When most hard rock fans of a certain age hear the name W.A.S.P., what comes to mind is a theatrical, over-the-top act whose excess regularly made them targets of the bipartisan, censorship-obsessed P.M.R.C. (Parents Music Resource Center). But for founding member Blackie Lawless, born Steven Edward Duren, the goal for his band is pure: simple storytelling.
For the “1984 To Headless” Tour, the narrative is about commemorating their four-decade-plus anniversary by revisiting the group’s early full-length albums. As the spiritual offspring of Alice Cooper, Lawless explains that fans can expect some onstage fireworks through a walk down W.A.S.P.’s musical memory lane.
“We’re going to kill Hitler,” Lawless said matter-of-factly in a September interview. “You will see his trial on a big screen behind us while we’re doing The Headless Children. As the trial is going on, he is going to be wheeled out when his sentence is pronounced, and we’re going to electrocute him right in front of the audience. With the anti-Semitism going on around the world, when people see this, it’s not a joke. It’s a serious thing.”
Attendees will get a healthy mix of songs from the band’s self-titled 1984 debut, 1985’s The Last Command, 1986’s The Electric Circus and 1989’s The Headless Children. For Lawless, doing the deep dive on that part of his canon yielded some gems for the tour set list.
“We’re going to do material we haven’t done since the very beginning,” Lawless said. “It really is pretty interesting when it comes to that. People are going to hear things they’ve never heard, and a big part of the audience is going to hear things they haven’t heard since the beginning. One of the things we’re looking at is ‘Fistful of Diamonds,’ which was written as an opener. We opened the second tour with that song and haven’t played it since. That’s an example of what we’re talking about—trying to do stuff like that.”
Lawless’ lifelong love of music eventually turned him into a professional musician in the mid-’70s, when he was hired to replace Johnny Thunders after the latter quit the New York Dolls. This was just as the band embarked on the Red Patent tour, the group’s last gasp with future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. With Lawless having to learn 21 songs at a soundcheck, the Dolls lasted for two shows before Lawless and Dolls bandmate Arthur Kane headed out in 1975.
“We worked together for about a year, and Arthur had a really bad alcohol problem,” Lawless said. “I tried and tried and tried to make it work, but I couldn’t. That’s when I put the band Sister together, which was the precursor to what W.A.S.P. would become.”
By the time 1982 rolled around, L.A.’s Sunset Strip became a hard rock scene that was a response to the disco and punk movements. Sister begat Circus Circus, which evolved into W.A.S.P. Lawless remembers it as being a heady time where major label A&R execs signed several acts including Ratt, Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P.
“Every label at that point was looking to see what they could find,” Lawless said. “We were fortunately one of them.”
All these decades later, Lawless and W.A.S.P. are still standing with plans to release new material in the next year or so. When asked about his band’s longevity, the septuagenarian rocker feels the answer is rather straightforward and obvious.
“It comes down to the same thing as any band that’s been able to survive as long as we have—it’s the quality of the songs,” he said. “If you’ve got that quality and it’s something people remember, then you’re going to survive. And if you don’t, you won’t. That really is the difference.”
He continued, “Every band that starts, and I don’t care who they are, when you look back at their first five years together, that’s where they make their bones. That doesn’t mean you don’t make good records after that. You keep on making good records. Any artist needs a dozen songs that people really, really love. If you’ve got those dozen songs, then you can make a career out of what you’re doing. If you’ve got more than that, then you can last a long, long, long, long time.”
W.A.S.P. will perform at San Jose Civic on Oct. 27 at 8pm. sanjose.org/theaters/events/wasp
