BLACKIE LAWLESS IS HAVING A BLAST!

-by Dirt

My very first opportunity to sit down with W.A.S.P. was when they were promoting K.F.D.  It was a thrill for me to speak with one of my longtime favorite bands, but I came away with the feeling that leader Blackie Lawless had delivered stock, pre-planned answers to my questions.  Chris Holmes, on the other hand, was an absolute trip.  He granted me a picture but threatened to 'get me' if he saw it printed anywhere. (Chris, if you're reading this, I only hung it up in my luxurious Metal Dreams office, I swear.) He also fell in love with the pen that I was using and was overjoyed when I told him that he could keep it.

Since that interview, I've chatted with Blackie several more times and he seems more at ease these days, coming off relaxed and forthcoming.  He treats each question as if it's the first time that he's heard it and genuinely appreciates the fact that W.A.S.P. is able to kick ass in 2005.  This particular interview took place on the west side of Manhattan just before the commencement of W.A.S.P.'s American Metal Blast Tour with L.A. Guns, Stephen Pearcy, and Metal Church.  Blackie and I were supposed to do the interview in the Sanctuary offices but got booted out because they had to set the alarm.  Mr. Lawless wasn't pleased with the respect that he was being shown, but everything worked out, as we were able to sit down and speak in a quiet part of a nearby bar.

 www.waspnation.com

So, the American Metal Blast, what brought it about?  Was it your idea?

It's something we've been talking about for a few years, putting a package like that together, taking it out and seeing what happens.  We've got to road test it and see how it works.

How did you choose the bands?

We were looking for balance.  Not too heavy one way or the other, something that had some diversity to it.  I think Metal Church being on it gives it real good balance.

I saw you on the Headless Children tour and Metal Church was on that tour, as well as Accept.

They (Metal Church) didn't finish the whole tour.  Something happened, the guitar player whacked the singer in the back with his guitar, literally broke his guitar over his back and that was the end of that.

I've heard that this is your greatest hits tour of sorts.

I don't know where that came from.  No more so than probably any other band going out because you have to be conscious of what you're playing.  Any band that's has any kind of heritage...every new record they put out...they're their own worst competition.  Not only are you competing against the song, you're competing against a moment in the fans' lives. They're thinkin', 'I remember being in the back of my dad's pickup truck with my girlfriend listening to "L.O.V.E. Machine."'  If you go out there playing too much stuff from the new record, it becomes self-indulgent.  No matter how good that new record is, you're competing against those old memories people have, plus maybe a substantial amount of people don't even have that record yet.

It's too bad that you can't give Unholy Terror and Dying For the World the time that they deserve during your shows.

We are playing one of the songs off of Unholy Terror in the opening medley called "Hate To Love Me."  People may not be as familiar with that as some of the other stuff but that song is a steamroller.  It works well in the medley.  We found a long time ago the way to satisfy is to do a couple medleys in the show.  Some people say, "I don't like medleys, I want to hear the whole song." What are you gonna do, stay up there for five hours and turn into Springsteen?  There's always those arguments.  You've got ten different people, you're gonna get ten different opinions.  You have to create some sort of balance as to what you think the majority are gonna want to hear because there are eight guys out there that want to hear b-sides.  You can't do that.  Every once in awhile we do something a little eclectic just to entertain ourselves, but you gotta go pretty much with what you think the average is.

Do you think that's more of a problem now than when you put out The Headless Children for instance?

It might be just by virtue of the amount of stuff over a twenty year span.

I think people used to run out to get the new records, now they're okay with just reminiscing about the past.

I don't know if it's so much the audience has changed versus the idea a long career maybe starts to dictate to them what they think they should hear.  It might be a little of both of that going on. 

For The Neon God tour, did you pull back a bit on your stage show?

I did it the same way that I did with Crimson Idol.  I just get belligerent.  If want people to listen with the ears instead of their eyes, you're gonna have to really strip it down to nothing.  You end up alienating people because of that but if you think you've got something to say that's really worth listening to, I don't want that being confused with some sort of visual that was going on at the time.

But on the American Metal Blast Tour, you're going to deliver a classic W.A.S.P. show with the meat and blood drinking, right?

There's a whole generation out there that has never seen this.  Let's show them what the fuss is all about.

Did the 1983 Lyceum show that was released on video so long ago capture this?

That was what the early show was, yes. 

By 1984, you released The Last Command and went on tour supporting KISS.  Is that when you pulled back on the wild show?

