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Pit Stories: Beer, Booze, And Blood

We've had some great Pit Stories lately about teaching a student the way of the mosh, a trailer park show with some dubious offers for merch, and some hardcore dancers who can't sling insults for shit.

For this week's entry, we again hit up Virgin Steele, who previously gave us a baffling story of a kid who managed to take a nap in the bass bin during a Manowar show.

Today the Steele gives us another rousing metallic tale of just how crazy things can get at a GWAR show:

One night I wandered into a Rock Club that was quite famous here in New York at one time, called Sundance. I played there with Virgin Steele quite often, also Manowar played there, Guns & Roses, Megadeth… everyone. Anyway… one night I wandered or rather stumbled in blind drunk, crashed my way to the bar, ordered another drink, looked around, and there was GWAR onstage wearing these reptile suits.

They were roaring away, the music was deafening, and pounding, and the vocals were low, snarling and well…reptilian… and then quite suddenly the song ended and the head reptile spoke to us in a very human, soft rather cultured voice and I was riveted, shocked & startled by the juxtaposition of visual and aural strangeness and the next thing I knew, the entire audience seemed to have flown through the air and imbedded themselves on the stage!

They were flailing about, leaping off then back on the stage, jumping forwards, sideways, and backwards and generally running around wildly. There were so many people up there that you couldn’t see the band anymore… it looked, sounded and felt quite insane! I had no idea what was happening and thought I was in a Hieronymus Bosch painting or Dante’s Inferno. This was my first experience with moshing and wild over the top audience participation. When I finally stumbled out of there much later, I was covered in a nasty mixture of beer, booze, blood, both real and fake, and other assorted liquids that emanated both from the band and the audience that I would not care to remember or identify…

What's your favorite memory for a GWAR show? Let us know in the comments below! Virgin Steele's "Nocturnes of Hellfire & Damnation" dropped last month and a song off that album can be heard here: