Two days after the death of Chuck Varga, GWAR have spoken. “There are some losses that hit harder than others,” the band said on Sunday evening. “The world lost Chuck a few days ago, and GWAR lost one of its own.”
What the statement makes clear is how much of the band came out of him. “He was there when this strange, disgusting, beautiful thing was being born, helping create the world that would become GWAR,” they wrote, and then the part that most obituaries of a performer cannot say: his illustrations and his costume design set the visual style, and he did it while also standing inside one of the costumes as The Sexecutioner.
“He was there at the beginning, and even before, when GWAR was struggling to establish what it was going to become,” the band said. He held the role from 1985 until 2022 and had been battling cancer.