GWAR is a band of interplanetary warriors. They were once part of the fighting force Scumdogs of the Universe, but got banished to earth after gaining a reputation for being fuck-ups. Since 1984 they’ve been performing shock rock songs with hilariously violent and grotesque lyrics. At their live shows they perform in elaborate outfits, execute politicians and pop culture figures, and spray gallons of blood and semen over the crowds. If you’ve never seen them before then just think of GWAR as the professional wrestling version of heavy metal.

GWAR is currently on your and you can catch them In Austin this Thursday, May 22nd, at Radio East, and their new EP The Return of Gor Gor comes out on July 17th.

I sat down with lead vocalist, Blöthar the Berserker, to talk about all things GWAR.

GWAR has been a band for over 40 years. How does that feel? Did you ever think it would last this long?

I didn't think it would last 10 minutes, I'll be honest with you. But 40 years later, look at us go... and I mean like, look at us go to the bathroom. There's a long line for the bathroom at night now on the bus because we're all older… and wiser… and less continent. These are the ways things have changed.

I don't know, man. I mean, I don't know if we knew that GWAR would last as long as it did. I think we thought we would make our money and then get out of it. You know what I mean? Just hit it and quit it. We can make a fortune and we'd invest it in something like pinball machines or something. Skill games that you put up in convenience stores, ruin people's lives with. But instead, we decided we would continue ruining people's lives with music. That's what we do.

I'm sorry, Spencer. I didn't mean to give you a strange answer. The simple truth of the matter is that when we started GWAR, we thought it was a rock band that we were having fun with. We didn't know that it would take this long, but I mean, you know, we're still waiting for our next big break. laughs I feel like we're the next big thing. I think the world is ready for some 55 to 60-year-old men, half naked, on stage, dressed like monsters. I think that's what they want. I think the kids like that. Young people can identify with having to wait to use the bathroom because your prostate doesn't work.

Blothar, I don't want you to ever apologize for a strange answer. That's what we're here for.

Okay. All right. I don't apologize. I’m tired of apologizing for who I am, which is a fat motherfucker.

Blothar the Berserker

It's been 40 years, and in those 40 years, there's you've had some turnover in the band. There are people who have been in it for a brief period and then left. Oderus Urungus passed away in 2014. Do you see this band continuing past the current members? Is GWAR going to exist forever?

No, I don’t think so. Honestly, I think that our fans would like that, some of them. I think that GWAR will survive in some form, but the band as it is now I think that it'll last until…

The thing about it is that there's a very unique commitment to one another that makes this band work. The simple truth of the matter is that we can't find people who are willing to make that commitment because GWAR comes with a great deal of sacrifice. We were so lucky to find Tommy Meehan to become Grodius, and the reason for that was that he understands GWAR. But I mean, we got lucky with him, as lucky as we did with Dave Brockie, in a sense, right? We managed to find somebody who understood this band. That's important, but it's kind of more important, less so from the music side than it is from the art side: getting people that understand GWAR. Musicians are used to sucking dirt for a living. They do that all the time. It's not at all unusual to be a poor musician, but to be a poor metal fabricator? laughs The hard skills that we need people to have in order to put this thing on stage. That's a little harder to come by, people that are willing to make that sacrifice. So I sometimes feel like maybe it will stop with Matt Maguire and Bob Gorman. How are we going to replace them?

I do think that it could get to a point where we're the executives that are running a crew of people that make stuff, but you know, I don't think it's gonna last forever.

Let's hope that day is far, far in the future... But also in the future, this July, you have a new EP, The Return of Gor Gor. It comes out with a comic, and you are on a tour. Can you tell me about Gor Gor, this project, and these shows?

We decided to do something different and write a couple of songs instead of writing a whole album. And we put together an EP that goes with a comic and essentially tells the story of GWAR's pet dinosaur, Gor Gor. After Oderus dies, Gor Gor winds up on the streets and is captured by a circus trade or... Oh no, no, that's right. She's marauding across the countryside because I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but Godzilla has a problem with trains. And the train is a circus train, and the circus train crashes into Gor Gor, killing the mother, and so the child is adopted. It's very sad. It's like a Disney movie. It's like Dumbo, right? Then little Gorgor is raised by circus people who don't treat him very well, and he becomes a prostitute. A dinosaur prostitute. A lot lizard if you will. Trying to make money the way lot lizards make money. That doesn't work out because you can't really get a hand job from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It's going to end badly. And this show that we're doing, Gor Gor shows up on stage, you know, having made the cycle complete.

