W.A.S.P.: LAWFUL OR OWFUL?

W.A.S.P.: LAWFUL OR OWFUL?

J. Kordosh

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of Blackie Lawless: his real name is Steve Duran, he’s 28 years old, getting paunchy, sings and plays bass for W.A.S.P.

Kind of makes you wish you knew him better, huh?

No?

Realize that W.A.S.P. ostensibly stands for “We Are Sexual Perverts.” That’s pretty good, right? And that W.A.S.P. have been known to throw raw meat at their audiences. Best of all—that they used to stage a mock murder of a young woman in their show. What more could you ask for?

You want an album? You got it— Blackie and his pals in W.A.S.P. (Chris Holmes, Tony Richards and Randy Piper) have released a disc on Capitol called W.A.S.P. It’s, like... let’s see, what’s the right word?...cheap! It’s amazing. The cover is actually cheaplooking! You know how much money Capitol spends on a record cover? I don’t either, but I’ll bet it’s a lot! And this thing is just so ...cheap] So is the music!

So, let’s see what we have. We’ve got a guy in a band that advertises themselves as sexual perverts and they’ve got a cheap album out.

I know what!

Let’s interview him! It’ll be fun!!

So Bill Holdship and I went over to the Royal Oak Music Theater to interview Blackie Lawless one nice day. Bill and I like talking to heavy metal artists whenever we’re not doing something like playing gin, or going down to Louie’s for a grilled swiss cheese on whole wheat. Louie says that cheese is hard to melt, and he should know!

Anyway, we were supposed to meet Blackie backstage at 5:00, but we had to wait until after 7:00 before he showed up. Well, what are you gonna do? If a guy can pretend he’s killing a woman onstage in front of thousands of people—and do it well—you can’t expect him to be prompt, too. Nobody’s perfect.

While we were waiting for His Blackiness we talked to several roadies working the W.A.S.P./Metallica/Armored Saint revue. Here’s what one roadie told us: “Their (W.A.S.P.’s) attitude sucks. All the other bands pull together—they’re like in a world of their own.” Talk about sour grapes! Then, when W.A.S.P were doing their sound check, I asked another roadie if W.A.S.P. always do a sound check. “They always try,” he said. What’s with these roadies? They’re mean! Did you know that roadies make roughly $660 a week in the States? It’s true! Then they come right out and'lie like that! Stuff like that’ll make you mad if you’re like me!

I hope you are, too.

By the way, did you know why Blackie was late for our interview? It’s because he had to visit the chiropractor because he was having spasms in his back, that’s why. See, while those scheming roadies were talking to us instead of shuffling equipment around, ol’ Blackie was taking care of business. Much like Elvis Presley, who we’ll talk about later. So, who’s doing more for rock: them sneaky roadies or Blackie Lawless?

The answer is obvious.

Blackie’s quite a guy in an interview situation, as we quickly learned. He sat on one of those cheap counters in one of those little rooms they always have backstage and answered our questions, name-dropped, and so on with amazing candor. He didn’t even care that we could see he’s getting fat!

What the heck! So am I! (Must be those grilled swiss cheese sandwiches!)

I guess the big thing we wanted to know was what W.A.S.P. actually stood for... as an acronym, I mean. Does it really mean “We Are Sexual Perverts”? See, I thought it did, because why would they make that up? So I asked Blackie if he was a homosexual, which is about the most dreaded perversion there is.

He paused for a few seconds, then burst into laughter. (He likes to burst into laughter; he’s kind of funny that way.) “When I was in England...ha ha ha...this girl asked me...she was from Melody Maker. She goes, ‘Do you ever wear women’s underwear?’ Ha ha ha ha.”

All of a sudden, he turned ugly! “What, just ’cause we’re from Hollywood, we’re homosexuals, right?”

Uh oh. I could see Blackie didn’t realize I was just wondering about those perversions, so I asked him what W.A.S.P. stood for. As an acronym. He cleverly avoided the issue, just like I would if I were in his place.

