Members of GWAR show off their menacing mugs. Credit: Courtesy Photo / GWAR

Hilarious and terrifying — hilarifying? — the band GWAR is bringing its hostile alien takeover back to San Antonio.

The band, which turned 40 this year, will bring its costumed and very messy take on metallic shock rock to Vibes Event Center on Saturday, Nov. 16, with Dark Funeral and Squid Pisser opening the show.

In anticipation of the show, the Current caught up with GWAR frontman Blothar the Berserker in anticipation of the show.

Sadly, due to an injury, Blothar won’t be sporting his notorious sideways vagina surrounded by blood-spewing dicks. But don’t worry, the audience will get covered in blood anyway — and they’ll love it.

Even 40 years on, the world is still not ready for GWAR, Blothar told us during the wide-ranging conversation that included his education in ethnomusicology and recollection of playing revered San Antonio punk club Taco Land.

OK. So, first of all, do I refer to you as Mike, Michael, Mr. Bishop, or Blothar the Berserker?

Well, you can call me Blothar the Berserker, but periodically, I’ll slip in and out of my human form, as the question requires.

Right. So you are an intergalactic goblin?

Well, not a goblin. Goblins are little. I am an intergalactic alien. I am part of the Scum Dogs of the Universe, which is an army of elite warriors that unfortunately made some serious mistakes and were banished to the planet Earth, where we started a rock band.

I don’t know if you follow Earth politics at all, but in this momentous time in history, I’m wondering if you can give a bird’s eye view of our civilization, our democracy and how it contrasts with your home planet of Scumdoggia. How does your home planet pick its leaders?

Well, of course, our leaders are all creatures on Scumdoggia, grown in a lab in the syntho-wombs of the planet. And, you know, they’re pretty much bred for the purpose, so we don’t really have elections, so to speak. We just have tyrannical rulers that tell us what to do and what not to do.

Yeah, so a bird’s eye view of Earth politics and the Earth situation … I mean, you know, good job, America. Another great choice. At least we’ll have something to talk about for the next four years. Or who knows, maybe it goes longer than that.

He’s hilarious. At least there’s that, right? A true entertainer.

But no, I mean, it’s just gonna be weird and difficult, and who knows if their plans will come to fruition. Let’s hope not too much damage is done.

I’d imagine that tyrannical takeovers are kind of the norm on Scumdoggia just based on your tyrannical takeover of the slave pit.

No, on Scumdoggia, we serve a being called the Master. You ever see the Planter’s peanut guy? That’s him. And that’s a mean son of bitch right there. Our leaders rule with an iron fist. But that’s okay. I mean, you have order. So, it’s the blessings of fascism. The beauty of a society built on domination.

Blothar the Berserker took over as GWAR’s frontman after the death of Dave Brockie in 2014. Credit: Courtesy Photo / GWAR

Right. I wonder if that’s what we have to look forward to.

Well, I mean, humans … truly surpassed the Master as far as being bloodthirsty, hairless baboons waging war on each other. And it’s gotten difficult for GWAR to keep up with the chaos of humanity.

How do you continue to bring us horrors beyond our comprehension when humans are so good at perpetrating horrors against each other?

Yeah, I mean, we really can’t. You know, when we started, it’s not like you could watch YouTube and see somebody have their head cut off. But, we would do that on stage and people would be like, “Ahhh!” But now, people are just like, “Oh, yeah, here they come, cutting heads off.”

I want to talk about your upcoming visitation to San Antonio. What can fans expect from the night at Vibes?

I think what you can expect is a GWAR show. I mean, we come and we present what, something like musical theater? It’s hilarious. There’s props, it’s spectacle and it’s outrageous. GWAR truly breaks the frame of rock ‘n’ roll performance. We’ve reshaped it to the point that the band just doesn’t fit into these spaces. But we’ve always made it fit.

I’m trying to imagine GWAR fitting into Taco Land, the tiny, long-running and sadly defunct San Antonio club you once played. This was back in, what, ’88 or ‘89?

Yeah. I mean, it was a smaller scale performance, but the impact on the space was the same. Now we just are sort of bigger and uglier and we’ve grown into these spaces, but we’ve always stretched at their limits.

Taco Land was one of the greatest gigs in GWAR history. I mean, nobody in this band will ever forget that experience.

In the early days, GWAR would put on a show that was just bananas with a giant cockroach that got sprayed with a big RAID can and there was a woman juggling torches or blowing fire and all kinds of weird executions and spraying people with blood.

And we would do that anywhere we played. Taco Land was hardly the smallest place that GWAR played. I mean, we played the Covered Wagon in San Francisco, which was tiny. We played all kinds of little submarine shops, you name it.

But the thing that was special about Taco Land was the people who were there, right?

Like Ram, the owner. He was a hilarious guy. Like, you’ve got this dude that’s just this crazy dick swinging nut bag with like a bevy of big-ass women that were taking their tops off and dancing around him.

It was insane. He’s literally pouring tequila down people’s throats, spanking fannies and grabbing boobies. It was a bacchanal of degeneracy.

When we got there, we loaded all the shit in, and it’s this daytime scene at a bar. You got a few of your truly dedicated drinkers.

I go over to the jukebox and I would always play the number one song. That was my thing. And so I go over and I put a quarter in. The number one song is this awful, racist David Allan Coe song. And I was like, “Oh, my God, where are we at?”

But they started to see the props that we brought in.

And so, like, all the people who were there went and got their friends and their relatives to come. And that’s what would often happen at GWAR shows when we were first touring and we were just playing in some town where nobody knew who we were.

So three people would be there for the first song, but by the time we got to the third or fourth song, there’d be a hundred people there because what we were doing on stage was so crazy that they would just go and get people.

