TAKE A TRIP BEYOND HELL!
A special Christmas interview with ODERUS URUNGUS of GWAR!
All photos by Kirstyn Kristiansen, taken at the House Of Blues, Myrtle Beach, SC
WARNING: THIS INTERVIEW WILL PROBABLY OFFEND YOU
If you don't know who Gwar is then BOY should you get a brief history lesson before reading this. Basically this all-powerful being called The Master created Gwar to go around killing everything in the universe. Eventually Gwar decided to kill him so The Master imprisoned them in ice on a pathetic planet called Earth. In the 1980's, the over-use of hair spray opened a hole in the ozone layer, which melted their prison in Antarctica and Gwar was set free! Gwar became a heavy metal band and with the help of their then manager Sleazy P Martini toured the world and recorded several cds. This was all a front though as every night in concert, Gwar slaughtered their own fans, and just about every celebrity you have ever wanted to see killed. Their concerts are brutal, bloody, perverted displays that will either scar you for life or make you their slave. I've seen them dozens of times and have the blood-soaked shirts to prove it! The band is currently touring in support of their latest album Beyond Hell, and I dared to breach the inner sanctum of Gwar's leader and vocalist Oderus Urungus to bring you the story behind the greatest musical massacre in human history. Oderus, meanwhile, was reading a popular music magazine...this is gonna be good!
Oderus: Oh, they suck
Anarchy: Who are they?
Oderus: Panic! At The Disco. How did these guys become rock’s hottest new band? THEY’RE NOT! They’re the fucking flavor of the month and it’s probably already over for them.
Anarchy: Panic! At The Disco is a good thing.
Oderus: How so?
Anarchy: Because they're watered down enough to kill the trend. Every trend starts off as a legit art form, and then by the time you get to the third or fourth generation it’s just crap. Trixter, Silverchair, Panic! At The Disco. The original fans rebel against this stuff and the trend dies soon after.
Oderus: I hope so. Ugh, this is diet energy drink. That won’t do! Excuse me. (Oderus walks away for a moment) Barfy, this is diet energy drink, it’s barfy.
Anarchy: Every time I’ve seen you it’s been freezing cold,. Do you do that just so I can freeze to death?
Oderus: Yeah, we bring the cold weather with us. We bring the storms with us. That’s what Gwar’s all about. Everyone knows that, I’m surprised you didn’t.
Anarchy: You bring it from Antarctica?
Oderus: Yes, it’s cold there! It’s part of the catering. We just insist. We need 8 cases of beer, cocaine, all this other crap. But more than that we need it to actually be cold. That’s not an easy thing for promoters to set up, but they managed to. They used Usama Bin Laden’s weather control machine.
Anarchy: Thank God, because that means I can have hard nipples as I leave tonight.
Oderus: Well, you can have them right now if you’d like! I can put ice cubes on them. That’s what Jayne Mansfield used to do.
Anarchy: Oh, she was hot.
Oderus: She was hot as shit, and she put ice on her nipples.
Anarchy: Until that car accident.
Oderus: Yeah, that kind of took her head off. That kind of sucked
Tommy Lee's got nothing on Oderus!
Anarchy: Okay, lets get this going.
Oderus: We are going, this interview started 20 minutes ago, you just don’t realize it.
Anarchy: When you first broke out of Antarctica and decided to kill everybody, the goal was to kill enough people to go back and kill The Master.
Oderus: Right, right, right.
Anarchy: is it safe to say that you’re just killing for fun now?
Oderus: Yeah, we pretty much failed on all the killing the human race thing. We figured out that Sleazy P. Martini, it was all a big plan of his. If we killed the whole human race, there’d be no one to come to our shows or buy our records. That was part of his marketing strategy. Plus, we don’t want to use nuclear weapons, we like to kill using our hands. We’re traditionalists. We don’t even use machine guns. We probably should, but we don‘t. We spread disease and AIDS, that’s what we’re trying to do. It only seems to be working in Africa.
Anarchy: You have a big following in Africa?
Oderus: No, not at all. No one likes us in Africa.
Anarchy: Are you still going to kill The Master at some point?
