GWAR at the Westcott: Two Parts Hobbes, One Part Darwin
Last night, Anna , Casey and I went to a GWAR concert. GWAR, a thrash metal/shock rock outfit, seemed to be somewhat outside Anna and Casey’s usual musical tastes - as far as I knew, the hardest thing Casey listened to was Nickelback. I’d never listened to these guys, but I figured I’d give them a chance. I had an in at the venue, so I could get in for free. Why not?
We arrived early enough to be pretty far up in the line - only thirty or forty people stood between us and the door. All of us stood in the shadow of a nondescript white sixteen-wheeler. Anna peeked in the back, confirming it held GWAR’s famous masks and props.
Cruising past full-body tattoos, garishly large face piercings and eighteen-inch, dyed red-and-black mohawks, Anna’s friend Robert stopped by to chat. Dressed in a white wifebeater with “Jagermeister” printed in small letters on the chest and faded jeans and with a devilock trailing over his left eye, Robert kept repeating variations on “I can’t believe they’re actually here.”
A pudgy man in his late forties asked us our ages as we waited. All under 21, each of us received thick black X’s on the backs of our hands.
Upon entering the Westcott Theater, I told my friends we should stake our claim in front of the sound booth to avoid having anyone behind us. They went along with it for a while, watching the array of people filtering into the converted movie theater. The predominant tshirt color was white: all the better to display the fake blood GWAR was guaranteed to spray its audience with. I saw more wifebeaters in one place than ever before. More combat boots and camouflage cargo pants on civilians, too.
Once Robert and his girlfriend found their way in, though, Anna wanted to join them at the front of the theater. I warned her of the dangers: kicks from crowd surfers, bruises from being crushed against the bar separating us from the stage and shoves from fans eager to get close to the action. She ignored me, and Casey and I followed.
As the place filled, the combined stench of weed and beer filled the air.
Everything was fine during the first act, Mobile Deathcamp, a death metal band from Toledo, OH. They played all right, but accomplished nothing mind blowing. At one point, the band’s lead singer, probably in his late 50s, poured water in his ear and spat it from his mouth.
I leaned in so Casey could hear me and yelled, “That can’t be healthy!” He nodded.
The bassist kept trying to get the crowd going by jumping up on the monitors, but no one was really feeling it. Still, the crowd threw up some appreciative devil’s horns as they left.
A sixty-plus-year-old man with a pierced lip, arm tattoos and a blue bandana around his head leaned in close and started talking to me. I wondered if he was going to try to sell me drugs. Before I could start mentally guessing at what his grubby weight lifting gloved hands would pull from his heavily patched denim vest, he struck up an informative conversation about a local thrash/death metal band of which Deathcamp reminded him. Book by its cover and all that.
Next up was Dirge Within, a metalcore band out of Chicago. I came to appreciate their genre a little more this year. As a band that I would’ve entirely written off last summer, I can say they were pretty good. The bass and drums drove the songs well, and the guitar took off when it had to. The singer, who employed more growling than I am generally willing to accept, lit up the stage.
I’ve come to realize there are few people more powerful in this world than the front man for a hardcore band. About a quarter of the way through their set, Dirge Within’s singer stood on the edge of the stage, lifted his arms high over his head, and screamed, “OK, SYRACUSE! I want to see you make a mosh pit out there. I want to see a real fucking PIT right THERE!” As he finished his sentence, he pointed to the center of the floor, not far behind us.
Within minutes, the crowd had shifted to open an oval of bare floor to accommodate the madmen (and women) who call themselves moshers. This group, mostly 18 to 30, get their kicks by running across the cleared area and slamming into each other. While a majority of the moshers were content just running into each other, many whirled their arms like windmills, throwing blind fists, or like helicopter blades, swinging unguided elbows. Some stomped slowly and deliberately, others ran as hard as they could. All were driven by viciously fast, energizing instrumentals and intermittently gravelly, melodic and shrieking vocals. One brave soul stood in the middle of the pit, eyes closed, banging his head in as close an approximation of the rhythm as a human neck could achieve. Within 30 seconds, someone would slam into him, hard. He would reposition himself, sometimes having to get off the ground, and resume his headbanging.
A tall man in his early thirties wearing a Ghostbusters t-shirt, camou pants and combat boots, swung his leg through the air and connected between the headbanger’s shoulderblades, knocking him to the ground. Ghostbusters Shirt wiped out. The walls of the pit surged forward to pick them both up.