“I think a band should be like a marriage,” he said.

“You should have children??” I said.

“For there to be intrigue, there’s got to be some mystery, y’know? Playing in a band is like being married,” Blackie said.

“So you mean you’re not gonna tell us what your name really means?” I’ve interviewed a lot of people, so I’ve got what you might call a fifth sense about these things. (I’d call it a sixth sense, but my vision’s not that hot.)

“Fuck no!” Blackie swore. Then, sort of rubbing salt in the wound, he added, “Ha!”

“It does mean ‘We Are Sexual Perverts!”’ I proclaimed.

“Hey, I hear a new one every week,” Blackie explained. “ ‘We Are Satan’s People.’ Y’see, if I told you right now you wouldn’t come back a year from now and wanna know what in the fuck was going on.”

“Blackie, why are you trying to jack me around on this point?” I asked the Lawless One.

“Ha ha ha ha,” he ha-ha’d. “You asked me if I was a fucking faggot...whaddaya mean, jack you around?”

(Then Blackie told us a story about himself and Nikki Sixx and a girl and a liter bottle of Pepsi, using colorful language like “gloomp, gloomp” to describe what might be regarded as a sexual perversion. I’m real sorry I can’t tell you the story because it’s the sort of thing you don’t hear every day. But I guess it might make some people mad.)

And, speaking of Nikki Sixx, his was just one of the many names Blackie dropped during our discussion. (Bill pointed this out to me later, so I went back and counted ’em up... in addition to Nikki, we also heard of Kevin DuBrow, Frankie Banali, Rudy Sarzo, Eddie Van Halen, David Lee Roth, Ace Frehley, Vince Neil and a couple other guys. Blackie sure knows a lot of people!)

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 38

Well, on to his record and on to Elvis Presley, too. I said that W.A.S.P. hadn’t sold so well and wondered if this was a record Blackie would like to stand behind.

“If I was gonna try to hide behind that record it would take several of ’em to do it!” Blackie quipped. Bill and I laughed.

“Let me tell you what that thing does to me,” he continued. “It’s got energy. For that, I’m proud. Rock ’n’ roll is meant to be smelly and sweaty, right? If it ain’t smelly and sweaty, it ain’t rock ’n’ roll no more.”

(This is one of Blackie’s favorite lines...his other is that W.A.S.P. performs “Electric Vaudeville.” They’re not the greatest lines, but let’s remember that Blackie graduated 636th out of his high school class of 650.1 forgot to mention that, I guess, but it should’ve gone in the thumbnail sketch.)

Getting back to the smelly and sweaty remark, I reminded Blackie that he’d said that about Elvis Presley in some story in one of those heavy metal magazines with 300 pages on Ratt, Motley Crue, Quiet Riot, Van Halen, and a couple other bands every month, month in, month out.

“What do you think Elvis Presley would say if he saw you guys, Blackie? If he saw W.A.S.P. I mean, here’s the Big El, he’s sneering—”

“He probably wouldn’t like it,” Blackie answered. “I’ll tell you something: I’m a big (he’s 6' 4") Elvis Presley fanatic; I’ve got loads of his videos on our bus. And I’ve got lots of interviews with him—him talking about other bands. The only band that he ever acknowledged existed was the Beatles— because he was forced to. He never liked talking about anybody but the Big El. And that’s cool.”

“You can’t knock the Big El for that,” I ventured.

“Fuck no. I mean; like the first time I saw him I was five-years-old. My mother took me to a shopping center and she was holding me in her arms.”

“You remember this?” I was astonished.

“Shit, yeah I remember this, man. And there’s this friend of my mother’s that’s right up in front of the stage—he was in between songs and I remember this woman saying, ‘Can I kiss you?’ And he bent down and she kissed him—she was freaking out. I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know quite what until I got older and pieced it all together. That woman was married and I didn’t link the two together. He had it even then— and I guess you can do what he did if you’ve got the attitude.”