Oderus: I think we did, or maybe we didn’t. I just don’t know! All that Gwar shit is too confusing for me to keep up on, and I’m the lead singer!
Anarchy: Speaking of the weapons you use, your broadsword is obviously the most powerful weapon in the universe.
Oderus: Yes, Lick. Though there is a way to defeat Lick, and that way is to book us in a club where it won’t fit through the door. So that has kind of taken away a bit of it’s power. We’ve been playing every fucking club you can conceive of. Yes, we’re playing the House Of Blues tonight. There’ll be a thousand people here, it’ll be fucking amazing BUT there’s been plenty of other nights where we’ve played The Shit-hole Incorporated and Lick doesn’t fit through the door. Usually what I’ll do then is just hack the building in half. So that actually is a way that I’ve solved that problem. So yes, it’s the mightiest fucking broadsword in the universe and I am it’s wielder and I’m pretty proud of it.
Anarchy: To prepare for the new record you guys vacationed in Hell, which is a little different from Antarctica. What did you think of the place? Why, Hell?
Oderus: Well, it wasn’t really our choice, we were kind of driven there. The combined forces of the entire Earth nuclear carpet-bombed Antarctica and blew our fortress up and we were so fucked up on crack that we couldn’t do anything about it. So, we had to retreat into the basement. There we found a secret door in the back of the mop closet and we found the gates to Hell! Of course, that set off a 616,000,000 year journey through Hell. Of course on Earth time is different so it actually seemed like we went backwards. We conquered Hell, we killed Satan and then we came back. We ended up back in time 3 minutes before we got attacked by the nuclear bombs so we were able to defeat them because we were able to say “okay, let’s not smoke crack” “We lived through this before, we know we’re about to be attacked by the combined army of the world, so let’s wait to smoke crack for another 10 minutes”. So, we killed all those guys, then we smoked crack again and everything was fine. And we got our fortress back.
Anarchy: Satan, is he a misunderstood anti-hero?
Oderus: Oh yeah. First of all, he’s Jewish.
Anarchy: Oh, that makes sense.
Oderus: It’s not Lucifer, it’s Jewcifer. He sounds like Woody Allen and he tried to get Gwar to sign a contract with him. He acts all nice and everything but the final part of the deal involves me sucking him off. I’m sorry, I wont suck an uncircumcised penis. I’m not racist or anything, I don’t have anything against Jewish people but those fucking…I don’t know what the Yiddish name for it is, but I’m sure it’s horrible.
Anarchy: In your free time, what do you like to do? I know you like croquet.
Oderus: Croquet, not really playing the game so much as hitting people with the mallets. Today for instance, I was going to go over to the crocodile farm (there’s a crocodile zoo next to the House Of Blues) and fight for a few hours. I noticed that it’s cold so the crocodiles are rather sluggish so I don’t think they’re going to give me much of a fight today. But, I’d like to take this opportunity to plug my latest film that I’ve just finished working on. A lot of people don’t know that Oderus Urungus is a director on the side. I’ve just finished working on a new horror film about the Katrina disaster. It’s called “When A Gator Calls”. It’s all about this elderly grandmother who’s trapped in her home, in the attic. She manages to get a call through to the fire department before the cell phone goes dead. She knows that they know she’s there, so she hears the rescue workers coming up the stairs and IT'S AN ALLIGATOR! The rest of the movie is a struggle to the death, between her and the alligator. Her son died in some stupid war and she’s got a big footlocker and she opens it up and finds all these weapons in there. Then the alligators start getting guns too. That’s when I really lost control of the production and it became some kind of granny Rambo fighting alligators with guns kind of thing. I completely lost control. Don’t go see this movie! DON’T GO SEE “WHEN A GATOR CALLS”! They bastardized my idea! Gators with guns? It’s absurd!
Anarchy: Yeah!
