I recently sat down with Blothar and Pustulus Maximus of the incomparable GWAR at the legendary Toad’s Place in New Haven, CT for dynamic one-on-one interviews. The frontman and guitarist of the heavy metal horde had a lot of interesting things to say that you surely won’t forget!
BLOTHAR
Alex Obert: How does being in New Haven compare to other parts of the galaxy?
Blothar: It looks like a little shitty Earth town to me. It looks like we’re all on the campus of some kind of fucking learning institution, especially judging by the looks of the students running around. Everybody looks like they’re ready to slit their wrists because they’re under so much pressure to get good grades. There’s a lot of ugly chicks. Lots of morbidly obese, fat people walking around the street with grease on their lips. Bunch of Hasidic Jews on the corner trying to hand out pamphlets, it’s awesome. It’s fucking great.
Alex Obert: When you’re not touring and you’re looking to get away for a bit, where you travel to for vacationing?
Blothar: While you asked how this compares to any place on the galaxy, well this place on the planet Earth fucking sucks. What if I want to have a vacation, I usually go somewhere like the moons of Jupiter. Our fat fucking bass player believes that there’s something circling the rings of Saturn, some sort of a shape, a hexagon or something up there. Maybe we’ll go there next week when we get off the tour. It’d be nice to blow off some steam by actually blowing off some sailors, if you know what I mean!
Alex Obert: What have you thought about your travels on this tour so far?
Blothar: Our travels on this tour so far, everything has been great. It’s not exactly great, okay? I’m asleep, I wake up every day onstage in front of screaming metalheads and then we perform a set. It’s that way every single day, every place we go. It’s always the same. But so far, the fans have been reacting well to the show. They like it. Just as always, they come looking for a GWAR show and that’s what they get. They see death, they see people being torn apart onstage, they see space aliens playing rock music. And they get the opportunity to pay tribute to the greatest rock ‘n roll singer ever to live, Oderus Urungus.
Alex Obert: How do you travel around?
Blothar: We travel by a bat-shaped helicopter, the bus is an optical illusion. You look at it and you see a bus, we look at it and we see a bat-shaped helicopter. I don’t think you can handle seeing what we see. It is a bat-shaped helicopter that hovers above the venue and then we repel down on ropes to come into the venue. Except for me, I come in through a time wormhole.
Alex Obert: And when do you think you guys will travel to Stonehenge to play a show?
Blothar: It’s interesting that you would mention those two things together because Stonehenge is a croquet course that we set up a long time ago. Humans are just so fucking stupid because they think it has some kind of mystical meaning, it really doesn’t. We were having a picnic and we were in England, which of course meant that we were fucking depressed because that place fucking sucks, even worse than New Haven. And when I look around this place, what I see is a place that looks like it aspires to be England. Certainly fucking Yale. So anyway, croquet.
Alex Obert: Now that you are in GWAR, what life lessons are you looking to teach the other members of the band so they can be as rad as you?
Blothar: Mainly what I try to impart to my fellow band members is that you can’t teach hatred, it’s born. The other beings that populate GWAR, they all are born with the same undying hatred of humanity. And there’s not really a lot of teaching that I can do. But I am, so to speak, a sort of spiritual leader and I try to keep them focused on the things that are important. Of course the things that are important are mainly just a bunch of trivial bullshit. Mainly I try to keep them from killing each other.
Alex Obert: What in life gives you a natural high?
Blothar: Fucking masturbation. I was just doing it like fucking fifteen minutes ago, did I shake your hand? Let me tell you something, I was really fucking cranking one out in the bat-shaped helicopter looking at PornHub. Natural high, yeah man, fucking sex. That’s it, that’s all I live for. Fucking eating pussy, man. That’s what I wanna do right now, I want to be eating pussy. I don’t even care whose pussy. I don’t even care if it’s a dude’s pussy, I’ll eat your pussy.
Alex Obert: How would you compare the feeling of sex to the feeling of music?
