Today, November 11, is National Metal Day, and since they shot onto the scene 40 years ago, W.A.S.P. has made sure to put true, hard, heavy metal into the glam metal genre that they are so unshakably part of.
Track one on W.A.S.P.’s first album has proven to be prophetic.
“I Wanna Be Somebody” leads off the proceedings on the Los Angeles-based metallers’ ferocious, 1984 self-titled debut, introducing the world to a merciless band that would not be tamed.
W.A.S.P. founder and mastermind Blackie Lawless sings with a feral attitude, foam dripping at the mouth from intensity, while guitarists Chris Holmes and Randy Piper spew visceral riffs and solos. The battering-ram rhythm section of bassist Lawless and drummer Tony Richards propel the wild abandon.
In addition to “I Wanna Be Somebody,” the album boasts the huge chorus of the anthemic “L.O.V.E. Machine,” the boiling over rage of “School Daze,” and the one-two gut punch of album enders “Tormentor” and “The Torture Never Stops.”
Forty years later, album after landmark album (15 studio records and counting), W.A.S.P. indeed became not just somebody, but a seminal heavy metal act.
Lawless, a Staten Island native and the band’s lone constant member, is celebrating the album’s 40-year anniversary by performing the songs start to finish as part of what he promises to be W.A.S.P.’s most extravagant stage show, an experience that will leave even veteran, ‘I’ve seen it all’ fans with jaws agape.
W.A.S.P.’s One Alive Tour includes stops on Saturday, November 16, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC, and Sunday, November 17, at the Franklin Music Hall in Philadelphia.
The band’s current incarnation consists of longtime members Doug Blair on guitar, bassist Mike Duda, and drummer Aquiles Priester. Their shock rock domination over the world began with a string of irresistible, angst-ridden albums accompanied by a theatrical live show replete with raw meat, bloody skulls, and what would be become Lawless’ trademark exploding codpiece.
In the years and decades to follow, W.A.S.P. would continue to push the envelope through a diverse array of fantastic work, including game changer The Headless Children, legendary concept album, The Crimson Idol, the absorbing, two-part rock opera, The Neon God, and the religious leanings of Babylon.
The Aquarian recently spoke with the always insightful and engaging Mr. Lawless, who shared his first-hand insights on W.A.S.P.’s wild ride.
The stage set for this tour is heralded as unrivaled in W.A.S.P. history. That’s a bold statement given the band’s previous elaborate productions.
Well, the first half of the show is the first album, so what we’re doing is a combination of what the first album cover looked like and what the first tour looked like. There’s a part in the show where part of that album cover is going to come alive. I don’t want to go into detail about it, but it’s going to freak people out when they see it. It’s pretty cool.
Your debut record is timeless in the sense that people may play it after not having listened for several years, and then it still sounds fresh and vital. What do you attribute the record’s staying power to?
What it did, especially looking back in retrospect, has to do with it being one of those records that was able to take a snapshot of its time, and I think, really, with any rock band, that’s what they should be. When people think of a band, they’ll think of those snapshot moments. You know, they’ll think of an older record that might have come out 10 years earlier or 20 years years earlier, and you look at it and you go, “Oh, wow, that was a good one.” I think that’s a big part of it, the reason that it had the staying power.
I think that any band, they make their bones the first five years they’re together. That’s the thing that everybody remembers. That’s not to say that you can’t make great records later on down the road, because we have been fortunate enough to have been able to do that as well – and other bands do, too – but it’s those first five years that solidify you in the fans’ minds.
After those critical five years, what separates the bands that continue onward and those that fall off the radar?
Whether the band can morph and grow and have a long career, you know, 20 or 30 years, that takes a lot of ingenuity. You can’t just live off those first five years. You’ve heard the old expression, you have to constantly reinvent yourself, and it’s harder to do that than it is to get there in the first place. There is a lot of truth to that. If you’re going to have a long career, you have to have landmark records every once in a while, that literally breathe new life into your career.
“I Wanna Be Somebody” is the first song on the debut. Were you already plotting on, and confident of, world domination?
I would love to sit here and tell you yes, but that’s not the case. I remember it well – we did our first tour, we started in Europe, and I remember the journalists coming to us. They all asked, “So, how long do you think you’re going to last?’” I didn’t realize it was a question that all new bands get. I just thought maybe we were getting singled out for some reason, but I would find out later all new bands get asked the same question. And, like I said, I thought we were just being picked on. I would tell people, “Listen, it took me all these years to get here where I am. Just let me enjoy the moment. I don’t know if we’re going to be around five years from now. I can’t tell you that. I’m trying to make five months, so, you know, just let me enjoy this, will you?”
What was your mindset when you were writing “I Wanna Be Somebody” for the album?
