What’s something you’ve done that your past self would be proud of?
I would have to go to 2011 before I met Gwar, but I would be impressed that I got that interview… and surprised that it didn’t equal getting discovered or becoming an honorable member of some sorts🤷♂️ yeah we butted heads a little 🤷
Wyrd Outlook by Grogh
Ghostwritten by Vikki Vexum — Pocket Librarian of The Wyrd Hereafter
Best of Wyrd Media, Through GsG Goggles
Before there was a Ghostship Groggy, there were other strange arrivals.
If we’re talking about my influences for wild alien theatrics on a stage, the order is simple: The Rocky Horror Picture Show first. GWAR second.
And before another step: rest in peace, Tim Curry.
Curry died on August 25, 2026, at 80, as the Television Academy records. His passing deserves a place at the beginning of this reflection, because his performance as Frank-N-Furter stands at the beginning of this particular creative influence.
Speaking personally as the Captain, nothing in his extraordinary career had a greater impact on my alternative imagination than Rocky Horror. The entrance, the voice, the outrageous confidence—the sheer command of the room. That performance helped me imagine what a strange character could accomplish simply by arriving completely convinced of himself.
Although, as a pirate, I must also salute his Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island. That is my second great Curry touchstone. The man could command a floor show or plot a mutiny with equally persuasive enthusiasm.
Rocky Horror first. Then GWAR—more precisely, Dave Brockie’s GWAR.
That distinction matters to me. Influences have names, personalities, and particular moments attached to them. A band can keep its name while the thing that reached you becomes part of its past.
This is about what reached me—and what eventually found its way aboard the Ghostship.
Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter holds the first position in this particular corner of my imagination.
There is something powerful about an alien arrival that takes command through theatrical presence. The costume, the voice, the sexuality, the confidence, the ridiculousness: everything participates in the character.
The room has to adjust.
That is a tremendous creative permission slip. A strange character can make an entrance with enough conviction that everyone else briefly becomes the visitor.
For me, that is part of the ancestry of Captain Grogh. The performance can be outrageous and still reveal something. It can flirt, provoke, embarrass itself, and expose the audience’s assumptions along the way.
Then came a considerably messier spacecraft.
GWAR brought another kind of alien theater into view: grotesque bodies, colossal egos, violence turned into spectacle, and humanity looking deeply unimpressive under extraterrestrial inspection.
The part that stayed with me was Dave Brockie as Oderus Urungus.
Through my goggles, Oderus often functioned as a parody of toxic masculinity taken to an extraterrestrial extreme. The swagger was enormous. The appetites were monstrous. The self-importance practically required its own loading dock.
There was something recognizably human inside that ridiculous alien shape.
Brockie himself described constructing the character by exaggerating his personality and the rock-frontman archetype in a 2012 interview. In another account of the band’s work, he explained the intention as “to hold up a twisted mirror to the culture.” That phrase appears in Style Weekly’s profile of GWAR.
That is the Brockie influence I recognize in my own work.
The monster gives human behavior somewhere conspicuous to stand. Inflate the ego, hand it a microphone, and let it explain why everything is somebody else’s fault.
Eventually, the audience may recognize somebody.
Occasionally, inconveniently, themselves.
My connection to Brockie includes a brief encounter in person. I interviewed him while appearing as the Captain.
As I remember it, that happened roughly seven months before his death. I would want to check the recording before attaching an exact date.
We lightly bumped heads.
He was rough around the edges, and the exchange did not unfold quite as I had imagined it. But he took the interview, which I appreciated. There is something memorable about bringing your developing character into the orbit of somebody whose work helped make that kind of performance imaginable.
Off camera, I remember him calling me “Mushroom Head,” suggesting that my appearance looked too much like Mushroomhead.
That got to me.
I made some alterations afterward. Not many.
An influence can get under your skin without getting the steering wheel.
That little collision belongs in the story because admiration does not require a perfect encounter. He could matter to my creative development and still annoy me. I could take the criticism seriously enough to examine my appearance and still decide that most of the Captain belonged exactly where it was.
The encounter left me with appreciation, irritation, and something to think about.
An unusually efficient interview.
Ghostship Groggy has a GWAR-adjacent flavor, but the more precise description is a significant Dave Brockie influence.
That does not mean a one-for-one borrowing. My Captain does not go as far as Oderus. The worlds, purposes, and characters have their own direction.
What traveled across was a willingness to inhabit an exaggerated masculine figure and let the performance expose the cracks in that figure’s authority.
Captain Grogh rides that edge.
Frankie rides it harder.
And Frankie carries a Rocky Horror breadcrumb in plain sight: Frankie. Frank-N-Furter. I now recognize that influence in my subconscious choice of his name and the role everyone attributes to him as the ship’s Ghost Captain.
Everyone, that is, except Captain Loki Groggy, who recognizes only himself as having ever been the Captain. Even the title carries a disagreement. That is part of the story’s mechanical lore: the characters cannot agree on who held the authority, and the audience has to navigate the competing accounts.
Frankie’s arrogance and toxic masculine tendencies can be pushed further, but he also has refinement. There is competence inside the difficult personality. He can know exactly what he is doing in one area while remaining a considerable problem in another.
That complexity matters to me.
A character becomes more interesting when the audience has reasons to respect him and reasons to question him. His abilities do not erase his ugliness. His ugliness does not make every ability imaginary.
There is room for satire inside that tension.
The character can make a compelling case for himself while giving the audience evidence against him.
Brockie’s death is part of this history, and it deserves plain language.
He died on March 23, 2014. The Virginia medical examiner determined the cause was acute heroin toxicity and the manner of death was accidental, as contemporary reporting documented.
I remember feeling that something was off during our encounter. That remains my impression of an interaction, rather than proof of what he had taken or what was happening medically.
His death also does not turn the excess into a creative requirement.
The imagination is what I value. The loss is what ended his opportunity to keep using it.
There were more performances, more arguments, and more strange ideas that could have existed.
GWAR continued after Brockie.
My relationship to the work changed.
Their newer performances, including the “Pink Pony Club” cover, do not give me the particular feeling that made Brockie such an important influence. Other listeners can enjoy that direction. It is not the creative lineage I mean when I discuss Ghostship Groggy.
The choice of a familiar song is not the dividing line. Brockie-era GWAR also performed unexpected covers, including Kansas and Billy Ocean, as this retrospective of their performances recalls.
What I miss is the particular mind doing the interpreting: the voice, the abrasive wit, the personality inside the absurdity.
A costume can establish continuity. For me, the person animating it determined the connection.
So when I acknowledge GWAR as an influence, I am pointing to Brockie’s era and what his performance taught me. That acknowledgment is not an endorsement of the current act or a statement that our work is heading in the same direction.
Rocky Horror first. Dave Brockie second.
One helped show me the power of a strange arrival taking command of the stage. The other showed me how grotesque alien bravado could hold up a deeply unflattering mirror.
Those influences became part of my creative vocabulary.
Then the Captain needed his own voice, his own problems, his own universe—and characters like Frankie, who could make the audience admire the craftsmanship while questioning the man holding the tools.
That is how I want to honor an influence: recognize what it gave me, understand why it mattered, and build something of my own with it.
The Captain remembers where he came from.
He still leaves in his own ship.