I saw all of this in glimpses over my shoulder, busy banging my own head, facing the stage. Casey and Anna occasionally turned to face me, their dislike for the music etched in their expressions. When I wasn’t paying attention, the pit expanded, and a mosher slammed into my back at full tilt, knocking me forward against Casey. From that point on, I turned my back on the stage, shoving the ridiculous-looking dancers back where they belonged. The guy next to me, doing the same thing, caught an errant fist to the side of the head. He grimaced and shoved the mosher, unable to hold it against him. Colliding bodies on the sweat- and beer-slicked floor fell often. Whenever anyone went down, someone else was there to pick him or her up.
Later in his set, in the middle of a song, the singer stepped forward again, perching atop a monitor. With one hand gripping the mic and another clenched in a white-knuckled fist, he howled: “SYRACUSE! I want to see you SPLIT THIS FUCKING FLOOR IN TWO! And when I say go, I want you to run as hard as you can at the person across from you.” He extended the arm without the mic straight out in front of him. “Everyone over here,” he swept his arm to the left, “move THERE.” He returned his arm to straight. “Everyone over here,” he swept his arm to the right, “move THERE.”
Hardcore concert goers will recognize this as “the wall of death.”
Just like that, the crowd, already somewhat divided by the mosh pit, parted like the Red Sea, all the way from the front row to at least the front of the sound booth. By now, the singer had resumed his job, but, once the separation was complete, he held his hands out like Christ on the cross. Each instrument came to a crashing halt.
I was grinning my head off. It was quite the musical feat. Casey and Anna were staring at the frothing mob across from us in horror. I didn’t want a piece of this any more than they did, though. I leaned back to close the distance between me and Casey and Anna’s ears. “Stay behind me,” I said.
The singer returned the mic to his mouth without lowering his arms. He smiled wickedly. In one instant, he dropped his arms, still keeping the mic up; the band resumed; and he shrieked, “GO!”
The divided mob rushed together. Casey, Anna and I stood single file, me in the front and Anna in the back. Maybe ten feet separated us from the steel barrier in front of the stage. I stood with my legs shoulder width apart and tried to remember years of wrestling, months of karate or at least dozens of pickup football games as the guitar and singer screamed, as the drums and bass rumbled.
They were on us incredibly fast. A few saw we weren’t moving or participating and avoided us. Not all were so perceptive. The first mosher headed for us was a shaved-bald probable juicer standing under 5’3”. I grabbed his left shoulder with my left hand, dug my right hand into his left side and shoved him off course, sending him harmlessly to our left. The wave kept coming. I tried to shunt them to the left, away from the barrier. One slammed into me, rocking me back into Casey, whose back was turned so he could still face the stage, and testing my sneakers’ grip on the slippery, slanted floor. One barreled in with his head down and his arms stretched wide. I placed my left hand between his shoulder blades, my right in their usual place on his side. I shoved down on his back and left between his ribs, forcing him to the ground next to me. Luckily, he was the last of the brief wave. He avoided being trampled by his cohorts.
“Endless aggression is my only friend,” the vocalist growled as bodies slammed into one another at his command.
It was chaos.
Part of me enjoyed it.
It felt good - instinctual - to defend myself and my friends in a physical confrontation, no matter how contrived. Maybe that’s why moshers do what they do, though those whirling, bludgeoning dances are far from self-defense.
The animalistic pleasure of shoving challengers aside didn’t last. Such things directly oppose Shaolin Kenpo’s first, overarching rule, expressed symbolically before each sparring match: the opened palm covering the closed fist during a mutual bow - sheathed fists, peace over war. I guess my “civilized” side won out.
The main event, GWAR, was eh at best. Their “humor” was sophomoric. Their showmanship, unlike the charismatic Dirge singer, was founded on an obnoxious blend of nigh-endless streams of fake blood and dick jokes. Their music was cookie cutter, an attempt to satirize over-the-top metal acts. With so few glam rock acts going, the satire falls flat.
We left about halfway through GWAR’s set. Anna had grown sick of being sprayed in the face with green and red “blood” and asked to leave, but not before the hordes behind me checkered my back with deep scratches and fast-purpling crush marks. A woman in her late 50s with tattoos snaking up her arms and platinum blond dye streaming away from her dark roots kneed me in “a sensitive area.” This is the same woman who, in her determination to throw up the horns, had consistently shoved my head into increasingly uncomfortable angles with her forearm. Crowd surfers’ shoes and boots threatened my skull’s structural integrity. A fistfight broke out two inches to my left. The collected body heat caused me to sweat the X’s clean off my hands.
So, yeah, I was ready to leave, too.
