GWAR at La Zona Rosa
All right, who's going to clean this up?
Five minutes into GWAR’s set, La Zona Rosa’s ceiling was covered in fake blood. The (thankfully water-soluble) gore heralded that, even approaching GWAR’s 25th anniversary, the now middle-aged “Scumdogs Of The Universe” still produce the show of every metalhead burnout’s dreams. Promising blood, shredded rubber limbs, cosmic death matches, and a lead singer who looks like a cross between a Rastafarian corpse and a Middle-earth Orc, this ravaged reverie is less nightmare than demented vaudeville act.
GWAR arrived halfway through its “Electile Dysfunction Tour,” which centers around recently reinstated fictional manager Sleazy P. Martini being proclaimed President of the Universe—a title that has something or other to do with winning the “Frank Sinatra Belt of Total World Domination.” Or whatever. The plot got a bit hazy, but of course, such details are secondary to GWAR’s primary goal: Unleashing a torrential downpour of fake viscera and declaring (even more fake) war on its audience. The band doesn’t refer to its live shows as “gladiatorial bloodfests” for nothing.
Make no mistake: A GWAR show doesn’t even begin until the audience has been splattered in the face—preferably the eyes—with blood from any number of ingenious devices. First there was the Piledriver, a man-sized mounted water gun that unleashed torrents of goo. Then came a sacrificial baby, ripped in half by a sword-wielding GWAR slave in a loincloth. And when it came time for a breather, a 10-foot long syringe injected crack into singer Oderus Urungus’ penis. But lest one think GWAR is capable of nothing but such base entertainments, this tour also finds the band staging politically themed interludes that comment poignantly on the modern electoral system.
Just kidding. Actually, hideous, rubberized versions of John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton did battle with GWAR villains BoneSnapper and Bozo Destructo, with every bout ending in the politicians’ plasma-gushing destruction. But along with the cheap shocks of seeing McCain’s torso ripped away, Obama’s neck snapped, and Clinton’s breasts torn off to reveal dual blood-spurters, these matches valiantly stabbed at satire: McCain hobbled on stage to a voiceover boasting of his Hanoi heroics, while Clinton double-crossed her teammate Obama before ultimately being betrayed by her own ladyparts. Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly The Colbert Report—actually, it’s not even MADtv—but give GWAR points for picking up a newspaper once in a while.
As always, the true stars were GWAR themselves, and whatever cackling engineer in the band’s fabled Antarctic compound designed the band’s current larger-than-life outfits truly outdid themselves. Both Oderus Urungus and guitarist Flattus Maximus sported masks made of raw flesh, while bassist Beefcake the Mighty, drummer Jizmak Da Gusha, and guitarist Balsac the Jaws of Death balanced towering headdresses and KISS-style platform boots as they shredded through classics “Ham On Bone” and “We Kill Everything.” Of course, the music is the absolute last reason to see a GWAR show, not because it’s ear-splittingly awful—on the contrary, over two decades of playing the band has become remarkably proficient at its mediocre metal—but because its merely a framework for GWAR’s over-the-top antics.
As GWAR ended its set with an encore of the eminently silly “Slaughterama”—which calls for the heads of hippies, “art fags,” neo-Nazis, and anyone else who crosses their path—the stage became a haze of red and green blood cells shimmering over the plasma-soaked audience. And once they’d “killed everybody that’s worth killing,” GWAR’s intergalactic horror show spluttered to a close, albeit with the promise that they’d be back real soon. The proudly worthless scum who worship them couldn’t have been happier.