Well, yeah.  You're this band that's coming out, literally blasting everything in sight.  A headline band looks at you and goes "we want the tickets that you can sell but we don't want what you're doing.  We don't want the competition."  It wasn't until years later that they confided in me that we were the only band that they ever played with that used to make them nervous.  They said whenever we would tour with them, they would get up more for us than any other band because they felt they could smoke everybody.  They said we used to really get 'em going.  I take that as a compliment.  At the same time, there were groups that we wanted to tour with that would not have us under any circumstances, show, no show, didn't matter.  I think it was just what we represented frightened them.  It was a good thing and it was a bad thing.  In a lot of ways you feel like a heavy weight contender but nobody will give you a fight.  You go, "I'm gonna knock your ass out, and you know it," but they keep ducking ya.  As a matter of fact, we came very close to calling The Last Command.......World Contender for that very reason.

I saw the Inside The Electric Circus tour back in 1986.  Slayer opened up for you.  It was the most bizarre cross-section of people.  It was a real division of metal fans.

I'll tell you what was worse - us and Metallica.  It was our first or second U.S. tour.  It was us, Metallica, and Armored Saint.  When they (Slayer) went out with us, they were still an up n' coming band, didn't have a lot of fans, so there was a pocket of division every night.  With Metallica, I kid you not, it was like an invisible line was drawn right down the middle of the room, and half was theirs and half was ours.  It didn't matter what we were doing on stage.  It looked like two opposing armies.  Sometimes we just stopped what we were doing and watched. It was a war.

It's funny now because over the years we've forgotten that period where there was a division  Thrash and regular metal has fused and it's just metal now.

The first time I ever saw anything like that was I remember The Who were playing with The Grateful Dead at the Day on The Green.  Half the stadium was Who fans and the other half was Deadheads.  It was an absolute war.  50,000 people fighting each other.  I thought I'd never see that again.  Wrong! I saw it every night for two months.

I interviewed you for KFD.  At that time, you were going for a big, scary show.

Best show we ever did.

It was pretty frightening.  People did get an opportunity to see W.A.S.P. as the scary beast that it is.  Do you think that what you are doing on the American Metal Blast Tour is more true to what W.A.S.P. is?

I don't know if it's more true because that was very true at the time.  It was a little too true.  Here's the thing.  What we did in the early days, it wasn't any social comment at all.  KFD was nothing but social comment. People couldn't handle it. You have to understand why I want to go back to this too.  There's that audience that had never seen it.  But also, to be very candid with you, after what we had done with Neon God for a couple of years, making that thing and then taking it out on tour, I made the statement I wanted to make but man that thing took years off my life.  I never want to say never but I will probably never do another one of those again, just because there's too much pain involved, there's too many little pieces of your soul that you leave when you do those kinds of records.  I haven't listened to either one of those records since we've done them because there's a place that I don't want to go back to.  It was similar to KFD.  I didn't listen to KFD for a long time after that. It was only last year that I put it on to listen to something for reference, for "Kill Your Pretty Face" that we're doing in this show now, and I thought "Damn, it's pretty good."  I'm not saying it just because we did it - I was astonished as to how good that record was.  But that being said, the little dark closet you have to go into to make that thing...I don't want to go back in there.  Our personal lives were an absolute mess.  I went into a shell.  I didn't go out.  I didn't date.  I was in a really bad place.

Just wanted to ask you a bit about a few W.A.S.P. songs that didn't get their due. "9.5 Nasty" from Inside The Electric Circus" - that was originally released as a single and then got overshadowed by "I Don't Need No Doctor."

Yeah, but that song for me, when I think of it, was pivotal in our career because that's my least favorite record.  I was in England and Sounds Magazine used to do a feature every week of the new singles that had come out, and "Nasty" was picked as the #1 single of the week.  Under us was ZZ Top, U2, and although it was #1, it was what the guy wrote in his commentary.  He said, "Although I've chosen this as the #1 song, this band is capable of so much more."  It was a steel shot right through my head because when you're already thinking something and then you read it in print, he had me nailed to the cross.  That single statement in combination with that record is what created The Headless Children because I said, "No more.  We're going back to the drawing board and I'm gonna write down what I'm really thinking."  Even against the wishes of EMI and Capitol - they didn't want us to make that record.  They said, "It doesn't sound like you. It's not what's going on in the marketplace right now."  It ended up being the biggest record we ever had.  It took us out of that boat that all those bands were in when the 90s rolled in and they all sank.  That's the reason you and I are sitting here talking right now, because of that record, vicariously because of that statement I read.

Coincidentally, the final song that I was going to ask you about was "The Heretic (The Lost Child)" from The Headless Children.  I think you played it on the Headless tour, too.

Opened with it.

Have you played it since?

No.  Hard to play live.  It's, vocally, really demanding in spots. That to be the lead track of any live show was just like....and I always thought "The Real Me" suffered a little bit because of that.  When "The Real Me" is by itself, as a video it stands on its own fine, live it does as well, but coming after "The Heretic" on the record, it was always a little bit of an energy loss because of it.  I have fond memories of that.  It was the second to last track that was cut for the record.  It was really an afterthought.