By Sylvie Simmons
Sounds - 25 June 1983
Four pneumatic rnales piled into practical Black
leather with spikes on the armbands, studs on the belts, stilettos on the
heels and a stark metal chainsaw blade gleaming up between the buttocks.
Naked buttocks.
It's no work in hell. They're standing, glowering, chained together underneath
a crude metal sign encircled by a gas pipe. The letter W.A.S.P. And then
the chains are loose. The construction workers from hell are unleashed..
The sign explodes into flame, the speakers erupt into deep, dark, road
drilling metal thunder, the crowd roars, WASP snarls and God is in his
heaven and all is right with the world.
Chris: "Sister. That was a glitter rock band
just like Motley Crue. We'd start 'off the show like the hunchback of Notre
Dame - I mean it wasn't evil, nothing portrayed the devil it was just crazy.
About as crazy as this one only more fire…"
Roadie: "And worms."
Chris: "Yeah. He used to eat worms.He used to thrown them at the audience.
Big bronco worms."
Roadie: "One day he showed up and they were dead, right?"
Chris: "You've got to put them in the refrigerator and they were a
day old and they died. And he had to get out and eat one of them. I don't
know why he-ever did it, because if you eat them enough you get a brain
disease...
HEAVY MENTAL
Muscle sweat shines like rhinestones under the
spotlight as frontrnan Blackie Lawless takes a hatchet to the front of
the stage. He pulls a hair out of his long black shag-do, lays it tenderly
on a sawn off log. He tests the blade; lt's sharp.
At the base of the drum platform where Tony Richards is slapping out a
beat there's a wooden box. RAW MEAT, it says. Raw meat it is, some long
piece of dripping gut. Blackie doffs it ilke a feather boa and struts back
to centre stage.
The crowd begins to winge and hide. Piercing blue eyes check the seats
for wimps. They always get it first. He chews off a corner, letting the
blood drip onto his chest. Then launches it into the crowd.Chops off another
kind continue behind him as the band grinds out some stirring neanderthal
riffs. Dinner's over, and Blackie washes it down with a nice cup of blood...
Chris: "He got more into theatricals than this one, because he didn't play bass then, he just sang, and he had more time to mess around with his bands. He had this dummy he put on a meat hook. Halfway through the show and he'd walk up - we wanted real people, but how do you pay for those? - and put it on this meat hook like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There were parts were he would grab me by my hair round the back and drap me across stage while I was playing and throw me on the ground, kick me a few times. I really loved that band. But I like this band better because everybodys really nice to work with. Nice people..."
A large wooden gibbet has been wheeled onstage.
The black shroud has been tugged aside to reveal bones, sku1ls and, bound
spreadeagled in chains and straps, a woman naked except for a black loincloth
and black executioner's hood. The band's playing 'Tormentor', Godzilla
meets Godz, thudding heavy metal.
Blackie's put down his bass guitar and is weilding a mace. He smiles a
'should I?' leer at the crowd. Sure, say a couple of thousand pairs of
starin eyes. He hacks awayat the female until the fake blood flows down
her cleavage and he can lap it up with the same fervour that the crouds
lapping up the performance.
The mangled corpse is untied and carried off by roadies. A couple more
anthemic ditties, the sign ignites once more,then silence. No calls for
more from the crowd. They looked shell shocked; drained. You can hear two
thounsand hearts pumping adrenalin as the house lights go back on....
Chris: "I was in about five other bands before. All Levis, tennis
shoes and T-shirts. And I got into this with Blackie and it changed my
lifestyle 180 degrees. My friends wouldn't even associate with me after
that..."
SISTER STARTED the whole thing off as far as LA.
was concerned; 1977, 78, glam rock and worms. But before that there was
the NewYork Dolls.
"I hid known the guys in the band and there had been some hostility
then between some members, and Johnny Thunders decided that it was better
for him to leave at that point. And having known the members of the band
I waltzed right into the situation - twenty years old; babe in arms. Completely
inexperienced, but it did'nt take long. Baptism by fire."
We're sitting on a shelf infront of a large-dressing roorn mirror in a
sweaty open toilet downstairs. Blackle Lawless is reminiscing under fluorescent
lights.
"By the time I got in the New York Dolls, the band was on its last
legs.They were struggling for existence. It was virtually over by the time
I joined. I was only completing a formality at that point.
"When the Dolls broke up, Arthur Kane the bassist and myself came
to LA, and we were-going to start a band with Glen Buxton, the ex-guitar
player for Alice Cooper. And Glen had some problems with the government,
the IRS, and couldn t come to California, so we stayed and put a group
together called Killer Kane. And thereafter Arthur and I had some disagreements
and he went back to New York. And he is still there and I'rn still here."
First he formed Sister. WASP guitarist Chris Holmes was in that band. So
was Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue for a while. ("I can tell you some stories"
Nikki tempted. "Me and Blackle would go out and rape an4 pillage in
Hollywood rnany a time...")