You're putting out the EP and the comic together, are you writing those at the same time? Does one come first or are they made in companion with each other?

With this we wrote a basic idea for the comic, but wanting it to be based around the music, like once the music was in place, and by music I mean lyrics, right? Like, once the narrative was put together. The songs that influenced the storyline of the comic which was written by members of GWAR, Mike Derks and Matt Maguire. They sort of worked together on the lyrics. We came up with some stuff that would work in the narrative of a comic, and then that shows up there. That's why Gwar is so fun to do because you have a multi-leveled presentation. You're able to write comics, you're able to write video screenplays, all kinds of things.

GWAR's Tiny Desk Concert

I really enjoyed the 2021 EP Place With No Name, which contained acoustic versions of GWAR songs. What was it like re-recording material? And do you have plans for more stylistically different songs, a jazz GWAR album or something like that?

Yeah, probably not jazz. We've talked about a country record for a while. Like a real country record. We haven't done that. I mean, it would be fucking a blast. GWAR can do all kinds of stuff. That's one of the great things about Tommy Meehan is that he's really familiar in writing a lot of different modes, a lot of different styles from working making soundtracks for cartoons and stuff. Plus there's a lot of music making opportunities in GWAR. You get to make the music that goes on while we're playing, right? Like, you know, because it's a dramatic presentation, the show. So there's music throughout it. It's really cool.

There's a lot of GWAR tie-in products, from comic books to board games to sex toys to a whiskey. What other products would you like GWAR to get involved with? What's next in that realm?

We just came out with a line of booty shorts. We think all kinds of weird ideas, anything that you can imagine, we’d like to do. Next I think we'd like to have a GWAR program at a university so that you could graduate with a BS in GWAR. We would insist, even though it's clearly an art, we would insist that it be considered a Bachelor of Science just so we could have the initials BS and GWAR.

Image: Ross Jones

At a show last year, and this is something that happens at a lot of your shows, you murdered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which seems to be a strong pro-Palestinian statement, but I've also seen you appear on Fox News. I'm curious what GWAR's politics are, or if you're just picking hot-button issues to play with? What are the intentions behind that?

I think that GWAR's politics are chaos, always. It's always been that way, that GWAR is on the side of chaos, but it's definitely not just picking hot-button issues and saying something. Although I will say that there's a really long tradition in punk music of being sort of politically ambiguous. I mean, you know, I don't think that that Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees was a Nazi, but she wore like SS outfits. You know, it's just kind of weird. There's always been that, like, you know, Blitzkrieg Bop, whatever. Punk is kind of populist, and can be turned to all kinds of messages.

For us, we side with chaos, and we also tend to side with humans that are suffering in some way. We like them because we want to make them suffer. We don't want to watch humans make humans suffer. So that's a little bit of an answer, but not much of one. I don't know. GWAR is political in its own terms. You know, like pinning it down and saying what's behind it would kind of fuck it all up, right? You know it's more about reception. Like that's part of how GWAR is special, right? Is that we don't close that loop. We let people make their own meaning from what we do. That's important, it's an important part of it.

This is a very personal question. I was doing some research, Blothar, and I found your Reddit account. You posted almost exactly a year ago on the r/Wendy's subreddit about the frosty size at your local Wendy's. I need to know what was happening and are there any updates on that?

I was irate. I was enraged because Wendy's had the audacity to make their Frosty’s like so small. I mean, it's shrinkflation, which is bullshit, fucking bullshit. But you know, I wanted a Frosty. You know that when I go to Wendy's now to get the amount of Frosty that I need, I have to buy three Frostys. Fucking ridiculous. So yeah, I was pissed off, man. And I put it on Reddit. Because I wanted help. I want people to say “am I the asshole? Am I the asshole for wanting a regular Frosty to be a regular Frosty?” I don't know.

Did you get the help you wanted?

I did not. It's just fucking disappointment. It’s all I got.

I'm really sorry, Blothar.

It’s a long road to recovery. I mean it's cool, I can still get the volume of Frosty I need, but it just costs a lot of money… I shouldn't have made that post.

I want to end by asking: what music are you listening to? Anything recent? Anything we might not expect?

Lately, I've been listening to this band called Trash Panda. I like them a lot. They’re a death Metal band that makes pooping sounds for their vocals. I like that when they go imitates death metal vocals.

I remember one time a little 10-year-old kid came up to me with his father. The kid was like, “you should sing like this” imitates death metal vocals. And I said, “you should start your own band, you little piece of shit”. I told him, that little eight year old won't be shooting his mouth off anymore.