Tell me you’ve ever been to a show like that where what’s happening onstage makes people go and say, “Hey, you gotta come. What are you doing? Leave work early. You gotta go see this shit.”

GWAR skewers Donald Trump and U.S. politics during a 2016 performance in Chicago. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / swimfinfan

And that’s also before cell phones. I know there was a pay phone at Taco Land, but that’s logistically difficult.

Yeah, they all got there, though. And so, yeah, it figures huge in our remembrance of what GWAR was.

Because when GWAR plays live, it’s like, anything is permissible. People watch and they say, “God, these guys are doing this. You’re not supposed to do this. That means I can do anything.” And that’s the sort of the positivity of GWAR.

So, San Antonio is a special place to us.

You know, the promoter who put the Sex Pistols there? We met him that night.

Because the promoter at the time was this guy named Baby Black Jesus. I have no idea what his real name was. And he was just hammered on coke.

He said, “I want you to meet the guy who booked the Sex Pistols here. You know, he’s a legendary promoter, right?” So, we go to this bar called Phazez, and he’s in the bathroom. And this dude is, like, hammered.

He’s this older guy, and he’s leaning over a toilet. His pants are around his ankles. And Baby Black Jesus is like, “You gotta see these guys.”

And then he falls on his back with urine arcing over his own body on the floor. You know, that was San Antonio.

I remember taking a dump in a Dixie cup.

Was that because that guy was occupying the toilet?

Yeah, you couldn’t get in there. I mean, he was pissing all over himself. I really had to go. And we just, like, you know, went out in the parking lot. And I don’t even know why we bothered with the Dixie cup. At least we could have grabbed a Solo cup or something.

Wow. I’m impressed, honestly. That’s precision.

It was fucking horrible. And just the best time, man. Never forget it.

The band continued on after the death of frontman David Brockie in 2014. What was that transition like and how were you brought back in after that point?

So, I had been the bass player in the band and I had sang songs and wrote songs in GWAR.

And, really, besides Dave, I was the only person who had written lyrics that became well-known GWAR songs. It just made sense when Dave passed, which was very sad and unexpected. He left behind a group of people who had put a lot of effort, a lot of human capital into this. So, it was not as difficult as people imagined for the band to keep going.

Were you there for the Viking funeral that they held for Oderus Urungus at Gwar-B-Q? What was that like?

It was bananas. We set the costume of Oderus on a boat, covered it in Vaseline and gas and then paid an archer to shoot a flaming arrow right onto it. And then it exploded into flames.

And it’s just billowing black smoke because, for whatever reason, they didn’t use a wooden boat. They just used like a regular shitty old fiberglass boat. So it was just careening out of control.

I certainly didn’t expect there to be a 20 foot high wall of flame. It was completely out of control and spewing black smoke. And the fire department came. We also didn’t anchor it — it was adrift, which is fine if you’re a Viking and it’s, like, on an ocean, right?

This was just a shitty little man-made pond with a thousand or more people standing around watching it. And everybody was running away screaming. It was perfect, really.

And I know you just welcomed a new lead guitarist in February — Tommy Meehan — who I originally know from Deaf Club but has also been in Cancer Christ and Squid Pisser, who are opening for you. What’s it been like welcoming him into the fold?

Tommy is a blessing in every possible way. I mean, you know, he’s a just a really warm and solid and positive person.

You have to have tremendous talent. But, also, there has to be something wrong with you so that you would withstand the everyday tortures of being in a band like GWAR. I mean, it’s difficult. Putting on the outfit, going out there. You know, because in GWAR, you’re just trying not to die every night.

And Tommy definitely gets it. He knows what GWAR is about. And if this band continues beyond the current incarnation of musicians, it will be because he takes it there. He’s the first person I’ve ever met that I would feel OK about handing this creation to.

In addition to the many ghouls who have served in the slave pit, there are still others who almost did. I’m thinking about one Dave Grohl in particular, of course. Can you share that story?

Well, I mean, obviously he made the wrong decision.

You know, he could have been suffering with us, but, you know, it was obvious that this was a really good drummer, a really powerful musician. And at the time GWAR had good draw.

We’re putting like 800 or 1,000 people in venues every night, and that’s a big deal. And he came from the exact same place we did, which is the American punk-rock underground. My kid band played with his kid band. I’d known him since I was about 15 years old.

And it wasn’t a big stretch when GWAR needed a drummer to say, “Hey, you know, here’s this guy.” He had been playing in Scream at the time, and we saw each other at a party that they were playing in Richmond.

And our guitar player had spoken with him and said, hey, maybe you could come down and try out for this because we need a drummer. It never even got to that point, I think, because he decided that he didn’t want to do it. I think he knew that he had some other options.

You actually have a PhD in music ethnography, correct? So, I’m wondering, as a musical ethnographer, how would you describe GWAR’s place in the zeitgeist?

I think that GWAR is a tremendously important shock rock band.

I also think that GWAR is an important punk band because it takes the ethos of punk rock and, at the same time, the pageantry of glam and the outrageousness of shock rock and really builds on one of the essential but often under-acknowledged elements of punk rock — its fucking humor, right?

And just sort of GWAR’s position in that history and in that narrative is a very important place. And I think that the band is criminally underrated as far as its music goes. Like, the world is just not ready for GWAR.

$34-$36, 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 16, Vibes Event Center, 1223 E. Houston St., (210) 255-3833, vibeseventcenter.com.

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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2024.

Stephanie Koithan is the Digital Content Editor of the San Antonio Current. In her role, she writes about politics, music, art, culture and food. Send her a tip at skoithan@sacurrent.com.