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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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