Bucket (List) of Blood

Ah, October is upon us! And how to start everyone's favorite month to dress up as a slut or act like a pervert than with some monsters and mayhem! Last Saturday (see the prior post) turned out to be quite the spontaneous adventure…

I had the opportunity to catch Gwar performing at Club Firestone- a place I usually avoid at all costs unless it's a band that I like playing (usually 3 times a year). Since I am a huge fan of any hard rock genre, Gwar is a band that I've known for years even though I've never really listened to their stuff. They just happen to be one of those bands that makes your bucket list- their shows are legendary, and even if they don't ever make it to your iPod they are still a band you know you have to see at some point in your life. I made arrangements with a friend that was offering some free tickets, grabbed an old white t-shirt, and met up with my photographer friend Megan Schutz. She was all kinds of excited when she heard what we were doing before catching Night of the Living Dead at the Enzian Theater later.

Within the first 3 minutes of the band taking the stage, I was frozen in place with my jaw agape and my eyelids glued to my forehead. I couldn’t turn away! The split second that I did, a man either was decapitated by someone else or at his own expense, and by the time I looked back to the stage he was already spurting blood from his carotid artery onto the masses. Damn it. After I told Megan a few times that I couldn’t tell if I was genuinely scared (I wasn’t sober at the time) or if I was entertained, I grabbed her hand and we meandered around the side of the crowd and snuck into the front. There we were sprayed by the headless man, followed by something that looked like a mutant pig fetus.

I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech, so even when Oderus Urungus was proclaiming that an on-stage Sarah Palin shouldn't be in politics, but rather his own personal fucktoy, I couldn't really be offended. I knew what I was getting myself into when I went to this show; it would be as ludicrous to be upset over seeing Marilyn Manson tear a Bible up on stage- you know it's bound to happen! Even though I'm a firm believer in gender equality and I'm not a fan of Palin whatsoever, I kept my cheers (and jeers) to myself and watched in stunned amusement. This is why you go to this show to begin with, right? He then went on to chainsaw her in half, rip her severed hips and legs away from her spinal column, and she gushed blood all over the delighted audience.

Fortunately, I don't think that the people at a Gwar show are taking themselves too seriously. Most people who are watching a bunch of men pushing 50 wearing ripped fishnet stockings and spraying an overzealous crowd with faux bodily fluids aren't- if they were, they'd be running for the nearest free clinic. And if there are still people that are going to these shows and taking music-or anything- in its literal sense, then they are more impressionable than originally thought, and should be avoided at all costs. That’s how we could have avoided such events in history like Jonestown, duh.






Sadly, we had to leave about 30 minutes into the show to make it to the Enzian in time. This was the aftermath.






It ended up not being Night of the Living Dead that stuck with me the longest. The ride to work was nearly as entertaining as the concert. I thought maybe it would have been funnier to see a Kardashian ripped apart since a few years ago they killed off Paris Hilton, and then I started to think of all of the other catchy celebs that Gwar could mutilate on stage... That chick that can’t act from Twilight? Ke$ha? The entire cast of Jersey Shore? And then I found myself at work muttering to myself every time I hit the Send button on another email, "Now there's someone I would have liked to see get chainsawed in half on stage." Even better was when something went awry in the office and my initial solution to the problem was to rip someone’s head off and spray blood everywhere.

Run.