Vector Gwar
Circa 1996-97, me had not dipped a toe into the heavy metal waters yet so when I first heard Gwar (heard is important here) I was dismissive of them.
It was their classic song "Sick of You" and it was in, of all places, a skateboarding video I was watching. "What the fuck is this long-haired metal shit doing in my skate video" I angrily pondered.
Later, when I got a gander at the band, likely from the slacker record store movie Empire Records I was like "that's Gwar? What is wrong with me," and quickly went to the local record store to pay over-inflated prices for their then most current album (and probably my favorite "Carnival of Chaos") which featured the lineup you see in the art here.
I have so many awesome, stupid, exhilarating, youthful, aged, memories from the well over 20 plus years I've been a fan and having seen them live easily a dozen times.
Some of the standouts are the first time I saw them, somehow convincing my parents to let me go see a heavy metal band of monsters kill people on stage ON A SCHOOL NIGHT (which was probably the harder sell) and having met a select few of the band members before hand at a local records store, my now wife, but then fellow miscreant, was recruited to be fed to their then on-stage meat grinder. Or on New Year's Eve 1999 going on 2000 when we all thought the world might end and much to my parents chagrin, I decided if it be so I will end my time on this earth with my friends and Gwar, covered in fake blood and semen as it would be an apocalypse to remember. One of my friends ended up showing up late, in a suit to "look good for the end of the word" which was then ruined by Gwar's fluid explosions, which did not please him, but I'm not sure what he expected.