But I stopped to buy Dirge Within’s album on the way out. I think Byron will like them, and $10 going straight to the artist is fine by me. I had to throw out the shirt -- and the wifebeater beneath it -- I wore, as it was soaked in sweat and "blood."
We arrived early enough to be pretty far up in the line - only thirty or forty people stood between us and the door. All of us stood in the shadow of a nondescript white sixteen-wheeler. Anna peeked in the back, confirming it held GWAR’s famous masks and props.
Cruising past full-body tattoos, garishly large face piercings and eighteen-inch, dyed red-and-black mohawks, Anna’s friend Robert stopped by to chat. Dressed in a white wifebeater with “Jagermeister” printed in small letters on the chest and faded jeans and with a devilock trailing over his left eye, Robert kept repeating variations on “I can’t believe they’re actually here.”
A pudgy man in his late forties asked us our ages as we waited. All under 21, each of us received thick black X’s on the backs of our hands.
Upon entering the Westcott Theater, I told my friends we should stake our claim in front of the sound booth to avoid having anyone behind us. They went along with it for a while, watching the array of people filtering into the converted movie theater. The predominant tshirt color was white: all the better to display the fake blood GWAR was guaranteed to spray its audience with. I saw more wifebeaters in one place than ever before. More combat boots and camouflage cargo pants on civilians, too.
Once Robert and his girlfriend found their way in, though, Anna wanted to join them at the front of the theater. I warned her of the dangers: kicks from crowd surfers, bruises from being crushed against the bar separating us from the stage and shoves from fans eager to get close to the action. She ignored me, and Casey and I followed.
As the place filled, the combined stench of weed and beer filled the air.
Everything was fine during the first act, Mobile Deathcamp, a death metal band from Toledo, OH. They played all right, but accomplished nothing mind blowing. At one point, the band’s lead singer, probably in his late 50s, poured water in his ear and spat it from his mouth.
I leaned in so Casey could hear me and yelled, “That can’t be healthy!” He nodded.
The bassist kept trying to get the crowd going by jumping up on the monitors, but no one was really feeling it. Still, the crowd threw up some appreciative devil’s horns as they left.
A sixty-plus-year-old man with a pierced lip, arm tattoos and a blue bandana around his head leaned in close and started talking to me. I wondered if he was going to try to sell me drugs. Before I could start mentally guessing at what his grubby weight lifting gloved hands would pull from his heavily patched denim vest, he struck up an informative conversation about a local thrash/death metal band of which Deathcamp reminded him. Book by its cover and all that.
Next up was Dirge Within, a metalcore band out of Chicago. I came to appreciate their genre a little more this year. As a band that I would’ve entirely written off last summer, I can say they were pretty good. The bass and drums drove the songs well, and the guitar took off when it had to. The singer, who employed more growling than I am generally willing to accept, lit up the stage.
I’ve come to realize there are few people more powerful in this world than the front man for a hardcore band. About a quarter of the way through their set, Dirge Within’s singer stood on the edge of the stage, lifted his arms high over his head, and screamed, “OK, SYRACUSE! I want to see you make a mosh pit out there. I want to see a real fucking PIT right THERE!” As he finished his sentence, he pointed to the center of the floor, not far behind us.
Within minutes, the crowd had shifted to open an oval of bare floor to accommodate the madmen (and women) who call themselves moshers. This group, mostly 18 to 30, get their kicks by running across the cleared area and slamming into each other. While a majority of the moshers were content just running into each other, many whirled their arms like windmills, throwing blind fists, or like helicopter blades, swinging unguided elbows. Some stomped slowly and deliberately, others ran as hard as they could. All were driven by viciously fast, energizing instrumentals and intermittently gravelly, melodic and shrieking vocals. One brave soul stood in the middle of the pit, eyes closed, banging his head in as close an approximation of the rhythm as a human neck could achieve. Within 30 seconds, someone would slam into him, hard. He would reposition himself, sometimes having to get off the ground, and resume his headbanging.
A tall man in his early thirties wearing a Ghostbusters t-shirt, camou pants and combat boots, swung his leg through the air and connected between the headbanger’s shoulderblades, knocking him to the ground. Ghostbusters Shirt wiped out. The walls of the pit surged forward to pick them both up.
I saw all of this in glimpses over my shoulder, busy banging my own head, facing the stage. Casey and Anna occasionally turned to face me, their dislike for the music etched in their expressions. When I wasn’t paying attention, the pit expanded, and a mosher slammed into my back at full tilt, knocking me forward against Casey. From that point on, I turned my back on the stage, shoving the ridiculous-looking dancers back where they belonged. The guy next to me, doing the same thing, caught an errant fist to the side of the head. He grimaced and shoved the mosher, unable to hold it against him. Colliding bodies on the sweat- and beer-slicked floor fell often. Whenever anyone went down, someone else was there to pick him or her up.
