Mike Bishop, who sings for GWAR as Blöthar The Berserker, has talked about the death of Dave Brockie and about the comparison he thinks nobody makes.
Speaking to the Go With Elmo Lovano podcast, Bishop said the talent was the part people miss. Brockie was like Buster Keaton, he said, a man who could have worked as a stand up comedian or an actor and chose instead to clown around on a stage in a costume. The energy was ridiculous and it went into the one place he wanted it to go.
Bishop had played bass in the band in the 1980s and the 1990s, and the two of them had discussed him coming back more than once while Brockie was alive. It never happened. They spoke on the phone a few months before the death.
The call that followed came from Bob Gorman, the band's longtime artist, and Bishop said he knew what it was before he had finished picking up the phone. He cried, and he was one of several people who spoke at the funeral.
Everybody came, he said, and they gave Brockie a Viking funeral with the costume laid on a boat, which in typical fashion for this band was not a wooden one.
Bishop took the microphone in 2014. The band have buried another of their own since.