Blothar: With music, you live for the times when the activity seems to fall away into a mist as you’re doing it. It’s when you reach a state where everything that you do is right and it’s impossible for you to make a mistake because you’re in the zone. The proverbial zone. And in that way, music and sex are actually very similar activities. The orgasmic state that you are attempting to reach when having sex is very much akin to the mental state that you can sometimes reach while playing music. The activity itself seems to become almost meaningless, you just lose yourself in the activity. Even though not a lot of people talk about it, I think that’s the reason that a lot of people play music is because they want to reach that feeling of spiritual perfection.
Alex Obert: On the topic of spirits, do you feel that Oderus Urungus has discovered the whereabouts of musicians such as Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix?
Blothar: I fucking hope that he’s gone and fucked each person that you just mentioned right in the fucking mouth, that’s what I hope. Right now, I hope that he is getting a fucking three-headed blowjob from Jim Morrison. What I hope is that he has fucked Jim Morrison’s asshole until it’s just a massive gaping cave, then come out, fucking shoved his dick all the way down Morrison’s throat, out of the other side of his head and into Kurt Cobain’s eager-waiting mouth on the other side. So a fucking dick Shish Kabob, that’s what I hope is happening to those fucking clowns. Except for Jimi Hendrix.
Alex Obert: Have you received a telepathic message from Oderus about whether or not he has encountered Joan Rivers in his current journey?
Blothar: I hope so. It’s funny that you would mention it, I was thinking of her just yesterday. What a great piece of ass she was. Joan Rivers was very kind to GWAR. I was thinking of her because someone told me yesterday that she left in her will a provision that if anyone disputed her will, they would be disinherited. I think that is tremendously interesting. She left most of her money to her daughter, her publicist and charity. Hopefully right now he’s fingerbanging the old bitch. I hope that’s what’s happening right now. I doubt he’d actually dip in the pool, but he’s probably got his hand up her skirt. In the afterlife, maybe Joan Rivers looks the way she did in around 1958, a real hot fucking bitch. Hopefully.
Alex Obert: At the latest GWAR family reunion, did you encounter the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the early nineties?
Blothar: Oh, you are a presumptuous fuck! Bonesnapper is the only one that is related to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and he’s barely in GWAR. So the answer is no. What are their names, Dartanian? Is that one of their names? Weren’t they named after The Three Musketeers? Bunch of fucking turtles.
Alex Obert: When you had a deep sleep leading to a resurrection, what did you dream about?
Blothar: I was dreaming of hunting, as I always dream of. Hunting Spectral Moon Moose. I was dreaming of killing and throttling humans. The greatest feeling of pure ecstasy is to feel your hands span the neck of a human being, they’re particularly easy to kill. You can do it with one hand and just throttle in the life, watching the eyes and the hope disappear. They hope that maybe they’ll survive this, but the moment that they realize it’s too late, it’s too late and the damage is done. That’s what I live for and it’s what I dream of.
Alex Obert: In your day to day life, what does your meal plan look like for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Blothar: I’m awakened every day by someone who takes an order for me. They hand me a menu and usually I choose something healthy like lasagna. I love lasagna. And after I eat lasagna for breakfast, I’ll usually have lasagna for lunch. Much like Garfield. I eat a lot of fucking lasagna. At nighttime, corn beef, pastrami, bacon. I eat a lot of fucking bacon. Mainly that’s what my meal plan looks like. Bacon, bacon, bacon.
Alex Obert: If you were to have dinner with any three people, living or dead, who would they be?
Blothar: I’d say it’d probably be Martin Luther King, Duke Ellington and Jimi Hendrix. We’d fucking sit there and play basketball, that’s what we’d do. We’d have a little pickup game. I don’t know if you saw the video where Oderus played Jesus in a game of basketball one-on-one, he slam dunked him. But yeah, why not? Martin Luther King had a lot of good things to say. Jimi Hendrix, he didn’t really have a lot of good things to say, but he looked like he was probably a good time. And Duke Ellington, I don’t know, I don’t even know why I said that.
Alex Obert: If you are going to take your powers and transmogrify Jimi Hendrix into a member of GWAR, what would he look like?
