GWAR doused Tempe audience with monstrous metal and gooey liquids

Before GWAR can begin the headlining set at Tempe’s Marquee Theatre, stage techs must first wrap the stage monitors in transparent green plastic. This will protect crucial sound equipment from the spurts, gushes, geysers, jets, streams, and outright torrents of blood that are to come.

For the uninformed and lacking in mettle (and metal), GWAR is none other than the greatest, most awesome, most brutal band in the universe, originally from a galaxy far behind Uranus (say it aloud), having been exiled to Earth millions (or is it billions?) of years ago, where they remained frozen in the Antarctic ice shelves for a long time (numerical estimates vary widely). After thawing, GWAR—to quote one of their own songs—“fucked apes/giving birth to the human race.” And ever since, GWAR has been involved in convoluted, but always comically bloody, battles with various terrestrial and extraterrestrial nemeses.

The crowd gathers

A quite curious mix of people and aesthetics gathers as the techs prepare for the coming of GWAR. There are shirts for Black Sabbath (both some kind of anniversary as well as the yellow outline of Ozzy making the peace that was the cover of “Volume IV”), “Scarface,” Venom (the comic book alien, but, sadly, not the black metal band of the same name), The Cramps, The Subhumans, and any number of other bands from the punk/heavy section of the record store, as well as GWAR shirts, some celebrating 40 years of Scumdogs, others tied to the 2025 album and tour “The Return of Gor-Gor,” and one black-and-white number memorializing founding member and former lead singer Dave Brockie, who portrayed the character Oderus Urungus until he died in 2014.

More provocative outfits are in evidence, too. Shirts are advising you to “Fuck a Corpse for Fun” and “Teach Your Children to Worship Satan.” There’s a parody of a tourist shirt stating that “Tucson is for F♥ckers,” making one wonder whether this counts for or against Tucson’s favor. A few lingerie/BDSM-type outfits are about, with one woman in what appears to be a bikini-diaper-and-fishnet combo, a strange and category-defying choice that seems oddly fitting for GWAR’s sonic and visual aesthetics.

Like any heavy music show, many people are wearing all or nearly all black, but, for GWAR, about as many have come wearing white, the better to be spattered in the coming storm of blood. Some are plain t-shirts (including one already bloodied with actual, non-GWAR blood), but there is also a noticeable contingent in coveralls, painter’s smocks, overalls, and the like, some even sporting goggles and military-style helmets.

There are also, given that GWAR as an entity is forty years old and the teenagers who first thrilled to “Scumdogs of the Universe” and “This Toilet Earth” as new releases are now eligible for senior discounts, a surprising number of young teens here with parents.

The overall effect is of attendees of unrelated punk and metal shows, middle school students tagging along with parents, and families on the way to the mall for a sale on cargo shorts and sandals, all somehow ending up in the same room.

It begins

The room goes dark, and audience members begin chanting, “GWAR! GWAR!”

A few people off to the side and about halfway back try to anticipate the spatter radius.

“It’s not going to get that far back here.”

A video comes on welcoming the “labias and gentiles” of the audience and introducing the plot — such as it is — for the evening, something to do with an evil genius fighting GWAR’s protector figure, Bonesnapper (who, to the uninitiated, appears as a big green muscular anthropomorphoid wielding oversized weapons to fight on behalf of GWAR during and between songs). Through inter-song (and intra-song) skits and stage combat, the plot plays out, beginning with something about a train, then on to a giant mysterious egg (and the thematic introduction for “Crack in the Egg”), which hatches a lizard that, at the end of the pre-encore set, returns as the giant saurian figure Gor-Gor.

If analyzed in any kind of literary sense, the plot doesn’t make much sense, and it’s not supposed to. The plot is there as a pretext to play out the comic violence and mutilation scene again and again, with bigger costumes and greater volumes of blood each time.

The blood

Philosophers, mystics, thinkers, and great figures down through the ages have all, each in the manner of his or her respective time, expressed the idea that language has its limits, that it ultimately cannot capture an experience.

None of those people had GWAR in mind, but the sentiment applies nonetheless.

To read that a show involves fake blood provokes something between disgust and mild amusement, but nothing can quite capture the experiential truth of GWAR.

The blood is hilarious every time.

It really is. Even a newbie who picks up on the pattern after a few minutes (song ends, some skit stuff happens, characters fight, then one or more turn to the audience to spray them with blood) will find that although the gag may wear thin in the telling, although listening to the skits on the live albums (such as the terrific “Live at Mt. Fuji”) gets old as soon as they begin, that despite all that, seeing sprays of fake blood (or, if one is so inclined or unwary enough to end up in the spray zone, to be sprayed) is funnier every time it happens.

