Thursday, March 27, 2014

RIP ODERUS URUNGUS


On a lazy summer afternoon
whilst home from college
my best pals drove up to my house and shouted,

GET IN!

When I asked obvious questions like 
WHY 
and 
WHERE ARE WE GOING 
they replied with one word:

GWAR

I eyed them quizzically.
I say, good fellows...
What, pray tell, is a GWAR?

But they wouldn't say.
And we drove all the way into Philadelphia
with nary an explanation.

Eventually we ended up at a club called
The Revival.


Ah... music!
We got there in time to see
A Sub Pop band 
I liked a lot.
So that was cool.

But afterwards
 the stage became thick and choked with smoke.
An unholy heavy metal racket erupted 
from within and
ENORMOUS
HULKING 
CREATURES
stalked out from it's depths.


They were legion.
Some had instruments.
Most bore giant cartoonish weapons.
Some just leapt around in a less-than-half-naked state.
And it was only a matter of minutes before 
someone/thing was decapitated in a hail of 
fake blood, latex and 
EW...
was that raw meat?

This was


They were loud.
They were violent.
They were offensive.
They were funny.
And they were so over-the-top
in so many ways that you could't help but 
admire the lengths they went to entertain.

I saw them play many times afterwards.
Sometimes on tiny stages
and other times in venues large enough 
to be attacked by
a crack addicted dinosaur named
Gor Gor:


They were ALWAYS being attacked by something.
A giant robot sent from the Vatican
A Government Superhero Morality Squad
A Cybernetic Dead President
You name it.

Nothing was sacred.
Nothing was too ridiculous.
And they made fun of themselves even more than
they did everything else. 

So you could see why I thought they'd be 
perfect for an episode of
Codename: Kids Next Door.

Well...
not perfect.

I could't let this band of 
ultra-violent 
intergalactic 
perverted 
drug-addicted 
weirdos
ANYWHERE NEAR
a kids show.

But I could use their music.

I had the idea of taking two of their songs,
stripping out the lyrics
and rewriting them
to make a KND rock opera.

So I approached the band about getting the rights to the music for
and

And they agreed!
Even with the stipulation that 
we could only credit them as 
RAWG.

Great, right?!
Except no one in the band knew 
where the master tapes were.
So what'd they do?

THEY 
RE-RECORDED 
THE SONGS FOR US!

I'm still kicking myself for not 
making the time to fly down 
to Virginia to see them record.

Once we got the songs,
I doodled up a sooper rough board for
rock star storyboard artist 
She promptly threw it in the trash 
and made something better.

And thus
was born!


And now I hear that 
GWAR
founder and lead singer



I got to meet him once when he was 
in NYC for a GWAR art show.
 He was very nice,
very funny
and a great storyteller.

Sorry to see you go,
Oderus.
You made heavy metal fun!


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