118. GWAR: Insane and Surprisingly Deep. Music, Money, AI & Chappell Roan | Blothar & Michael Bishop
Go with Elmo LovanoShow Notes
GWAR: Insane and Surprisingly Deep. Music, Money, AI & Chappell Roan | Blothar & Michael Bishop
Episode 118: GWAR’s lead singer Blothar the Berserker and his human Michael Bishop sit down for the first time ever in a single interview! This is a full career-spanning interview across Gwar. Never before have Blothar and Michael been seen together.
Michael Bishop has one of the strangest résumés in music. He joined GWAR in the late 1980s as the first Beefcake the Mighty, played bass on the band’s earliest records, and walked away in the mid-90s at the exact moment GWAR broke into the mainstream through MTV and Beavis and Butt-Head. He went on to front his own band, Kepone, drove trucks for a living, and then earned a PhD in music from the University of Virginia’s Department of Music in Critical and Comparative Studies, where he studied ethnomusicology, performance studies and music history, and taught. In 2014, after the death of his friend Dave Brockie, GWAR’s founding frontman Oderus Urungus, Michael returned to the band as its lead singer: Blothar the Berserker.
In the first half of this episode, Michael tells the whole story as himself. How GWAR began in Richmond, Virginia as an art collective in an abandoned dairy in Jackson Ward, a band that came second, after the costumes. The VCU sculpture and printmaking scene that built it. Hunter’s rule: don’t talk about it, do it. The school bus they toured in until the mid-90s, the time Dave Brockie borrowed Suicidal Tendencies’ backline even though they said no. Opening Danzig’s first show. Jello Biafra, Joey Ramone, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Fat Mike and NOFX, Mike Judge, Kurt Loder and Matt Pinfield. Why he left at the peak, what academia taught him about punk, and what it was actually like to be handed the job of replacing a frontman who was, by design, irreplaceable. That includes how he built Blothar’s voice by studying Brockie’s, as a tribute to someone he loved.
In the second half, Blothar the Berserker takes the chair, and Elmo keeps a straight face. Money, AI and the state of music making. How you actually keep a band together for forty years, with a genuinely good answer about Duke Ellington. Why you shouldn’t rehearse. Covering Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” and the matter of a borrowed Grammys dress. Playing NPR’s Tiny Desk. Forty years of blood, 100 gallons a night, sixteen albums, Gor Gor, the Scumdogs, and what GWAR is actually saying about humanity underneath all of it. This is one for the books. Lets go!!
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