You covered “School’s Out” on the new record…
Oderus: YES, YES, YES! The label tricked us! We didn’t want to do it! It’s gay! It was stupid! It was a trick! It was a lie! We were trying to fool people who didn’t really know what Gwar is all about into thinking we were kind of a gay-ass Alice Cooper comedy act or something. So we thought if we got a bunch of hot schoolgirls and covered an Alice Cooper song we would trick people. Then they would buy the album and be forced to listen to the true savagery of Gwar and they would become our slaves! And actually it did work pretty well. It got played the fuck out of on MTV, But I’m worried because I wonder, will they make the connection with the butt-raping, Sodom metical, heroin-addicted freaks when they see “School’s out”? Will they be able to take the plunge from “School’s Out” to anal rape and I’m just not sure that that’s happened. So, we are right about now releasing a new video, “8th Lock” much heavier, much sicker, much darker, it’s actually our song, and I think much more representative of what Gwar’s really about. So, that’s why we did it. I don’t want to hear anymore bullshit about it from my fans! Give me a hard time because I covered that lame-ass song! It made perfect sense God damnit! Sounds Of The Underground tour, we were out this summer. SCHOOL WAS OUT WHEN WE FUCKIN RECORDED THE SONG! Now school’s back in! Everyone’s like, “why do you got that song”? Well, school was out when we did it! It’s just ridiculous. Fans, they buy an album and they think they have a right to say anything! And they do, I guess.
Anarchy: Not for long though, you’ll take care of that!
Oderus: Yeah, yeah! I talk a good game but I tend to fuck up pretty hard.
Anarchy: How do you decide who to kill and who to make a slave?
Oderus: Pretty much whoever’s in arms reach, except for members of the press like yourself.
Anarchy: Thank you.
Oderus: We let you live because we know you spread the word of Gwar. Besides, you’ve probably contracted several diseases just by being in here. By the time you’ve outlived your usefulness as a journalist, you’ll probably die around then, so that’s fine. I see Gwar as kind of justice. A lot of people see, for instance no-talent celebrities. I think they’re the most deserving of suffering really. They get to live the most opulent, posh lives. They’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives and then it gets even more hilarious when these aforementioned celebrities actually think they can have an effect on world politics or something. HA HA HA HA HA HA! That’s fucking retarded. Because by even suggesting that they do anything about it just trivializes the entire matter, I believe. “Oh, look at me”, I hate them! I’m talking about Angelina Jolie. She’s just pathetic! “I’m gonna save the starving children”. First of all, fuck you! You’re an American, get your ass over here and start fucking working on your own country before you go overseas and start crying about Bangladesh’s starving children. If you’re an American, fix your own fucking country first before you have THE BALLS to go around and shove Angelina Jolies lips up my ass or drop bombs on me. Fix your own fucking mess first.
Anarchy: Do you have a favorite celebrity to kill?
Oderus: Paris Hilton was a good one to kill because we used to rape her with her dog. She finally just kind of melted into a big pile of sludge but I guess that grew her again in the flesh vats because she’s still on TV. She’s not even hot, I’m sorry. Her mouth looks like a little butt hole. It looks like a little fucking butt hole. She’s just stupid. Lindsay Lohan is the latest one! What a talent less boob! Come on, she’s not even hot! She’s not even very fucking hot. Just watch her face just mutate over the next 10 years with her repeated plastic surgery. She’s going to end up looking like a cat-woman or something.
Anarchy: Who gives a better blow job, Michael Jackson’s son or The Pope?
Oderus: The Pope never blew me, but I bet he’d be good at it. I love fucking oral sex with old people because they can take their dentures out
Anarchy: There’s still time, there’s a new one.
Oderus: Yeah.
Anarchy: When a celebrity joins your tour, what’s the turn-around time? Lets say that Michael Richards wanted to join so he could spread his word every night. What would be the general turn-around time between him wanting to join, and then you being able to chop his head off every night?
Oderus: I think Michael would have done a lot better with his cutting edge kind of comedy if he’d been opening up for Gwar. Unfortunately, the way we do it is as soon as you first join the tour you are ritualistically mutilated and murdered and then every night we just kind of animate you with enough energy to just stumble through your performance. We give the opening bands, because they need to be a little more energetic, we give them a pound of crack. That’s why they play so well. But yeah, Michael Richards, he’d be great if I could locate that guy. I hear he’s not even Jewish now. Apparently his mother and father were both Christians and he never converted. He just claimed to be Jewish because he hung out with Jews.
