Goat Whore, God Forbid, GWAR (the 3 G's, yo!)
@ The Key Club in Hollywood, USA
on February 4th 2002

The Key Club fits in perfectly with any mid-westerners expectations of what a Hollywood club should be like.  The Key Club is 100% Club MTV: part overt swank and part pretense.  You walk over their floors, look down and see many little black and white TV sets, displaying the stage, embedded right there in the floor.  The bathrooms are manned with attendants who are there to offer you a towel, a Mound's bar or dating advice (condoms). The walls of the club are covered in metal grating, the same metal that covers the pillars shooting up to the ceiling, and as a special decorative measure, for one GWAR-night only, everything in sight is wrapped in plastic: speakers, disco ball, couches, cameras, monitors - it's like the home of one of those anal retentive suburbanites, but gone overboard beyond their wildest plastic coated dreams.
Enough about the club, what matters are the bands.  Goat Whore was the opener, which is always tough, especially when opening for GWAR.  Let me tell you, I've seen GWAR on 11 different occasions and save for once, when Bile opened, the openers have met indifference or hostility.  A GWAR crowd is there for GWAR and they're none to keen on putting up with preliminary crap.  GWAR fans want immediate satisfaction, no foreplay, put the penis in the vagina and get on with it.  Shit, I once saw a crowd boo the X-Cops off the stage when they were opening for GWAR, and the X-Cops, oh my brothers, are GWAR!  So Goat Whore didn't have a particularly responsive audience.  Their music was a cross between Celtic Frost and Death; couple that with song titles like, "Invert the Virgin," and "Dark Sorcery," and I think you get the picture, in broad strokes anyway. 
Goat Wombat left the stage, and after a far too g.d. long change over, God Forbid was ready to rock and rock they did.  In the style of Sepultura (they covered a tune by the Seps), Fear Factory and early Entombed, God Forbid is good balls out and dangling like a whore's earrings, super-tight Nuevo-death metal.  If it weren't for the fact that the entire crowd was drooling for GWAR, I think they really would have enjoyed God Forbid.  Christ, I can't express how horribly difficult it is to open for GWAR and get anything resembling an appreciative response from the GWAR fans.  It's tough, brothers; it's tough.
Again, there was an excruciatingly lengthy stage change over between acts.  I don't know who's to blame for the amount of time stolen from me, but I blame the club.  Why?  Always blame the rich bastards who screw hard workers out of $20 for a single night out.  Twenty bucks for a fucking rock show and here we are in a goddamn recession.  Greedy fuckwads.  How much of that money goes to the TV sets in the floor and all the pretentious accoutrements their wannabe Club MTV interior designer bilked them for?  Give me a warehouse and a jerry-rigged P.A. any day of the g.d. week over their excessive Sunset boulevard horseshit.  But, all the time between acts was soon forgiven for the mighty GWAR were (in the parlance of our rapper brothers) in the motherfucking house, y'all.
What a show, GWAR, the hardest working band in showbiz, put on.  They opened the show with the first song from their new album.  Battlelust peeled sweetly off the stage, some senseless carnage ensued and soon the whole crowd was in an ensanguined frenzy: slamming, hopping, and always jockeying for the bloodiest positioning.  After Battlelust, the show kicked into overdrive with one of the best overall sets I had seen GWAR perform in quite some time.  The preponderance of material came off their scintillating new Metal Blade release, Violence Has Arrived.  Highlights played off VHA included Licksore, Bloody Mary, Immortal Corrupter and The Apes of Wrath during which they mutilated good old woman beating rapist Mike Tyson.  The Blood Drive was off to a fabulous start.

Up next on the chopping block was Osama Bin Laden, killed to the song Baby Dick Fuck.  Osama was quickly followed by our stateside mass murderer, George W. Bush who GWAR thoroughly dismembered and violated to the lovely refrains of Babyraper.  The crowd howled and cheered the death of President Bush with more angry ferocity than they did that of Osama Bin Laden.  Very interesting sign of the times considering President Coke-brain has a 90% approval rating, make that 100% violent disapproval rating amongst GWAR fans.  Of course, it's all good clean fun.  It's just entertainment so please don't take it as anything but entertainment.  Unless, that is, you want to.
Gwar, after nearly 15 ass-kicking (literally, the master has a butt), pope-raping years, are still in top form.  Although, I do miss the excessiveness of old.  The absence of several perennial favorites, including: Sleazy, the Sexecutioner, Techno-Destructo and, most heartbreaking of all, Slymenstra, were all strongly felt.  But why linger on the past when the present of GWAR is as musically brutal as they've ever been.  Like Oderus said, "15 years ago GWAR started out at the very bottom, and we rose up, struggling, to somewhere about in the middle, and now we're on our way back down again.  We fucking love you guys!"  And we love you too Oderus.  We love you too.