Later in his set, in the middle of a song, the singer stepped forward again, perching atop a monitor. With one hand gripping the mic and another clenched in a white-knuckled fist, he howled: “SYRACUSE! I want to see you SPLIT THIS FUCKING FLOOR IN TWO! And when I say go, I want you to run as hard as you can at the person across from you.” He extended the arm without the mic straight out in front of him. “Everyone over here,” he swept his arm to the left, “move THERE.” He returned his arm to straight. “Everyone over here,” he swept his arm to the right, “move THERE.”
Hardcore concert goers will recognize this as “the wall of death.”
Just like that, the crowd, already somewhat divided by the mosh pit, parted like the Red Sea, all the way from the front row to at least the front of the sound booth. By now, the singer had resumed his job, but, once the separation was complete, he held his hands out like Christ on the cross. Each instrument came to a crashing halt.
I was grinning my head off. It was quite the musical feat. Casey and Anna were staring at the frothing mob across from us in horror. I didn’t want a piece of this any more than they did, though. I leaned back to close the distance between me and Casey and Anna’s ears. “Stay behind me,” I said.
The singer returned the mic to his mouth without lowering his arms. He smiled wickedly. In one instant, he dropped his arms, still keeping the mic up; the band resumed; and he shrieked, “GO!”
The divided mob rushed together. Casey, Anna and I stood single file, me in the front and Anna in the back. Maybe ten feet separated us from the steel barrier in front of the stage. I stood with my legs shoulder width apart and tried to remember years of wrestling, months of karate or at least dozens of pickup football games as the guitar and singer screamed, as the drums and bass rumbled.
They were on us incredibly fast. A few saw we weren’t moving or participating and avoided us. Not all were so perceptive. The first mosher headed for us was a shaved-bald probable juicer standing under 5’3”. I grabbed his left shoulder with my left hand, dug my right hand into his left side and shoved him off course, sending him harmlessly to our left. The wave kept coming. I tried to shunt them to the left, away from the barrier. One slammed into me, rocking me back into Casey, whose back was turned so he could still face the stage, and testing my sneakers’ grip on the slippery, slanted floor. One barreled in with his head down and his arms stretched wide. I placed my left hand between his shoulder blades, my right in their usual place on his side. I shoved down on his back and left between his ribs, forcing him to the ground next to me. Luckily, he was the last of the brief wave. He avoided being trampled by his cohorts.
“Endless aggression is my only friend,” the vocalist growled as bodies slammed into one another at his command.
It was chaos.
Part of me enjoyed it.
It felt good - instinctual - to defend myself and my friends in a physical confrontation, no matter how contrived. Maybe that’s why moshers do what they do, though those whirling, bludgeoning dances are far from self-defense.
The animalistic pleasure of shoving challengers aside didn’t last. Such things directly oppose Shaolin Kenpo’s first, overarching rule, expressed symbolically before each sparring match: the opened palm covering the closed fist during a mutual bow - sheathed fists, peace over war. I guess my “civilized” side won out.
The main event, GWAR, was eh at best. Their “humor” was sophomoric. Their showmanship, unlike the charismatic Dirge singer, was founded on an obnoxious blend of nigh-endless streams of fake blood and dick jokes. Their music was cookie cutter, an attempt to satirize over-the-top metal acts. With so few glam rock acts going, the satire falls flat.
We left about halfway through GWAR’s set. Anna had grown sick of being sprayed in the face with green and red “blood” and asked to leave, but not before the hordes behind me checkered my back with deep scratches and fast-purpling crush marks. A woman in her late 50s with tattoos snaking up her arms and platinum blond dye streaming away from her dark roots kneed me in “a sensitive area.” This is the same woman who, in her determination to throw up the horns, had consistently shoved my head into increasingly uncomfortable angles with her forearm. Crowd surfers’ shoes and boots threatened my skull’s structural integrity. A fistfight broke out two inches to my left. The collected body heat caused me to sweat the X’s clean off my hands.
So, yeah, I was ready to leave, too.
But I stopped to buy Dirge Within’s album on the way out. I think Byron will like them, and $10 going straight to the artist is fine by me. I had to throw out the shirt -- and the wifebeater beneath it -- I wore, as it was soaked in sweat and "blood."