Shots Fired: Vulvatron (Kim Dylla) vs GWAR

May 8, 2015

6230

166

Late afternoon yesterday, I got word of an explosive argument on Facebook. Kim Dylla (AKA Vulvatron, AKA lead seamstress at Kylla Custom Rock Wear) was apparently let go from GWAR. The problem, however, rose in the fact that she was allegedly not told she was being fired, and discovered this turn of events through a press release on Blabbermouth.

Kim lashed out on Facebook, saying:

Her supporters came to her defense. That’s when things got heated and Pustulus Maximus (AKA Brent Purgason) came to GWAR’s defense, and a Facebook-brawl ensued.

(Via Ultimate Guitar)
Brent Purgason: If you really want to keep dragging this out then I can tell them the truth. I wanted to keep the crew in Richmond so of course my first choice was to pick someone local and I figured it would be great to grab somebody that I had come up with. So I picked you above all others and it seemed like it was going to work out great so we hired you. Then you toured and you were drinking too much before you performed and we told you to stop.

Then it happened again, then again and the final straw was when you were so inebriated you broke a bone on stage during the show. Not cool. It wasn’t like we never said anything to you. We told you again and again from individual band members and tour manager and you didn’t listen. Did we say that to the world? No, but you want to paint this picture like you got sidelined out of no where. Dude, we told you JANUARY 5th 2015 and we told you WHY. You insulted fan art right from the get go in public for the world to see. I don’t like it when someone that is supposed to be working with me is disrespecting the people that make this possible.

Say whatever you want, your friends are going to have your back no matter what but don’t call me a f-cking a-shole for protecting my livelihood. You showed up drunk for work after given multiple chances to correct the mistake and you were the NEWEST person on the crew. If anyone here got a new job and showed up hammered they would get fired too. We gave you more than a few times to fix the problem and you would just deny you had one. I tried to help you out and you want to make us look like a-sholes? Tell the truth for once and accept responsibility for what happened. I didn’t want it to come to this but I’m not going to shy away while you try and turn our mutual friends against me. I even reached out to you today because I didn’t want it to go this far but this thread is still up and this is what you want. Not cool.

Kim Dylla: I broke my rib because i made a stupid f-cking mistake trying to put on a good show for the last date not because I was drunk. If others can drink i can,.there aren’t different rules for ppl based on how long they are in the band.. hazing is for frats not music. I asked ppl how they thought about how I was doing my job and every time they said I was doing a great job. Until someone told me I wasn’t doing a good job or did something wrong no one had a right to say shit about my lifestyle unless they said something about everyone’s lifestyle.

Brent Purgason: We lost two members to abuse problems and you don’t think we have a right to tell our employees to not put us at risk by performing under the influence?

Kim Dylla: If there is no drinking then no one can drink, not just different. Arbitrary rules for everyone… drugs are different and you drink more beer than anyone. We agreed not to say anything publicly and you did without talking to me about something you never talked to me about so I will not let you bully me out of saying something because it is wrong what you did.

Brent Purgason: Asking you not to perform drunk is not hazing. I am baffled by your logic… We are asking you not to drink because you are BRAND NEW to have on a tour around guys that know their jobs inside and out. Nobody has come tome and asked me to stop and if they did, what do you think would happen to me if I just disregarded that and showed up wasted every night? I would get fired too. That’s obvious.

Kim Dylla: Sorry but having 2 or 3 lite beers in the course of 4 or 5 hours is not showing up wasted, if you got accused of being drunk after 2 bud lights I’m pretty sure you’d ignore what people say too because that’s just ridiculous and a physical impossibility.

Brent Purgason: We asked you not to drink before you went on because we saw it as a problem and it affected how the show went. You ignored that request and now we are here. There you go. That’s the whole story in a nutshell.

Kim Dylla: You didn’t have the right to treat me differently than the other band members. Sorry that is a rule of any employment, any band. Equal treatment.

Brent Purgason: Asking you to do the job we hired you to do is not unequal treatment. I still wish you the best of luck. It just didn’t work out between the band. It didn’t have to go this far.

Man, you could have just told everyone 5 months ago that we just went in separate directions. We didn’t fire you to be mean.

Kim Dylla: You never told me you were getting a new Vulvatron. Would you get a new Slymenstra and expect her not to be upset if you didn’t tell her even if you don’t ‘owe’ that to her it’s called respect.

I was absolutely not told you were getting someone else to play my character. Otherwise I wouldn’t be upset about this.

I am just upset I had to find out you were getting a new Vulvatron via a public post we agreed not to make rather than a private conversation which it should have been.

Holy crap.

Without giving away too much about my ethereal identity, I am in fact a friend of Vulvatron’s. Prior to this entire blow-up, Kim was forthright in letting people know that she wouldn’t be touring with GWAR in the near future. As far as she knew, GWAR was “moving in another direction” and she would return to the stage with them in a year or so, reprising her role as Vulvatron. According to Kim, what happened here was that GWAR decided not to tell her personally that she’d never be coming back. Instead they resorted to putting out a press release, which is where she discovered that Vulvatron would be played by someone else.

Then there’s the whole alcohol debate. Was Kim too drunk to perform? Fans at her shows say no, but GWAR is using this as their reason for letting her go. Despite the fact that the rest of GWAR drinks, they expected their new member not to, due to what they considered multiple performances where she was heavily intoxicated. To that, Kim replied:

Kim Dylla: If people would like to falsely accuse me of being drunk and drag my name through the mud, I would have been happy to take a breathalyzer test any night before we played, because the amount I drank would have put me far under the legal limit. I even explained that. You can’t argue with someone who is accusing you of being intoxicated when you are holding a beer in your hand, even though you know you’ve had 2 light beers in 4 hours. If someone else is holding a beer in their hand don’t you think it’s even more hypocritical for them to say anything? There can’t be band rules then “arbitrary band rules” for someone in the band who happens to be different. Equal treatment or there is no fairness. I ask people to critique my job, not who I am and my lifestyle, because I like who I am and I’ve always been fine this way. Until I fuck up my job, then there is no right to say anything, and every time I asked people told me I was doing a good job to my face. Also, last I checked this was rock and roll, not investment banking.

Putting all this out there without personal comment, I think it’s safe to say that there are no winners here. In fact, rumor has it that the same thing happened to Slymenstra.

So what’s really happening here? Did GWAR fire Kim because she’s an alcoholic? Nobody else seems to believe that’s the case (or has come forward saying any such thing), so I’m not too sure about it myself. What I do know is that this is a familiar story. Remember Anette Olson? She claimed that she was replaced without being told as well, and while people are skeptical over whether or not this is true, it seems a little strange that this kind of thing has happened more than once.

I leave it to the readers to come to their own conclusions, but I’d also ask you to consider this:

Regardless of whether or not Kim is fired, the fact that they’re still going to use the character that she invented seems to be in poor taste. While the characters they portray on stage are the very essence of poor taste, I’d hope that the musicians themselves not be.

Then again, all publicity is good publicity.