Bonnaroo 2024 is less than a year away, and the big music festival is already teasing performers that fans can look forward to. Over on X — formerly Twitter — the official Bonnaroo account posted an animated clip featuring a trio of dogs covered in green slime while floating in space, while encouraging followers to guess who they might be referring to. It didn’t take long for many to pick up that the clue seemed to be in reference to a legendary metal band.
The image likely is a reference to Gwar and their iconic 1990 album Scumdogs of the Universe. This is also how the band refers to their on-stage alter-egos, a group of interstellar travelers playing raucous, violent music for their fans, endearingly known as “bohabs.” While Bonnaroo organizers have not confirmed that Gwar is definitely the artist referred to in the post, Festive Owl shared their own post with a photo of the band and the caption, “Let’s just say this will be your POV Thursday night at Bonnaroo in 2024.” While we can only speculate as to what fans can expect from the performance — aside from gallons of fake blood and hilariously gruesome creatures — it could be notable that 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of This Toilet Earth, the band’s fourth album, released in 1994.
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A few years ago, PopCulture.com had a chance to speak with Gwar frontman Mike Bishop, more commonly known as Blöthar the Berserker, and formerly bassist Beefcake the Mighty. Heavy metal icons for multiple decades now, Gwar have been quite enigmatic throughout their 30+ years in the music scene, and in 2022 the band unveiled a retrospective documentary, This Is Gwar, which follows the space-born scumdogs from their earliest origins all the way through to the current incarnation of the legendary band.
Speaking about the documentary and the band’s collective candidness about all they’ve been through over the years, Bishop joked that there were “tons of things that I don’t want to discuss about the history of Gwar.” He then added, “But we didn’t run into that in the story. If anything, I think there’s more that he could have put in. Of course, you’re just struggling against the issue of time and how you tell a story like that. It’s hard telling any story that it goes over as many years as the story does and has so many people involved. Gwar has had a lot of, lot of people involved.”
Bishop continued, “There is very little that we… We didn’t cordon anything off from him. He just gave us the opportunity to talk and if I didn’t want to talk about something, I just didn’t talk about it. But it’s mostly just weird stuff that happened on the road. The band’s been around for a long time and there’s been a lot of conflict.” Bishop clarified, “Not conflict within the band, but there’s just a ton of stories that we could tell. Fighting with security, weird shows in the beginning, weird managers we’ve had. Just everything. It’s such a long story. He [director Scott Barber] did a really good job of distilling it down.”