Blothar: He liked killing humans as well. And he hated humans, he wanted to live in a world of sound and sound alone. He was in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam, unlike most of those fucking clowns throughout the sixties marching around with signs and pretending like they fucking changed the world. They didn’t, they really didn’t. They didn’t fucking change shit. There’s still war, there’s still death. All they did was make each other feel good and alienate poorer people did have to go to war, like Hendrix. Now to get back to your question, he’d look a lot like Predator. Actually as a member of GWAR, he wouldn’t look like anything. I think Hendrix would reach the state of being that he sought as a human, which is he would exist as pure sound with nobody at all.
Alex Obert: When you are approached by many that ask what the meaning of life is, what do you tell them?
Blothar: Life’s a piece of shit, that’s the meaning of life. Simply seek the path of least resistance. Try to do absolutely nothing like the earthworm. A lack of desire, that’s the meaning of life. Reach that state you don’t want anything, where you don’t do anything, where you don’t try anymore.
Alex Obert: For readers that are wondering about the future of GWAR for the next million years, what can they expect?
Blothar: GWAR is keeping going and continuing on. What you can expect is more GWAR because GWAR still exists, GWAR lives. We’ve been looking for Oderus and each night, we relive the trauma and loss of our dearest friend. Each night, we give the audience an opportunity to experience that loss with us. What we are doing is for our fallen friend. It’s for him and for the people who come to the show. In his name and also for our own selfish purposes, let’s be honest, GWAR will continue. GWAR will move forward. It will continue to be GWAR, but it won’t be the same, nothing’s ever the same. Really, nothing is ever the same. Were he alive today, GWAR would not be the same as it was the last time you saw it. Things change and the absence of change is nothingness. GWAR will continue and will continue to be GWAR. GWAR will continue to make records and videos and films. GWAR will continue to make blistering fucking rock and roll music.
PUSTULUS MAXIMUS
Alex Obert: What takes place on the stage of a GWAR show that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the galaxy?
Pustulus Maximus: Well, there’s highly publicized drug abuse onstage, there’s full penetration gang bangs, we spray blood, cum and whatever else on the crowd. There’s human blood, alien blood, cum. I don’t know where the cum is coming from. A lot of diseases are in that stuff too. I wouldn’t try swallowing it. It turns your eyeballs red like in the movie, 28 Days Later. It’s pretty fucked up shit. But who else is gonna do that for you other than us? Nobody. Because we give a fuck. I mean not really, but we try to give the appearance that we care. But we don’t, we don’t care about you. We don’t care about anybody.
Alex Obert: How are the plans for playing a show in Antarctica going?
Pustulus Maximus: I really don’t want to go back there. It’s not that I don’t want to go back there, it’s that I don’t want any of you people going over there. So that’s more than likely why we’re not gonna do it. I had to leave when Metallica tried to play there. I did not want to hear that shit when I’m trying to sleep.
Alex Obert: Where have you played that no other band could handle playing?
Pustulus Maximus: Lots of bands play everywhere, but I don’t think anyone has as good of a time as we do. Last couple shows really stuck out. Toronto and Montreal fucking destroyed it. Those people are awesome, well, as awesome as human beings can be. I enjoy myself up there.
Alex Obert: What is your interaction like with your fans?
Pustulus Maximus: They usually ask to give drugs. I enjoy that very much. Sometimes they ask for fellatio and sexual favors. I do not abide by that. Humans carry a lot of diseases that are pretty fucking bad for us.
Alex Obert: Which other bands do you admire in this world?
Pustulus Maximus: Every band I like, they’re all fucking dead. Motörhead, The Ramones. I mean Motörhead’s not dead, but when Lemmy dies, I’m fuckin’ outta here. I don’t wanna be on this earth without that. Zeke, Judas Priest, that’s the shit right there.
Alex Obert: What is the secret to Lemmy’s longevity?
Pustulus Maximus: Probably speed. And just being a very toxic human being. He probably shares a lot of DNA with us, that’s why he’s still around.
Alex Obert: How did the Ramones inspire you as a human and as a musician?