I learned early on that you write about who you are at the moment. You don’t try to write what you think you’re going to be in a couple of years down the road, or you don’t try to write from any other perspective. You don’t look at what’s going on in the charts. You don’t do any of that. You write about what you know at the moment, and the only thing you know is who you are. You write from a perspective of truth. I always talk about the first five years any band is together, by the time they hit that five-year mark, they’re not the same band anymore. I remember thinking to myself, that first record, that was an angry record done by a very angry band. We didn’t know it at the time. We were just us being us.
The anger and rage in your vocals and the music are immediate. You sound feral and the music is ferocious.
We did a video from the tour, “Live from the Lyceum” – the theatre in London. I hadn’t seen it since we did it. I looked at that video; I sit down where I was going to get something to eat and it was playing. I looked up at the TV screen. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was like I was watching somebody else. I could see then for the first time what got people agitated, upset. Whether you liked it or not, I could see what was scaring parents.
The thing with us as opposed to a lot of bands that do rock and roll theater, a lot of it comes off being kind of animated. We were not that. We were downright frightening. You looked at us and you thought, “These guys believe what they’re doing.” If that’s what people thought, then they were absolutely correct, because that’s who we were. But fast forward five years – like I said, I’m looking at that video, and I’m asking myself, “Who is that?” Because I’m not that guy anymore.
You’re influenced by Alice Cooper. How do you make the theatrics your own and not look like you’re just copying someone else?
The same way you write the songs. You have to remember that we were a band that never had any intention of playing live, really. When we first got together, we knew from living in L.A that you didn’t get a record deal by playing liv; you got a record deal by doing a great demo tape.
So, we go in and record what was the bulk of what would become the first album. Six weeks goes by and we were not getting any responses from the labels. We thought, “We think these songs are ok, but maybe they’re falling on deaf ears for the wrong people. Why don’t we take it out in front of folks and see if we got anything here? That’ll tell us one way or the other if we need to go back to the drawing board.”
The big question after that was, “Ok, what are we going to do onstage? Are we just going to stand there and look at our shoe tops?” The general conclusion was, “Let’s entertain ourselves,” and that’s what we did. It just grew out of that. I would love to tell you that it was a mastermind plan, but it wasn’t. We never could anticipate the reaction, that visceral reaction, that we would get, because we were so damn hostile. We thought that was normal. We were playing more mainstream rock, but our individual attitudes were far more punk.
It reminded me of in the movie Rocky III where Rocky wants to fight Mr. T, but his managers tell him he can’t win. Rocky’s insisting, you know, that he wants to fight him, and Burgess Meredith, his manager, tells [Sylvester] Stallone, “Rock, the worst thing that could happen to any fighter happened to you. You got civilized.” The point is that when you’re five years down the road and you’re driving Ferraris around, it’s kind of hard to be angry. It’s a gradual process, and you slowly start to lose some of that anger, and you start growing in different directions.
How long did it take for W.A.S.P to get signed after you started playing live?
Eleven months from the time we played our first show at the Troubadour, which was on a Tuesday night (and that’s only because the Troubadour closed on Mondays, so we had the worst spot of the week). We played two Tuesdays in a row, two weeks in a row. Then we got moved up to a Wednesday and then a Thursday, then a Friday, and then a Friday and a Saturday. Then we were able to move on from there to about a thousand seat venue within the 11 months. We went from playing the Troubadour on a Tuesday night to play in the Santa Monica Civic center, which held 3,000 people. It wasn’t long after that I met Rod Smallwood. He had an association with Capitol and EMI because of Iron Maiden, so we went to Capitol and we signed the deal. It was right at the end of 1983.
On The Headless Children (1989), your fourth album, W.A.S.P. became a more serious band. Your lyrics started to examine the world at the time, there were some political themes.
When Capitol first heard the demos, they didn’t like it. They wanted us to keep doing songs like “L.O.V.E. Machine” and “I Wanna Be Somebody.” I said, “I’m not that guy anymore. You have to let me try to grow.”
That’s the reason The Headless Children ended up being a landmark record for us, because it changed directions for us before it was fashionable. The record company wasn’t into it, and the record ends up being a big success, so they were all happy after that. Then the same thing happened again. Right after that record, I told them I wanted to do The Crimson Idol, a concept record. Concept records were a dirty word back then, and that ended up being a good one, too. I think after a while they learned to leave us alone. Again, it was trying to write from a perspective of who you are at the moment, because anything else is not coming from a perspective of truth.
Did the idea for this tour germinate from the debut’s 40-year anniversary?
It first started to come about when we started doing meet-and-greets on the last tour. We had never done them before. We didn’t know what to do, so we started looking at what other bands were doing. It was basically an autograph and a picture and a handshake. We looked at that and thought that didn’t seem great. I wouldn’t want that if I was a fan. We were trying to figure out better ways of doing it to make it an enjoyable experience, something that people could take away for a lifetime.