Blackie: "Well, as you know, the Dolls were plagued with being too
far ahead of their tirne. Sister was plagued by the same problem. It takes
a while socially for people to catch up with what you're doing."
So now they eat raw meat instead of raw worms?
"It all ends up in the same place now, don't it! lt's no difterent
from the geeks during the Depression. I mean, rny dad worked in the carny
when he was a kid, and they use to have a guy that ate live rats onstage.
Ours is very tame in comparision, wouldn t you say then?
"There's a good bad taste and bad bad taste and I feel like we're
doing good bad taste. There's a degree of what you can and can t do. I
ve heard of people doing all sorts of atrocious things - like the Frank
Zappa thing you've heard about (taking a dump onstage and eating it, so
the stories go). That never happened. But some of these'stories get better
with age so who knows, maybe people will start to see rats up there in
a period of time, They are seeing what they want to."
And getting it.
"If you don't," opines Blackie,"give the people what they
want, you're not going to sell tickets. If you don't sell tickets you don't
get a job. The thing that I have learned between this band and that band
is that i'm not doing so much entertaining myself as I was then. Because
when you are doing things that are avant-garde or ahead of their time,
you start entertaining yourself; you start playing to a minute audience.
"All great artiets die broke. In that case I don't want to be a great
artist.
"It's just like sport - you've got a limit lifetime that you cen do
this, and when it's over it's over. You've got to do it when it's hot,
and we are hot right now."
BURNING. ASK any LA owner about WASP and his eyes
will mist up with tears like a sentimental grandmother. In the one year
this band has been together - recruitirig Chris from Sister and dabbling
with Don Costa for awhile before losing him to Ozzy, adding drummer Richards
and second guitarist Randy Piper and landing Blackie with the bass work
"because somebody hard to do it and I was elected so that is it. The
process of elimination" - they've built up a big, rapid following.
Wall to wall people wherever they play.
"This is electric vaudeville. It's nothing new. We're just packaging
it up a little bit differently, putting a different bow on it and sending
it back out in a different direction. I don't see us doing anything different
than thecarnival side shows did in American around the turn of the century.
I don't see us being a new institution. The only thing that we're doing
is we're creating a catharis onstage that keeps kids from going out and
stealing people's hubcaps while they're in there watching us. As a matter
of fact they should be glad we're doing this."
Glad their kids are getting to see someone whap the shit out of a girl
onstage?
"Well that goes back to kids getting their aggressions out. Guys have
aggrestions. I mean we're not saying women have to take a fall particurlarly
or anything like that. I just happen to think that women look a little
nicer than men do when they are in a situation like that.
"I get the rap for this all the time. They say heavy metal drives
people crazy if they listen to it over a period of tirne. I say the people
who are getting driven crazy by it are the ones who are unbalanced already.
That's like blaming Jodie Foster for shooting President Reagan! I'ain't
taking the rap for that".
Blackie calls it 'psychodrama' the stage set, the getting the audience
involved. "You don't see anybody leaving". It's true. "It's
like horror movies." A big heavy metal cartoon, simple and primitive
and instantly absorbed. The costumes look straignt out of Aussie sci-fi
movie Road Warrior.
"Yes, I will admit that there are some elements of it there, but if
you look at what we're doing now, I.think the look has progresed futher
than what it was originally intended to be." When they started out,
the idea was to be a 'futuristic primitive', a kick in the butt to the
futuristic synthesiser wimp bands. "We thought we would go right back
to the basics, which was very primitive - which was right about the time
that movie came out.
"We were looking for a hook. Becauce if you go back and examine things
like the Beatles, the Beatles were the Everly Brothers but they were electric,
and it was the look that made them different. Their sound was'nt all that
different.
As for WASP; "We're not a heavy metal band. We're a rock 'n' roll
band. The difference between us and them is the difference between Cream
and Grand Funk."
You'll get to judge for yourself when their first album comes out. They
start working on it the second week in June with Rick Browde of Ted Nugent
fame at the controls. Blackie wrote most of the songs, with occasional
help from Chris.
"He is a heavy metal child, I am more rock and roll. When you fuse
the two together you get WASP."
Oh yeah, the name. All sorts of meanings there - little stinger, White
Anglo Saxon Protestant....
"And I come up with a new one every week! We Are Satan's People -
well I was looking for a name that was controversial without being controversial.
If you know what the name means, fine. If you don't, then it's a bug. You
can see into it whatever you want.
"I got what I wanted out of the name - It's been working like a charm.
That's really what it all adds up to; the periods."
And the costumes?
"Between Chris and myself it was just a natural born instinct to go
out and be lewed and lascivious! There's nobody in rock and roll that doesn't
have a nitch upstairs, believe me!"
I do, Blackie, I do.
