GWAR!!!

The last time I saw GWAR, it was the Spring of 1999 and I was 17 years old (go ahead, do the math). My friend Blueguy and I drove to Worcester, MA with his friend Miken (no one I knew at the time had a real name and we liked it, dammit) to see the very first New England Hardcore and Metal Festival (by the way, I cannot tell you how excited it gets me to find that there’s a Wikipedia page on the NEHMF. I love that damn site) at the Palladium. GWAR headlined after a long day of bands, buying things, getting a free poster promoting the release of IX Equilibrium, meeting a GWAR slave (roadie) in the parking lot, meeting members of GWAR and having them sign my copy of This Toilet Earth and watching Miken construct sculptures out of cigarettes and phlegm (truly awe-inspiring). I could probably write a whole post just recapping memories from that day, but that’s off point; I bring this experience up for two reasons: first, GWAR rocked very, very hard and sent me home, much to the surprise of my parents, dyed a mixture of blue, red and green and second, I finally had a chance to get a reprise two weeks ago when GWAR headlined at Irving Plaza in NYC.

Outside of what I mention in the review, two things of note about this show:

1. The barrier that concert security sets up between the audience and the stage – the one that marks off the zone where crowd surfers fear to tread – broke two songs into GWAR’s set and overall, security had a hard time keeping crowd-control barriers from collapsing. Normally this problem would effect me not at all, but unfortunately I was in that zone (or is it pit?) taking pictures – at least until security decided to kick all of the photographers out of the pit and back into the audience for our safety, leaving me a good 30 or 40 feet away from the stage without a good angle. In retrospect, it was a good thing I didn’t make a scene – the same security crew worked the Nokia Theatre three nights later when I went to cover Children of Bodom. I’m not too impressed with Irving Plaza, however.
   
   
2. Before the show started, people started tossing condom balloons off the balcony – most likely made from the condoms someone was handing out in the lobby. I wish I had taken pictures, because there’s really nothing more amusing than people smacking around a balloon meant to cover someone’s genitals.