PopHorror Let's Get Scared
When I was a little kid, my family allowed me to watch things I had no business seeing. GWAR was one of those things. Thirty-five years ago, I saw GWAR for the first time on one of those heavy metal VHS’s and I’ve been hooked since. We sat down with Mike Bishop, AKA Blothar the Berserker, who had been in the band since the start, playing bass as Beefcake the Mighty. Here’s what he had to say.
PopHorror: What was it that attracted you to the band in high school? Was it just something new?
Mike Bishop; Well, yeah. GWAR was a part of the punk scene in Richmond, so all of that was new. I will never forget the first time I heard about GWAR. People said that one of the singers for one of the punk bands was a part of it, and I had my own hardcore band at the time, and he was like, “Have you seen this guy?” These guys were crazy, and they were an older group of people than than I was. So, yeah, it was just a big deal in the hardcore scene in Richmond. The people that were involved in it were well known and from good bands that. Dave Brockie had sung for Death Piggy, and Dewey and Rob Mosby were both from the band called White Cross, which is a good hardcore band. So that’s what attracted me.
PopHorror: I remember watching GWAR videos of the old interviews on those old heavy metal VHS movies that I was way too young to watch. How would you describe those first few years?
Mike Bishop: The first few years were weird. Nobody knew who GWAR was. So, when we would tour, we had an old school bus and we would load all the stuff into the back and everybody would sort of just lay down on mattresses. I mean, it was a lot of fun. It was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. People were really shocked. It was outside of the frame. That’s how GWAR has always been; it still is. Actually, the band kind of pays the price for that. Sometimes it doesn’t work, right?
You go out and work in a casino with nice carpets, right? When you go to something like that for the first time, nobody had ever seen it, right? That was what was so much fun. And it’s what I’ve looked forward to in expanding the band. Going to places where people have never seen us. Even now, there’s a lot of people that come to our shows. I would say at any given GWAR show, at least half the people have never seen it before. It’s pretty cool.
PopHorror: How long did it take you to get used to your various costumes and performing in them?
Mike Bishop: When we came up with my suit… I remember the hardest part was that I was the bass player first, and I was playing the role of Beefcake the Mighty, and I had a metal breastplate that we had gotten off of this guy and it was from an actual suit of armor. They wound up just banging it out and making it bigger and stretching it around and then putting stuff on the inside of it so I could put it on my chest, and it was really hard to play the bass with it because it would catch my arm. And, you know, one thing about GWAR, like, you definitely find out about power friction.
I have tried to do the song “Viking Death Machine,” which I played bass on. I’ve tried to play bass on it a couple of times. When we played live it was really hard. The suit just was not made for bass playing, so it’s sort of like laying the bass flat. So yeah, man, playing in the suit is a pain sometimes.
PopHorror: When did you obtain your PhD in music?
Mike Bishop: 2008 is when I graduated. I went after doing GWAR and then doing my own band, Kepone, for a long time. I kind of just switched around and started doing a scholarship, and I really enjoyed it for a while. I really liked teaching, but there’s no comparison. And now when I think about it, things have just changed a lot. I wouldn’t want to be in academia right now, but it was fun while it lasted.
PopHorror: Did you ever see yourself returning to the band?
Mike Bishop: I did not. Like I said, I had played in all these in bands, and I was just at the point where I had to do something because I was driving trucks for a living, and I was like, “Man, this sucks, I don’t want to be doing this.” That’s why I went to school, and it was while I was in school that I figured out that I liked it because I’m a writer. I’ve always been a writer, even though I didn’t go to school. It was hard to get somebody to give you a chance if you didn’t have a degree.
So that’s really why I went. That was my path, man. I had stopped doing music pretty much except for when I had this project called Misery Brothers, and the project itself is kind of a scholarship, right? It’s like learning these songs, these kinds of old songs, and trying to combine the project of the band to show the commonality between country music and soul music. It involved getting students to play and all that stuff. So I was still involved in music that way. When Dave died, I was not looking to be the singer of a rock band. There’s more than just something that happened and I kept going with it. It’s weird to me now that I’ve been doing this way longer than I played bass in the band.
PopHorror: What is a genre of music that people would be surprised to enjoy?
Mike Bishop; Oh, man, there’s a lot, because of my background. I guess they wouldn’t be surprised. I came to music through religion, and that is a fairly common story for musicians. I don’t know why, especially in metal. Maybe it’s because of people. It might actually be they just don’t want to admit it. I learned how to sing, and I learned how to be a musician at church. Then I left church when I was old enough to ask questions about dinosaurs and said, “All right, fuck you guys. I’m out of here.”
So that might be surprising to people; I do like gospel music, and I still like it. I still like things like sacred harp. I was trained in ethnomusicology. I know a shit ton of different music styles but, Tejano music, this stuff I’ve studied… just all various types of music.
PopHorror: How long does it take to prepare for each tour?
Mike Bishop: Wow, it takes months and months for them to get the costumes. Well, it depends on if we’re doing a new show that has new kills, new gags, new builds… that takes at least three months and usually four. I don’t know why it is this way, but it’s always been this way ever since I joined the band. We used to do it. We called it throwing down, which is where everybody’s like throwing down on the show; we’re all there working, working, working, working, working to make it happen. It’s about the guys and the girls that build the costumes and build the set pieces and build all that stuff. That work goes on right up until we put the crap in the truck. It’s always been that way.
PopHorror: There’s a statement from you that the group wasn’t really into sharing their feelings. Do you think that’s changed in the past few years?
Mike Bishop: When you’re a group, everybody’s malformed in their own way, right? We’re all together. From the start, I felt like the members of the band were in some ways shaped by this. There was some way that people don’t talk… especially guys, right? Men around each other, it took a while for us to do things the way adults do. It’s surprising. When I get into working in the professional world, people just say what they mean. They don’t like demonstrate how they feel by acting like a complete asshole, and then waiting for you to figure it out, right? It’s that kind of stuff.
So, it’s weird because those guys have been in suspended animation, right? That’s what we’ve been doing. I was out in the world learning and meeting and figuring out politics and figuring out, like, how to be a person. They were still doing GWAR, so they were still within that little bubble, and it really is a consuming little bubble that you get in to do the band. So, I do think that after Dave and since I have come back, that has changed a little bit that, people talk more about what’s going on? I’ll tell you something, man. We got this new player in the band, Tommy Mehan, and that really helps, because he’s a younger guy. He’s from another generation. He’s not as cynical. He’s very enthusiastic about GWAR.
I’m going to tell you something right now: it’s a band that has a sort of inverted ego issue. Whereas in a lot of bands, you have a bunch of rock stars, GWAR has a bunch of guys that are comic book nerds and horror movie buffs. We’re nerdy guys, man. They’re into nerd culture. The obsessiveness of that and the fact that they haven’t done well… GWAR is not cool, right? If you look at a heavy metal concert and all the guys are hanging around in leather pants and chicks with them… We don’t fit into that, man. That’s not us, right?
PopHorror: What does the band have in store for this anniversary?
Mike Bishop; Oh, man, the 40th anniversary is going to be big. It’s going to be huge. We’re going to play a lot of shows. We’re going to bring back monsters that people haven’t seen for a while, and we’re going to also bring back the spirit of newness to GWAR. The goal of the whole anniversary thing is to show that there are still things to be done. There are still things that we haven’t gotten around to do on stage. GWAR is kind of like the movie Bad Taste, but live, right? There are different ways to kill things that we haven’t done. So we’re going to just experiment with that and bring it. Bring it out more.
