by Emmie Sharp
There is maybe no point to reviewing Beyond the Streets’ Let There Be Gwar show in the same way there’s maybe no point in reviewing the David Bowie shows museums keep putting on—it’s happening less because the props and ephemera left behind are fascinating (even with the music and man eerily absent) and more because basically everyone in the demographic that goes to museums likes David Bowie as well as a fair chunk of the demographic that doesn’t like museums but still needs something to do before bars open.
If you like the slaughterifically over-the-top intergalactic barbarian-metal spectacle known as Gwar, you are going to go to this show, and if you don’t like Gwar but know and like people who like Gwar, you are going to go hoping to run into them there, and if you don’t like Gwar and don’t like people who like Gwar, you haven’t heard there’s a show. In that way, it’s a lot like an actual Gwar concert.
It’s also a lot like an actual Gwar concert (and unlike a Bowie one) in that the music isn’t remotely the point (there was a lot of metal playing at the opening but none of it was Gwar)—while Gwar was actually capable of putting together completely credible mid’80s thrash (“Maggots” was ok), they didn’t lean into that, they leaned into being the most insanely cartoonish version of an 80’s metal show possible. You went to have fun—specifically: to be part of the fun of a room full of people possibly on acid being sprayed with blood all having fun.
The props on display at Beyond the Streets can only hope to be a dim echo of that. There’s a horned skull here, a cuttlefish codpiece there—a pretty decent alien fetus—basically all at a looks-good-on-stage level of crudeness and all the crafty road-durability VCU-grads can muster, but ultimately what you want is to see not these things in cases, but Gwar itself—especially the incarnation with the late Dave Brockie—aka Oderus Urungus, the band’s founder, as master of ceremonies.
The most interesting objects on display are the flyers, sketchbooks and high school yearbooks that tell the story of how some punks just as obsessed with music, wargames and comic books as all their contemporaries in other bands started to let the last two obsessions overtake the first. Although everything about Gwar was fake, after a certain number of days spent on the road, in recording studios and practicing instruments, every band becomes real: the audio malfunctions, police harassment, drugs, groupies, roadies, and screaming matches were all real enough.
Beneath the celebratory tone, there is an inkling of the central creative and personal tension in the band between Brockie/Urungus’ and Hunter Jackson (aka Techno Destructo), the bands two volatile leaders—and if you look carefully you can see their different hands at work. Brockie’s aesthetic was all bulges: muscle, plasma, eyeballs, bubbled Conan surfaces, whereas Hunter (a Warhammer 40k fan) brought the engineered lines of the techno-baroque. Though he appeared in full costume at the opening, squeezing fans heads’ in his wrenchlike claw, Jackson didn’t attend Brockie’s funeral—but with Let There Be Gwar, everyone can attend the wake.
Image: Courtesy of Beyond the Streets