(OK, now the reason for being astonished. All throughout our interview Blackie stressed he was “not quite 28.” That means he was five years old in 1962. Now, Bill’s a big Elvis Presley fan, too, and when we were eating our grilled swiss cheese sandwiches with onions at Louie’s a couple days later, he pointed out that it was probably impossible for anyone to see Elvis perform at a shopping mall in 1962—Elvis was in Hollywood, making no personal appearances. I’m not saying Blackie made the whole thing up; maybe he just doesn’t remember how old he really is, or maybe he saw somebody that looked like Elvis Presley in 1962. Like Chubby Checker.)

If Blackie’s confused about Elvis, he sure knows plenty about the metal scene in L.A. And he should! He knows just about everybody involved.

“I’m proud to be part of that movement,” he said, belly jiggling. “I know that this doesn’t sound like CREEM’s cup of tea, but I think that 10 years from now, when you look in a rock encyclopedia, you’re gonna see the ’69 San Francisco movement (get this man a calendar!— J.K.), the ’64 British Invasion...and you’re gonna see that what happened in L.A. in ’82-’83 is gonna have its own chapter. Because I think there’s genuinely enough good songs coming out of there. Fuck the musicianship. Y’know, we’re not the best and we’re not the worst. We’re average.”

And they are.

One area of life where Blackie wasn’t average was (in his words) “ath-e-let-ics,” particularly baseball—back when he was Steve Duran. (His uncle, Ryne Duran, used to pitch for the Yankees in the early ’60s. He’s bestremembered for his coke-bottom glasses, fastball, and thirst for alcohol.) Blackie—urn, Steve—was courted by the Cincinnati Reds in his high school days. But he’d already started playing in bands and realized that he was “getting all kinds of attention from chicks by playing in a band that I wasn’t getting when I played baseball.” So he didn’t sign with the Reds, which probably explains why they came in fifth last year.

Instead of sixth, I mean.

This involvement with baseball led, I guess, to Blackie developing what he calls his “Candy Store Theory”: “I was a virgin until I was about 18,” he candidly admitted. “I was like a little kid growing up in a candy store and never got to eat any of the candy. And when I grew up I owned the whole goddam store. Now, a thousand women later, I can say I’ve seen the world a little bit.”

Where’s that liter of Pepsi??!

And, since he’s now a worldly kind of guy, Blackie’s got another theory—this one’s his “Roy Rogers Theory,” and he uses it to explain how he doesn’t confuse that crazy Blackie onstage with the real Blackie. “I’m like a little boy who goes to his toybox and puts on the hat and the six-gun and goes out and plays shoot-’em-up for an hour. And for that hour that I’m out there you damn well better believe that I believe I’m Roy Rogers. But when the hour’s over I go back to the box and throw in the hat and gun and it stays there until I’m ready to use it again.”

You know, I wish I had some theories, too But I don’t.

☆ ☆ ☆

Want to know still more about Blackie Lawless? OK, here’s some more stuff for your thumbnail sketch: he used to drink a fifth of vodka a day, but says that he is now a moderate drinker (much like myself, I suspect). He used to do a lot of coke, but he doesn’t do that anymore. Good for you, Blackie Lawless! He’s not jealous of Motorhead’s Lemmy being a better singer than he is. (Or maybe he is—he just laughed when I asked him that question. Maybe he was secretly hiding his deep-seated resentment of Lemmy by laughing.)

As for his future, he figures that “as long as I can keep writing good songs, which—even though I’m an Elvis/Little Richard fanatic, I’ve taken the Lennon/McCartney approach to heavy rock—” (Whoops, I interrupted him here when I fell down unconscious. He continued after I was revived) “—Listen to ‘L.O.V.E. Machine,’ 'Sleeping On Fire,’ things like that. It’s got Lennon/McCartney written all over it as far as I’m concerned.”

Keep writing them good songs, Blackie!

Oh, yeah, one more thing: here’s what Blackie has to say about CREEM: “I love this fucking magazine. It’s the best, is what it is. No other magazine takes this approach.”

And we make more than roadies, too!