Anarchy: Have you gotten in any feuds lately? I think most bands would be afraid after what you’ve done to some others.
Oderus: Oh, any band that’s ever talked shit about us knows that they run the risk of being completely mocked in a Gwar show and rendered completely inert. Rock stars are a whiny, self-indulgent, completely ludicrous strata of human beings. The only reason I get upset about anything these days is because I’m jealous because they make so much more money than I do. Not that I care about money, but lets face it, crack costs money. I like to wipe my ass with hundred dollar bills. It’s a weird thing I like to do. It’s not really spending money, but using it to wipe my ass with, and I need a lot of it. I really wipe my ass quite a bit. That might be surprising to some people. They probably just think I shit myself constantly, but I like to keep a clean butt-hole. What was the question?
Anarchy: Has anybody stepped up to start a feud with you?
Oderus: Oh no, not lately. Not since I destroyed the dude from Slipknot about 3 years ago.
Anarchy: Yeah, that was brutal.
Oderus: Yeah, no I haven’t gotten into any trouble lately. I got into trouble with Phil Anselmo’s girlfriend. That was about it.
Anarchy: What guy hasn’t?
Oderus: Yeah!
Anarchy: Each Gwar tour is another chapter in your story. What are we getting this time?
Oderus: This is the story of Gwar’s trip through Hell. We’re kind of encapsulating. We went through Hell, we fought all these creatures and then after we destroyed them we decided, rather brilliantly I might add, that we’d take them back to earth with us, resurrect them, and do a show kind of based on the story of meeting, fighting and destroying them. Jewcifer will be there, Toe E. Namel the rock star demon, The Ultimate Bohab will be there, The Pope will be showing up, George Bush I believe makes a quick appearance. He shows up in Hell because apparently he’s just been assassinated. A lot of celebrities will be there, a lot of important people. What I’d really like to do is get Terrell Owens on stage, that would be great. Because if you think of all the people in the United States right now, he’s probably the person that people would most like to see in hideous agony. Pray for a career ending injury.
Just a small part of Gwars stage setup
Anarchy: I read that your tours are going a little more horror based. Is that reflected on this tour?
Oderus: It’s totally happening. Gwar has been getting more hideous and grotesque and darker for the last few albums. The music’s been reflecting that and the stage show has as well. You can only make it so horrible, because let’s face it, we’re funny guys. We can’t help it. We’re fun, funny guys. It seems the more seriously we take it, the more ludicrous it becomes, which is odd.
Anarchy: I love the Lacey Peterson bit last year.
Oderus: Oh, that was great.
Anarchy: That was so funny!
Oderus: We wanted to do something with…who was that bitch that drowned in Aruba? Natalie Holloway? Is that her name? Yeah we wanted to have something with her, that would have been pretty tasteless, but it didn’t quite work out. You know what they say, “what happens in Aruba, stays in Aruba”. Ha, ha ha!
Anarchy: You’re always cross-marketing with comic books and DVDs and all that. You got anything new coming up?
Oderus: Lets see, we just shot a great new video to the “8th Lock” song, which is for darker and more horrible and more sick. We did it in New Orleans at the House Of Shock, which is a really famous horror show/haunted house thing. That’s gonna be awesome! As far as any new products, not really, because all we’re doing is touring the hell out of this new album and we’ll probably be doing that until next fall. At some point we’ll settle down and start thinking about a new record but right now it’s just all guns blazing. Beyond Hell is our heaviest and most successful record in quite a long time. Gwar has been building up for the past 3 or 4 years and it’s really peaking out now. Actually, we thought War Party was the best we’d ever done, and now this year it’s a little better, so I think Gwar is steadily on the rise again and it’s probably going to go just as far as we want it to. Everyone understands that we provide a priceless service to them. We are the only voice of reason and justice in a world that is completely designed to frustrate the common man, the working man. To keep him down and drain him, or her, of every last penny and occasionally force him to go overseas and get his head blown off. And come home and not be old enough to buy beer. This is absurd to me. Gwar basically stands up for the little guy, even though we might be urinating on him at the time. I see years and years and years of mindless war, and violence, depravity and sexual proclivity and ruined anuses and burning clubs, sagging record sales and raped animals. This is my life. This is what I love. I am Oderus, this is Gwar.