What GWAR ultimately provides is more profound than it appears. The GWAR mythos, in all its contradictory and unintelligible looniness, takes the horrors of life and makes of them so transgressive, so extreme, so completely unserious that you can laugh at the awfulness of life that might otherwise kill you. Maybe it’s the same principle of catharsis that animated the dramas of ancient Greece.

Of course, if GWAR heard you say that, they’d just make fart noises and threaten to stomp on you until you explode.

The sound mix

It can be difficult to get heavy music to sound good and make the lyrics intelligible in rooms that are all hard, echoing surfaces. Reverberating amplified sounds mingle in a sonically muddy atmosphere.

The mix was good overall, certainly bringing out the heaviness of the guitar tones and clarity and solidity of the bass that you likely don’t get hearing GWAR on your tinny little earbuds, but Blothar’s singing and some of the pre-recorded dialogue for the skits could be hard to make out.

Power outage

Somewhere in the back half of “Bring Back the Bomb,” he brutal riffing of Balsac the Jaws of Death and Grodius Maximus, Beefcake’s thundering bass, and Blothar’s bluesy bellowing, all cut out. The lights remain on, but the performers look dazed, even behind their costuming. Jizmak starts an impromptu drum solo. The crowd is patient, forgiving, not shouting.

The sound comes back in, and the song finishes far enough from trainwreck to be impressive.

GWAR jokes from stage about trying the song with a twenty-second break and deciding not to do it again because it sucks.

This hiccup in the performance is a reminder that behind the fake blood, goofy costumes, and nonsensical mythos, these are serious musicians who can turn anything into a brief joke without letting it derail a show.

Grodius maximus

GWAR’s relatively new lead guitarist, Grodius Maximus, has been with the band for only about a year, and yet, in a realm where extreme weirdness is the norm, manages to be possibly the most cartoony and most over-the-top member. His costume, fittingly enough for the name, is something like a dreadlocked and unwashed goblin wearing little more than a thong to cover his nether regions. And in the tradition of heavily tattooed GWAR lead guitarists, it is not so easy to distinguish what is costume and what is not, making for a confusing maximalist appearance that fits the character and the band well.

By the second song of the set, Grodius had leapt down to the floor, at about the point where the crowd was regularly passing up crowd surfers, and walked among us for the better part of the tune. And with Grodius, “walk” is more like a high-knee, wide stance stomp.

For a stage voice, he has adopted some cross between Beavis (or is it Butthead?) and Oderus. At some point in the night, he tells a head-shakingly dumb dolphin joke with such commitment that you can’t help but laugh anyway.

In the final portion of the set, still keeping up his solos and intricate riffing, he walks with a hunched and contorted posture that must make it hard to play, just so that the huge misshapen shoulder piece of his costume can aim the jet of blue blood right into the press of fans jumping for it.

Blothar defends free speech

During the traditional final number, “Sick of You,” the two thong-clad GWAR minions, who have been attending to stage matters all night, hose the crowd in blood that no longer seems to be part of the plot, just blood for its own silly sanguine sake, just for the delight that senseless excess brings. While they do so, Blothar shouts to the crowd, “We’ve been doing this for forty fucking years.” Loud cheers here. He defends “free motherfucking speech,” though most of the other words are drowned in the mix and rain of blood and generally climactic sonic mayhem. He mentions Charlie Kirk and another indecipherable name, asserting that people should “be able to say whatever the fuck they want” (or something to that effect).

The end

The audience waits in the dark, some chanting, some shouting and cheering, all hoping for a second encore. Hopes are briefly kindled at the sound of heavily distorted guitar, not playing, but sort of in that sound of shifting around that can happen between tunes, a sound that soon cuts out.

Lights come up, followed by some cheering, but also a loud contingent of booing. Indeed, many songs (such as “Immortal Corrupter” and “Jack the World”) that have been on earlier setlists in the tour didn’t make it in tonight, but with a catalogue the size of GWAR’s and fans as devoted and encyclopedically knowledgeable as theirs, accommodating every fan favorite and treasured deep cut would take hours. It’s sad to hear fans boo their beloved GWAR, but a little over an hour of intense sound and visuals (the crowdsurfing, the general scrum at the front, plus reservoir volumes of blood) can leave even the more stolid attendees feeling a kind of withdrawal and wanting more.

The lights come up then, and the rush to the merch table begins. Some of the teens are soon in the bathroom, liberally applying Dial soap to try to wash the blood off. On the floor, a few of those who came in smocks and goggles are shedding their protective gear in the garbage cans.

In a development inexplicable on logical grounds yet somehow right on some other plane of being, Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” comes on over the house sound system. The crowd continues to dwindle, those remaining still in the post-GWAR comedown. And one young fan in white coveralls lies down in the pools of blood on the floor and begins doing the snow angel there, soaking up the precious blood that GWAR has left behind.

More photos from the GWAR show, including one of the opener’s, Helmet: