METAL Q & A W.A.S.T.E. NOT, W.A.S.P. NOT

METAL Q & A W.A.S.T.E. NOT, W.A.S.P. NOT

FEATURES

J. Kordosh

Editor’s note: As you know, Metal Rock ’N’ Roll is always pleased to present an unexpurgated, verbatim, virtually unedited interview with the most exciting, witty, urbane, downright interesting musicians around.

This month we talked to Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. instead. Blackie takes us from his stint with the re-formed New York Dolls to his eventual welldeserved fame with W.A.S.P. with the outspoken candor we’ve come to expect from him. As for us, we show our superhuman restraint by once again refraining from editorial comment. Heee.

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You were in the New York Dolls, right? About five minutes.

Yeah, but y’know, Blackie, lemme tell you something. Do you feel it’s really kind of shameless for you to say you were in the New York Dolls?

I’m not saying I was part of the band. You weren’t in the Thunders’ Dolls— Well I did some, I did some gigs with them.

But your record company hype says—

That’s their hype, man. Y’know?

Well, I just wonder if you endorse it. You think that’s cool?

Let’s put it this way: I think it’s a pretty even trade, seeing as how there’s songs that I wrote that I never got a nickel for. Which songs.?

Stuff that’s on an album called Sons Of The Dolls. Some previous things that Arthur (Kane) did before that.

It’s like being in the Stones after Brian Jones left. Worse, like after Mick Taylor left. I'm not saying it’s your fault.

I’ve thought about it. Y’know, at this point I ain’t gonna condemn it and I ain’t

gonna endorse it. It’s just something that happened, y’know, and you don’t see me walkin’ around with any of the advantages. As a matter of fact, quite frankly, I’d rather not talk about it. Not saying this towards you, but anybody that comes up, because of something that happened a long time ago. It was such an incidental thing that’s been blown up all out of proportion, y’know, I mean—fer Chrissake, I’m not out there trying to sell—

Why don’t we say it was a career opportunity at the time and now it’s behind you?

I really wish you would say that, (laughs) ’Cause everybody wants to make a big deal out of it. I wasn’t on any of those records. Unless you’re actually on a record, how can you say you did something? That’s like me going in to pinch-hit for Mickey Mantle and saying I played centerfield for the Yankees. Y’know? Whoopee.

We read that you were up for a baseball team—

The Cincinnati Reds. Yeah. As a matter of fact I was in Cincinnati the other day.

Were you in the farm system or what?

Well I could’ve been when I came out of high school. I was a pitcher. I had an uncle who pitched for the Yankees— Ryne Duran.

What kind of record did you have in high school?

Well...not only could I pitch, I could hit. When I was 14, 15 years old, I could hit a ball 400 feet. But I was as tall then as I am now. I’ll tell you where I was the other day when I was in Cincinnati: Johnny Bench and Pete Rose have a restaurant there—they’ve got this one room, it’s about twice as high as this room, y’know? It’s called the trophy room. It’s got Pete Rose’s 1975 World Series trophy, you know, with the flags that go around. Johnny Bench has an award in there for getting the Golden Glove Award for 10 consecutive years. And it says: “A feat accomplished by no other catcher in history.” It’s got Sugar Ray Leonard’s boxing gloves that he wore in the 1976 Olympics, when he won the gold medal. And I'll tell you, I just looked at that case and got that feeling in the pit of my stomach.

So we’ve established that you’re an OK guy, baseball-wise. Now we gotta ask about W.A.S.P.—the stuff that, you know, throwing meat to the audience, which you no longer do, butchering b woman onstage—

We don’t do that anymore.

You don’t do that anymore. Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you butcher a girl onstage anymore?

We did that show about a yearand-a-half.

Your idea?

I thought it was legitimate theater.

It was your idea?

Yeah.

What...was...the point? What point were you trying to make?

I just thought it was—we were doing the type of thing in the beginning called psychodrama. Totally psychotic people doing drama. But psychodrama is the type of theater that’s designed to try to get the audience involved as much as possible. It’s designed to play to very small groups. When we went on to bigger places, we were literally losing something in the translation, it wasn’t working anymore. But I thought—it was never designed to be an attack on women or anything like that.

Do you think that women felt it wasn’t an attack on women?

I think some of them did.

I think a whole lot of them did.

But I don’t think as many as, maybe, the press would like to think. I mean, I

“Everybody asks about my influences and I go: ‘Well, Ku Klux Klan, Hell’s Angels and Smirnoff vodka. ’ ” —Blackie Lawless

think what we were doing was a form of theater not unlike what Alice Cooper had done.

But really, what’s the point of killing a woman?

There wasn’t any. This was designed to be like A Clockwork Orange; it didn’t make any sense. It was never designed to make sense. Lemme tell you something about women—some of ’em got upset about what we did. Y’know what we did to combat that?

No. No.

We took the woman all around Europe, we did all that shit. We came back to the States—I didn’t wanna hear about another 21 served at McDonald’s; I don’t need to read about some 12-year-old kid stringing up his 10-year-old sister, right? So we stopped doing it—that was the biggest reason. By the same token, to get women off our backs I was sittin’ down thinkin’. I thought, what the fuck do we do? I know what we’ll do, we’ll cut the ass out of the seats of our pants. And two things happened: we had—about 80 percent share of our audience is male— when that happened our audience doubled overnight and it was all women. We got the women off our asses, literally, and increased our audience two-fold overnight. So everybody was happy after that. We’re sellin’ the meat, man. I call what we do ‘‘Electric Vaudeville,” man...we ain’t doin’ nothin’ that hasn’t happened in the last hundred years. We’re just puttin’ a different bow on the package, that’s all.

OK, OK.

Is that fair enough?

Yeah, that’s fair with me, man. How ’bout the album, now? I mean, the album didn’t do real swell.

I love this fucking magazine, I swear to God, they are the—ha ha!

We’re something.

No, it’s the best is what it is. No other magazine takes this approach. I love it, I’m not bullshitting you, I really do. Because I get so much of the same shit all the time: ‘‘Where’d you start? When’d you start?” Fuck you!

Who cares?

I don’t anymore! Well, I mean, fuck. Everybody talks about music, they go “What’s your influences?” And I say, “Well, Ku Klux Klan, Hell’s Angels, Smirnoff Vodka.”

I don’t care what your influences are. I mean, are you happy with that record? When you listen to it, does that say to you “That’s Blackie Lawless” or Steve Duran, or is it just jacking off?

Lemme tell you what that thing does to me. 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.

Tell me this: what do you make of the whole Vince Neil thing?

(Pause) The guy’s a friend of mine. Well, he’s a friend of yours.

And there’s nothing I can say about that, be it pro or con, it’s going to hurt somebody—

I’m not saying pro or con. If you were a listener or a fan, you liked heavy metal music, it’s enjoying a resurgence...L.A. metal. This whole Electronic Vaudeville—

Electric Vaudeville—it’s a good one, huh? (laughs)

Yeah. But I think you’re confusing what vaudeville was with what you think it was.

My dad worked in a carny, which was similar to vaudeville. When I was a kid I used to listen to all the stories, y’know? Maybe more burlesque.

Anyway, my question is: what does that do to not only Crue, but to everybody? The saws on your arm, that shit? This is serious. Blackie Lawless is wearing these saws on his arms—

Rock ’n’ roll’s a great thing. I have lots of fun with it. It’s a terrific thing; we have a ball. But you better respect it or it will damn sure take your life. And that’s no bullshit. I’ve been doing it long enough;

I know where that edge is. I’m never gonna go off that edge. Never—you guys ain’t gonna get rid of me for a long time. Twenty years from now, I’m gonna be like Jabba the Hut. Big and fat. “More sex, more chicks, more booze.” I’m gonna be here a long time, y’know, ’cause I know where that edge is and I know when to stop. I think a lot of guys think they can fly off the edge and they can’t die.

I’m not asking you to knock Neil.

But he’s not the only one, I mean, there’s a ton of guys—

Of course there are. I think it just kind of brought it out. Hey, maybe these guys aren’t kidding; maybe these guys are really kind of warpo. Maybe they’re really kind of sick.

Well, y’know,—

You’re kind of caught in the same trap.

Yeah, I know. Well, Hollywood doesn’t exist geographically, Hollywood’s a state of mind.

What does that mean??

It means that when you grow up living in Ann Arbor or Kalamazoo or Timbuktu, if you were voted the most likely to succeed or whatever, the most likely to conceive, you’ve been a debutante in your town or a big jock football player, you’re going to go to Hollywood thinking you’re going to do to Hollywood what you did to your high school. And what they don’t realize is that all those people, in Anytown, U.S.A., they’re all thinking the same thing. You’re not going to go to that town and blow it open. But if you’re of that frame of mind, you can go there and coexist if you’ve got the guts to stick it out. That’s what I mean by Hollywood being a frame of mind. Hey, there’s people living here that ought to be in Hollywood.

I grew up in Staten Island—I wasn’t really happy there—I live in L.A. and I’m happy. I’m one of them.

Do you actually like women?

I love ’em. Women are the most precious things God ever put on this Earth.

You don’t feel you’re insulting them?

No. I love ’em, I love ’em all. No bullshit. I don’t take drugs, I don’t drink excessively—the only two vices I’ve got in my life are women and my cars.

You don’t take any kind of drugs?

Not anymore. I used to do a lot of coke. And you don’t drink?

I don’t drink excessively. Moderately. I’d like to drink a lot more than I do but my throat can’t take it. So—I used to drink a fifth of vodka a day.

(Whistles) That’s a lot. But a lot of women might say you’re insulting them—treating them like objects.

Yeah, but we’re not doing that anymore.

Whaddaya mean, "anymore"?

Ha ha. We learned. (Much laughter from all) You know one thing I got going for me?

“Twenty years from now, I’m gonna be like Jabba The Hut. Big and fat. ‘More sex, more chicks, more booze. ’ ” -Blackie Lawless

What do you got going for you?

It’s that I ain’t pretentious. We’re refreshingly honest, to be modest about it.

Yep. Tell me how long it’s taken the band to break.

Well, the band has only been together since September of ’82. But, in all honesty, it took me six years, from the time when the Dolls broke up and me and Arthur went to California and we started a band. And Arthur was really the guy who was responsible for that whole band. It was his brainchild, the Dolls. He gave it its look, he gave it its sound. He’s working on a master’s degree in gourmet cooking—the guy’s brilliant. But he had problems. And we stayed in California for about a year and he couldn’t handle that, so he went back to New York.

What’s the deal about L.A. ? How come all you guys are coming out of L.A. ?

There’s a whole scene going on there. Kevin DuBrow and Frankie Banali I’ve known probably as long as anybody I’ve ever known. Rudy Sarzo, too. There was a whole scene going on there. And it took everybody that long to really accumulate that kind of material.

It didn’t take Van Halen that long.

(Pause) Well, that’s true. But I think they were—

Do you think Van Halen are probably the most exceptional band out of L.A. ? Would you say they’re the best?

(Very long pause) I like them. Musically?

Well, musically, sociologically, everything.

I think Dave’s terrific. Dave’s a good friend of mine. Uh.Jt’s hard for me to talk about those people because—it’s like Ace Frehley is one of my best friends. I never saw Kiss like everybody else did. Like Chris Holmes, our guitar player, grew up next door to Eddie Van Halen. Chris can’t see Eddie like the rest of the world perceives him. When somebody’s your friend... I mean, I look at ’em in front of 50,000 people.

Well, let me put it this way: how do you personally feel about W.A.S.P. in relation to these other bands?

I’m proud to be part of that movement, ’cause I’ll tell you, and I know this doesn’t sound like CREEM’s cup of tea: I think that 10 years from now, when you look in a rock encyclopedia, you’re gonna see the San Francisco movement, the ’64 British Invasion, and you’re gonna see that what happened in L.A. in ’82-’83 is gonna have its own chapter. ’Cause 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. We know a couple of chords.