Anarchy: Obviously, if you wanted to be president then you would…
Oderus: I couldn’t be elected though. I’m president as far as I’m concerned. I’m president…okay, now I’m not.
Anarchy: What is your opinion of the last election and the current state of the war?
Oderus: Ha, pretty funny. I didn’t think you could get any funnier than 9/11 until Katrina came along, but then the Iraq war, after about 5 years…yeah, pretty hilarious stuff. I mean honestly, did anyone ever think that by going over to Iraq that we were going to be able to stop people from hating us? I don’t think so. Come on, everyone hates this country. It’s a time honored tradition in the rest of the world to hate his country. It’s a big mess. You go over to Europe and you see nobody in Europe is starving. All the cities are beautiful and clean. There are no ghettos. it’s really hard to get guns so there’s no crime. I thought the United States won World War 2, it’s a pretty weird hmmm. Seems like the Germans are doing pretty good. It’s a big lie, covered up by a gigantic untruth and the fact that humans seem to think that by voting for their elected officials they can somehow influence or control the situation. That’s ridiculous, there’s only one way to control it and that’s to sack and destroy your government and set up a country that’s ruled by Gwar. We’ll make everything right. We won’t declare war, we’ll just kind of have it all the time. There won’t be any draft or joining the army involved, you just go outside and fight if that’s what you want to do.
Anarchy: I’m ready for it
Oderus: Yeah, survival of the fittest. The political system you have now is called survival of the fattest because basically you’ve got the people who are getting all the money and all the food and all the power and they’re about .1% of the entire human race and you’ve got everyone else fighting for the scraps. It’s not survival of the fittest at all, it’s survival of the FATTEST. We want to kill all the fatties and get the fitties in there.
Anarchy: Are you picking sides at all in the war?
Oderus: No, I’m on the side of the common man all the way. I don’t believe there is a war going on between the United States and Al Qaeda. I don’t believe that there’s a war on terror. You can’t declare war on an idea. War is things like World War 2, the Civil War, there’s two armies fighting each other. This is something completely different and I don’t trust the government in the way they are prosecuting this war whatsoever. They’re failing in Afghanistan, they’re failing in Iraq. The only way to invade a country and rule that country and get that country to do what you want to do is by killing everyone in it.
Anarchy: Which is what you’re going to do.
Oderus: That’s what we’re trying to do, but we’re not bullshitting you. Even the American Indians here in the United States, they didn’t succeed in killing all of them and there’s going to be hell to pay one day for that. For instance, the Indians just bought the Hard Rock Casino. The Seminoles just bought the whole Hard Rock line of restaurants, hotels and casinos worldwide for like $965 million dollars, and they made all that money with their gambling casinos.
Anarchy: They’re not too far away from having tanks with arrows on them.
Oderus: EXACTLY! That’s what I’m saying! Or maybe getting a second hand nuclear bomb from the former Soviet Republic or something. There will be hell to pay someday.
Anarchy: What makes you cry?
Oderus: I had my tear ducts removed. Impossible.
Anarchy: You know everything, and things don't look pretty. What does the future hold for humanity?
Oderus: War, disease, death, horror, incredibly untalented celebrities parading about in million dollar gowns. Continuing discontent and hatred, finally leading to riots, civil war, civil unrest. All the bad things will get worse. Until finally at some point, people are sick of it and rise up in bloody revolution against the forces that oppress them. This is your destiny.
Anarchy: And you will be there to…
Oderus: LEAD YOU!
My God...Oderus is sexy
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GOOD NEWS! I LIVED! I want to thank Oderus for not killing me, and a big thanks goes out to our friends at DRT Entertainment for setting up and ensuring my safety! For more info on Gwar visit Gwar.net and Gwar on Myspace.
Also, I'd like to give a big thanks photographer Kirstyn Kristiansen, who didn't wuss out like most people would have. She got down in the pit and started snapping photos while trying to see through the thickest fog ever...not to mention the fact that she was constantly ducking the blood from Gwar's victims as it was showering down on her, soaking her and her camera! Thanks Kirstyn for the help, and I'm glad you survived!