Pustulus Maximus: They’re just the best. They make other bands look like idiots. They’re just the best fuckin’ band ever. That’s obvious. There’s a couple others, but I don’t know how you could play anything better. I haven’t heard anything better than that. It’s just three chords, but it’s way better than all that technical bullshit that all these other fuckin’ stupid ass Neodick bands try to fucking play. You don’t need to fuckin’ lace your shit with blast beats, actually write a fucking song. Fucking putting sweep arpeggios in a guitar solo, that’s fucking stupid!
Alex Obert: As a member of a band that is your particular genre, what are your thoughts on Alice Cooper? Is he an influence for you?
Pustulus Maximus: The Master of Disaster. The King of Shock Rock. I wouldn’t say we’re too much like him, other than the fact that he is the forefather of the genre. He’s out there to shock and awe all people. And he does have a great backing band today.
Alex Obert: Which bands you hope to play with someday? Who can handle it?
Pustulus Maximus: I wanna perform with Wang Chung. Mainly because I just wanna get close enough to them to strangle them to death. Them and Nickelback. I wanna play with Nickelback for the same fuckin’ reason. I wanna fucking kill them onstage. That would be the only one where people would rejoice.
Alex Obert: Would you look into sacrificing all the members of Nickelback to bring back Oderus?
Pustulus Maximus: If I could, I would. I’d kill them for nothing. It wouldn’t be just to bring Oderus back, I would do it for a dollar. Shit, I would do it for the fun of it! Fuck!
Alex Obert: If you and the other members of GWAR were to visit a previous era of music, which would you want it to be?
Pustulus Maximus: I’d probably wanna perform during the era of vaudeville. That’d be pretty fucking cool because then they wouldn’t know what the fuck is going on.
Alex Obert: How do your fellow bandmates influence and inspire you, both onstage and in the studio?
Pustulus Maximus: They’re slowly pushing me to put a gun in my mouth. It’s eventually gonna happen. It’s agonizing and commiserating, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s good. To write aggressive music, you have to be full of hate and piss and vinegar and shit. I’m full of all those things and more. They push me towards violent outbursts, which eventually results in fucking songs.
Alex Obert: When you awaken, what’s the first thing you want to do everyday?
Pustulus Maximus: Just fucking destroy people. Fucking destroy all kinds of shit. Right now, I just wanna break a fucking Rickenbacker over somebody’s fucking head. More than likely, the president of Rickenbacker. Somebody just told me a tale of how they made somebody destroy their fucking guitar because it looked too much like a Rickenbacker. I don’t know the full tale yet, but it was enough to fucking piss me off. Fuck that shit! I always thought they were fucking cool. Now they’re just a bunch of fucking dicks!
Alex Obert: Before you take the stage, what will you do to prepare?
Pustulus Maximus: I drink. A lot. A hell of a lot! I think thirty six beers is probably a good starting point.
Alex Obert: When you go to a bar, what do you typically order?
Pustulus Maximus: Bloodweiser, just nothing but. I decided to give up being spiritual, so I don’t drink spirits anymore. That’s just followed by whole lot of bad tasteless jokes.
Alex Obert: If there was a GWAR shot, what would be in it?
Pustulus Maximus: A lot of stuff you don’t wanna put in your body. If you had it, it’d be like the same thing that happens when you drink viper. But I don’t think you’ve ever seen the movie, Street Trash. Maybe you should, you should check it out.
Alex Obert: What other movies does GWAR enjoy viewing?
Pustulus Maximus: Band Sluts, Rock n’ Roll in my Butthole, The Osbones. You know, mainly pornography. Gluteus to the Maximus. Shit like that.
Alex Obert: What are the plans ahead for GWAR?
Pustulus Maximus: New music. More death and destruction. Definitely more music. We’re just trying to write as much as we can and show the world that we fucking still got it. I wanna write some metal tunes and I wanna write some punk rock tunes. I wanna go back to our roots and I just wanna do something good for a change.
Alex Obert: In closing, what you have to say to those that have been on this journey with you and continue to walk with you?
Pustulus Maximus: Thanks for not giving up on us!
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