"I think they're like H.R. Giger crossed with that old Mexican boy band Menudo (because of their constantly-changing lineup), mixed with a little bit of The Blue Man Group on crack." - Juxtapoz.
My Experience with GWAR
By
Daniel Louis Krone
It was New Years 2021 when I fully realized the world had lost one of the greatest masked musicians, M.F. Doom.
I had just woke up with my girlfriend and was ritualistically burning a Juxtapoz Magazine from 2015 whose article by Nancy Strange was about the Rock and Roll Lords of Chaos themselves, GWAR, listening to a TYCHO New Years live~stream, I remembered I needed to write an essay about those strange Rock and Roll monsters and my experience with them. Times had changed but my commitment to David Brockie’s legacy remained.
I have a strange relationship with music and art.
If I were to write down all I was thinking on this matter it would sound like the pedantic ravings of a madman still trying to shake off the last drips of the year 2020 and other things out of his system.
Over the years I’ve been trying to correlate and quantify my experiences, feelings, thoughts, and emotions on my experience with the band GWAR. My history in the entertainment industry is less like an artist, or craftsman, but more like a journeyman. I have an Academy Award winning film (“Get Out”) and an Emmy winning T.V. show (“The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”) on my resume. Currently I work a retail job for the Government in Alabama.
This journey has been very strange. I’d told myself at the age of 30 I’d want to direct a film I was proud of…I did. I told myself in 2020 I wanted to finish that film…I did.
The GWAR project started out around 2010 when the idea of doing a documentary series on cult films, books, T.V. shows, and music began to take seed. I’d previously directed a short documentary film titled “A Cult Influence” about the nature of cult media and fan bases of very particular and peculiar tastes. It was received moderately well.
After the short film was featured on Slashfilm.com and a Full Moon sequel feature “Killer Eye: Halloween Haunt” I’d toyed with the idea of turning it into a T.V. series pitch. Each episode of the show would feature a new cult aspect of media. It would showcase everything from modern Quake tournaments to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s domination of Midnight Cinema from September 25, 1975 to present day. The T.V. show was pitched around to various producers but some egos, logistic complications, and general life seemed to snuff out that large scale idea almost completely.
About a year after those failed pitches I’d moved into a house on Carpenter Ave. in the valley with several wild, young, party-crazy, up and coming industry movers and shakers. After sitting on the idea and working on a horror script with a friend back in Alabama I’d still toyed with pitches and unique ideas for this project. The ideas all felt dead. Once you start to study a subculture sometimes you get embedded in them and you then go down the rabbit hole to as many others you can find. Art is a language and I wanted to be well versed in as many strange dialects as I could but later realized I may have just been learning to speak in tongues.
It wasn’t until seeing the anthology documentary film “Freakonomics”, based on the book of the same name, a different idea clicked. Since the balkanization of media into all these subgroups that already seemed to tackle the original thesis of the cults of the world I’d decided maybe a format change was best. Since you could type any cult subject into Youtube and for the most part find a decently crafted web-video on the subject I’d decided to boil it down into a feature film documentary pitch. It would be an anthology like “Freakonomics”, but each section dedicated to a particular cult of media; movies, books, video games and…bands.
When I’d mentioned this to my friend Eliza she’d said “Oh, bands. You ever heard of GWAR? I’m friends with Dave Brockie.” And a lightbulb shotgunned in my head.
The details of the GWAR shoot are best seen in the documentary. There are no interesting behind the scenes anecdotes. The only thing I do remember from the shoot is we listened to Tom Wait’s “Raindogs” on the ride up there and passed a strawberry field. The shoot despite a few glitches, false-starts, missed set-ups, out of focus shots, and rushes went fairly smooth it seemed. Dave was a gentleman.
When I’d got the news of Dave’s death the energy in his interview seemed more and more apparent of how precious he was over the other subjects in my documentary. I had been editing the project with my friend Kayla in the valley for some time after I’d moved out of that old Carpenter house and as we cut and chopped I realized more and more my interviews with men like Clint Carney (Artist, Musician, and Prop-Wizard), Nicolas Caesar (Artist), Bill Shafer (Hyena Art Gallery owner featured in my previous film), Mike Van Eaton (Art Gallery owner specializing in Animation Cels), the owners of Mystery Pier Books, and Marc Sheffler (The man who famously blew his brains out in Wes Cravens classic cult film “The Last House on the Left”) all had their own individual merits but didn’t gel in the same way as Dave’s interview did. Over time I ejected all the other aspects of the film and concentrated my energy on GWAR.
In 2016 I left LA after spending 9 1/2 years there. I spent a period of 4 days in a hospital unable to go home. Somehow Radiohead had triggered a hibernating psychotic episode to wake. (It’s a long story and a very different essay.)
I have a strange relationship with the language of music.
This project went on after I moved back home. When I went home to reconnect with my roots it helped me reconnect with some old friends, and even an old friend whom I’d worked with in news before I’d left for LA, at the infamous WPMI, home of the Mobile Leperchaun story. After a quick few days on Netflix’s “Gerald’s Game” to “Get Out” then into a commercial for the state of Alabama, which never aired, I’d worked on another film as part of a behind the scenes crew and around then it clicked that I needed real work after the tax incentives had slowed for media and it was apparent it wasn’t enough to keep me afloat. I’d dive in and out of the project with various editors met in coffee houses many miles away. A few odd jobs at liquor stores, gas stations, and Surf Shops I still tried on my off days to work on various shows and even tried to coordinate funding for a film in New York while simultaneously cleaning horrifying toilets at a gas station on the Florida - Alabama line and trying to piece my memories back together from what happened in L.A..
Soon after one of my media friends died of a heart disease and I knew the work he’d done would never be seen and my passion for the entertainment world wilted.
At one point during a serious re-edit of the material half of the GWAR footage went missing. It felt like part of this project was cursed. But I still wanted to finish it. I felt like I’d needed to.
Sometimes you ask god for a desert and he presents you with a grain of sand and you’ll look back on that grain and be proud of your tiny contribution to a strange legacy of art. To finish this project in 2020 which started in 2014 and still having the long uphill battle of trying to get it out there feels like some kind of closure rests in that it feels finished.
For a 14 minute short it sure feels like it was born in and out of chaos.
Like leaving a GWAR show I feel messy and probably stained after finishing this project.
Oh well, that’s life!
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