What I thought is, “Let’s give them time.” Time is the most valuable thing that any of us have. When we would do the meet-and-greets, I’d go down the line and I’d ask every one of them, “What’s on your mind? What do you think and what do you want to talk about?” It ended up being really, really good. First of all, it was a non-chaotic environment, because when you get half a dozen people on the street trying to come up to you, talking to you all at the same time, it’s chaos. In a controlled environment where everybody’s relaxed, it becomes really conversational, like what we’re doing right now. Everybody can really give themselves a chance to ask something that they’ve wanted to ask for a long time and get a genuine answer, and for them to understand that I’m getting as much out of it as they are. Because I’m doing little mini market surveys while I’m doing it, I’m picking their brains. Had I known what I know now about doing that, I would have done meet-and-greets a long time ago.
That’s how the idea for the tour and the production started. When I first started listening to what they were saying, I’m hearing it from a perspective I’ve never heard it before. When somebody is telling you about how some lyric changed their life and tears are running down their face when they’re saying it, they’re not acting. That’s genuine.
You have to remember, like most entertainers, I’ve lived in a bubble my whole career, and it’s not until you get in that environment – having an intimate moment with somebody where they’re really letting it all hang out, tell you something that you did that changed their life, saved their life – that became a common theme night after night after night. How can you hear those things and not be changed? It started giving me a whole new appreciation, because, again, I’m on the inside of the bubble. It started giving me a whole new appreciation of going back again.
And it wasn’t just that – tight around the same time, maybe about a year before we did that last tour, I started working on a book. but having an idea to write about and flushing out the ideas are different things. To really, accurately describe an event, let’s say something that happened to me, like I got shot at twice; to accurately describe that I’ve got to really go back and start digging to put the pieces of the puzzle together. After so many years, you remember, but you have the surface memory, but you don’t have the deep, detailed memory. When you start digging those things up again, it’s like Peter Gabriel says, “Digging in the dirt to find the places I got hurt.” It’s a lot like that. You start discovering things – a lot of it good, a lot of it not so good. It’s a real growth experience. It really made me start thinking about, “Maybe it’s time to start looking backwards,” though that’s not to say we’re going to live there, right? Who says you can’t visit the past? I remember hearing John Lennon make a quote one time when the Beatles broke up and everybody was all freaked out; he says, “Don’t worry about it. Those records will always be there. You can visit them whenever you like.” The simplicity of that statement was so great, and I thought, “Ok, let’s do the same thing, why can’t we go back and visit from time to time?”
It also connects to this tour. As part of the VIP package, we’re taking a little mini museum out with us. It’s four big road cases and they open up and they’re six feet high. When they’re all put together, they’re 16 feet long. Where we got the idea from was the racquetball court at Graceland, where all Elvis had his gold and platinum records and his outfits and all that, so we’re doing a little miniature version of that. It will have all our Gold and Platinum records. In front of the Gold and Platinum records are outfits, guitars, memorabilia that the fans have sent us, caricatures, models of us, photos, and posters that people have never seen. When I started going through the boxes of everything that I hadn’t seen for 20 and 30 years, it was like every box I opened was like Christmas morning. I kid you not; I would start giggling looking at stuff that I had forgotten about, a if it was wowing me like that, the fans are going to absolutely lose it when they see this stuff.
Was there any trepidation about putting this tour together, whether promoters would support it?
I didn’t think it was that great, to be honest. I just came from a production meeting. The guy’s saying the same thing to me that you’re saying right now. He asked me the same question about the promoters, and I told him, “When I came up with the idea, I initially didn’t think it was that great, and the first couple of guys I quizzed, they were all over themselves.” After about going through 10 different guys, all of them were acting the same. I thought, “You know what, maybe it’s me. Maybe we got something here,” because the enthusiasm wasn’t just good, it was bubbling over the top.
Why did you have doubts?
Because, again, I’m on the inside of the bubble, and I just don’t see it like everybody else does. You know the old saying, you can’t see the forest for the trees That’s what it’s like. I was so exhausted.
Can you tell us about the current W.A.S.P. lineup – guitarist Doug Blair, bassist Mike Duda and drummer Aquiles Priester?
I say unapologetically they’re one of the greatest bands in the world. I am lucky, and I’m not saying that with false modesty. I’m telling you the absolute truth. I am lucky to be in a band with these guys because they can all play circles around me. Mike Duda is one of the best bass players ever. Doug Blair’s guitar work speaks for itself. Aquiles Priester is a world-renowned drummer. These guys are professional assassins, musically, and to be in the same room with them is humbling.
For someone to think that this is the Blackie Lawless show, people might think that before they see the band. But, you know, Mike, our bass player, he’s been in the band almost 30 years now. Doug has been there the same amount of time, and Achilles has been with us going on 10 years now. This is a seasoned group of guys.
What’s on tap for W.A.S.P. in 2025?
We will have to take it to Europe because the first leg is just America here in the fall. After the holidays, we’ll start back up over there. There’s a big, wide world out there.
FOR TICKETS TO SEE W.A.S.P. ON TOUR, VISIT THEIR WEBSITE!