Blackie, why did you choose the name Blackie Lawless?

I wanted something that sounded like Jesse James. Y’know?

It doesn’t even sound like Jesse James.

It does to me!

Where'd you get the name? It's really cornball. I mean, really.

No, it’s like Nikki Sixx. It’s the same type of deal.

Sixx is stupid. But Lawless—

You never heard of Burton Lawless on the Dallas Cowboys? All-pro for ten years. Tom Lawless, the second baseman— But it’s their names. It’s like Fair Hooker, too—that’s the guy’s name.

Sounds like something you wave down on the street, y’know?

I just wonder how our guy Blackie—here we have a 28-year-old male, almost 28 years old, with the name Blackie—how does he deal with life with the name Blackie?

Well, I’ll tell you where the name Blackie came from. My mother was a professional dancer in Houston, Texas, and there was a guy who was a wrestler down there—his name was Blackie. And she told me a story about (how) he came into an NCO club one night during the second World War and stuck a straight razor in a sailor and walked around him. And dropped him. And I said, “Aw.”

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That be sickening.

That guy’s bad, y’know? Ha ha.

So, how did you feel in high school? Did you feel you were out of it, or what?

The last year I had a ball. ’Cause I skipped 67 straight days.

How in the hell’d you graduate?

Uh, it was not easy because—I don’t care what kind of grades you got—if you miss too many days they don’t pass you. And my mom had to really go down there and lobby at the time. As a matter of fact,

I didn’t know that I was gonna walk on the night of graduation until, like, 5:00 that afternoon. Boy, and my dad’s sittin’ there: “If you don’t fuckin’ graduate, I’ll kill you.” (laughs)

What do your folks think now?

Urn, my dad’s real religious, believe it or not—

What religion?

Christian, he’s Christian.

Baptist?

Yeah, he is. And, oddly enough, with his Jewish bloodline it makes for a strange combination.

That is strange.

Isn’t it, though?

He can’t—he can’t approve of W.A.S.P.

Well, I’ll tell you a funny story. He’s living in Tampa now and he’s very successful in construction; he’s got his own plastering firm, he built part of Cinderella Castle at Disney world, shit like that, so he’s done OK. So I did this interview with the Tampa Tribune right before Christmas and we got stuck in Buffalo, in this snowstorm a couple weeks ago. And I didn’t have anything to do, so I called him. He goes, “Y’know what? I was reading through the paper here and I got to the entertainment section and lo and behold, the whole front page of the entertainment section—guess who?” And I go, “Uh oh, me, right?” And he goes, “Right. I’m reading some strange stuff in here about you.” And I said, “Well, listen, you can’t believe everything you read. It’s show biz.” And he says, “Well, I understand that part, but there is one thing in particular that I’d like to ask you about. It says here that you’ve got this controversial single...” and I go, “I can explain that.” (laughs) Y’know, it took me, like five minutes to try to—what I ended up telling him was that it was something I only did one time in England and they recorded it and the label put it out and I had no control over it.

Why do you lie to your dad like that?

Hey, wouldn’t you, man?! I gotta go

back and see the man from time to time— Of course I would. But does he buy it?

I think it sounded good to him from a respect point of view. I think that he understands and, therefore, it’s like if you were married and your wife was screwing around on you, as long as she just didn’t come and rub it in your face, you might be able to get along with her—if you really loved her.

Do you think metal is, really, like taking over music?

(Much laughter.) Let’s just say some people will do anything to keep from working. Y’know?

Is that what it is?

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it. it’s a con job on your audience, then.

That’s true. But now we’re getting down to my Roy Rogers Theory.

Well, tell us your Roy Rogers Theory. He’s got his little things he’s got to say.

(Laughing.) 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’m Roy Rogers. But when the hour’s over I go back to the box, throw in the hat and it stays there until I’m ready to use it again.

It sounds like a hoax on the audience.

No; nope. I’ll tell you something that somebody told me one time: he said, “A lot of people will say this and that, but one thing they can’t say about me is that I’m a phony.”