Barack. But basically Mr Prefect is a representation of that ultimate power gone ultimately crazy. That’s why he (Mr. Prefect) needs to be destroyed so we can obliterate the line between the elites and the rest of us and get this world going in the right direction.”
That day isn’t coming anytime soon, however. Brockie still has a lot of fire left in him when it comes to his place in the world. Battle Maximus may be a humourus story, but couched inside of it is a blatant indictment of our times politically. It reminds us of the old Washington DC punk and hardcore days that Brockie came from with Death Piggy, the band that was a pre-cursor to GWAR:
“I’ll never forget where I came from. I was lucky enough to be around for the birth of punk rock. The hippie era and Woodstock era was dying out and I was right there for the birth of hardcore and the resurgence of metal. I remember being a fan at the Rock Against Reagan shows in 1989, 1990 and every punk band in the world was playing. They played the mall right in front The Lincoln Memorial. Dead Kennedys, Fear, Black Flag, Minor Threat, and the Bad Brains. It was like a who’s who of bands. It was such an energy and such a rebellion and wit, it really had an amazing effect on me, that’s where my roots are. I always felt like I was still in that same mindset and basically when I turned 18 I stayed the same person and now I’m freaking 50 years old now ya know? And I’m still doing the same thing. My enthusiasm is undimmed if anything it’s more vehement than ever. Because as my days as a human become more and more numbered, there’s more I want to accomplish and I know that GWAR inspires people. And as long as we can keep making great rebel music until the day that I die, I’ve accepted that’s our role. Ya know a lot of artists work their whole lives and never get any kind of attention or backup. So I’ve really been given an amazing opportunity and I never intend to squander a second of it.”
Switching gears, Dave talked about the lasting effect the death of Cory Smoot in November of 2011 had him and the band. The healing process is ongoing:
“Every year we will be doing The Cory Smoot Memorial Show down in Richmond (VA). The Smoot Family Fund will always be cranking, and through our fans and our efforts we basically raised enough money to put his daughter through school. It’s like anything we do to honor his legacy, we always will.
“We wrote this whole new album kind of about that. The Battle Maximus is not a battle against Mr. Perfect to save the human race against medical enslavement. It’s really a metaphor for how anybody can deal with the worst life can throw at you. Now, finally after getting the record out and seeing that its critically acclaimed, the fans backed us completely, and the fans back Pustulus (Cory’s replacement), I know that we’ve been successful. I hope that inspires people in their lives. No matter what kind of shit life takes on your fucking head there is the strength within you to somehow not only just carry but to actually turn it into a positive. I hope that’s what we did.”
“It made us reevaluate ourselves and birthed the fire inside of ourselves not to just to pay tribute to just Corey and Flattus but to also be an example to everybody that’s faced with such a situation. We wanted to inspire people on how to deal with it. Ya know? “Hows GWAR gonna possibly deal with this!?” Well, we did. We finished the tour as a four piece. We wrote this whole new album kind of about that. The Battle Maximus is not a battle against Mr. Perfect to save the human race against medical enslavement. It’s really a metaphor for how anybody can deal with the worse life can throw at you. Now finally after getting the record out and seeing that its critically acclaimed the fans backed completely and the fans back Pustulus I know that we’ve been successful. and I hope that inspires people in their lives. No matter what kind of shit life takes on your fucking head there is the strength within you to somehow not only just carry but to actually turn it into a positive. I hope that’s what we did.”
You’ve worked with guys like Devin Townsend before, how is it nowadays with your own studio?
“Great, great guy. We were taking notes the whole way. This last record was our first record we did in our own studio. We actually built a lot of it with Corey over the years. Basically he was gonna to be our engineer and producer on this one. So it was very sad that he wasn’t there for us but he got us to that point and there was no way we were gonna let him down. Working with guys like Devin, working with guys like Ron and Steve those so many different producers and other people we’ve come in contact with over the years we just learned so much from all of them. With this record, we’ve semi co produced before but this was the first time we had our own studio. Everybody involved, it’s not like having someone come I for two weeks and get rid of them again, they were all GWAR lifers ya know.”
“Working with guys like Devin we learned so much from them and we just felt like it was time to do it. It was the greatest yet. Now we don’t have to hire a producer again, we never have to fly to Vancouver to do vocal tracks. Everything is done at slave pit studios and having that 24/7 access, if you’re awake at 3 in the morning and come up with a cool idea for a song. Bam! five minutes later I can be in my studio recording the riff making it happen.”
Words and concert photos by Omar Cordy