W.A.S.P.'s BLACKIE LAWLESS Is Hoping To Release His Long-In-The-Works Autobiography In 2027: 'I'm About Halfway Finished'

In a new interview with Scott Penfold of Loaded Radio, W.A.S.P. leader Blackie Lawless spoke about the status of his long-in-the-works autobiography, which has the working title of "Tales From The Square Mile". He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "When I first started writing, I asked [IRON MAIDEN singer] Bruce Dickinson, I said, 'How long did it take you to do your book ['What Does This Button Do?']?' He says, 'About six months.' And I'm thinking, 'Well, it'll take six months.' Well, six years later [it's still not done].

"When I first got into it, I thought it was my singular story," Blackie explained. "And that seemed reasonable enough, because it's about my own story. But as I started to get into it, I started to realize that it is not just my story. It is about the town itself. And the more I started to understand that, the more everything started to change, as far as the book.

"There's only two guys left, if you think about it, that were there in the beginning, that saw the '70s and, obviously, the '80s," Lawless continued. "But there's only two guys — myself and Rudy Sarzo [former Ozzy Osbourne and current QUIET RIOT bassist]. Now, Rudy wrote a book ['Off The Rails'] a while back where he went into detail about what happened when he was with Ozzy and all that, and what happened when [late Ozzy guitarist] Randy [Rhoads] died and all that. I had lunch, or dinner, with Rudy about six, seven months ago, and I just wanted to pick his brain about what was going on with this. But I told him the approach that I was taking with this, and it was a very, very different type of approach to anything anybody had done before, and he was fully supportive of it. But that's really what it's about.

"When I got into it, I found out that it was about the town itself. I'll give you an example," Blackie added. "Blackie Lawless is a combination of Zorro and Dracula. Those were my two childhood heroes growing up. Well, the first year that I was here, I slept on people's floors. And the next year and a half, I moved into my deluxe accommodations, which was a closet that was three feet by 12 feet. And I was in there for a year and a half. Well, come to find out when I'm doing research on this book, that [Hungarian–American actor] Bela Lugosi had lived, the best I can figure, he was about 75 feet away from where I was when I was in that closet. Had I known that, I'd have been down there putting flowers on his doorstep every day. But I didn't know that at the time. But there's coincidence after coincidence after coincidence that people are gonna look at in this book, they're gonna read it, and they're gonna think, 'There's no way that this can be true.' It is true. Every word of it is true. And like I said, the deeper I got into it, the more I started to realize it is not just my singular story, it's about the town itself."

As for a possible timeline for the release of "Tales From The Square Mile", Lawless said: "Well, I keep telling people a year. I'm at a point now where I've done most of the research. So, I'm about halfway finished. So, I mean, we're getting ready to do this tour, so there won't be a whole lot going on there. But I'm hoping, and I got my fingers crossed, I'm hoping next year sometime."

This past April, Blackie told Matt Wardlaw of Ultimate Classic Rock about his autobiography: "The amount of research that it took to get a lot of these stories correct is really time consuming. And I find that there will be times where it'll take me six, seven hours to write two paragraphs because of the amount of research that's going on. Because when I first started this, like probably everybody else, I would've thought it would've been my singular story. And that seemed reasonable at the time. But the more I got into it, the more I realized it was not just my story."

Regarding why he decided to name the book "Tales From The Square Mile", Blackie said: "What it's about is that square mile that I was living in in Hollywood at the time, and the influences that the town itself would have on not just me, but the music industry overall, and we are all tied to it, whether we know it or not. Because the way the movie studio systems were set up in the '20s, '30s and '40s had a direct influence on what the record companies would be later. So all this research, like I said, that went into to uncovering a lot of what I've been doing has just taken an enormous amount of time. But the little nuggets that I've discovered that I think people will find interesting for me were fascinating when I would uncover them. And there's a lot of goofy coincidences that have happened in it too, the things that have been uncovered. So, like I said, I think it's gonna be an interesting read when people see it. It's not your gonna be your typical rock and roll book by any stretch."

Asked what has been the most enlightening thing for him as he has taken stock of everything that was going on during his earlier years, Blackie said: "Oh, man. Well, when you write a book, especially something like this, you realize you saved yourself about 40 years of being on a psychiatrist's couch because the rabbit holes that you have to go down… It's really revealing, because we have surface memory of events that have happened in our lives, but it's not until we go to really start digging deeper at any specific event that might have happened in your life. You think you remember it, and you do on the surface, but it's not until you start really going back to wherever that event may have happened in your head and you start looking and visualizing everything that was going on at the time. And man, I'm here to tell you, there's a lot of stones that you uncover that some are good and some are not so good. But I've come to the understanding that this is not a book I could have written 20 years ago, because I wasn't in the headspace to write it. So it's been — as the old GRATEFUL DEAD song says, 'What a long, strange trip it's been.' It's been that."

As for which area covered in the book was a particular "challenge" for him to write about, Lawless said: "Childhood. Because that too is where you start going down these rabbit holes and things that you think… It reminds me of the old Peter Gabriel song, 'Digging in the dirt to find the places where we got hurt.' My dad was in the construction business, and we traveled a lot when I was a kid. I ended up going to 13 different schools by the time I graduated. So I was constantly the new kid. And it's hard to make friends. And the friends you do make, as soon as you make them, you're gone again. And that ended up having quite a bit more of an impact on me growing up than even I gave it credit for. And as men, or as boys, we were constantly being tested by the older kids and stuff like that. So there was a lot of brutality that went on with it. But I would say in a word, childhood."

Back in October 2022, Lawless told Rockin' Metal Revival about the process of writing his autobiography: "When I sat down to start writing the book, it just poured out of me. And that was an interesting process, too, because, never having done that before, you always think of the… the first thing that comes to anybody's head is the things that stand out. But what I found that more than anything is it was a process of self-discovery, because if you look at any given event that may happen in your life that's significant — we all have those; those signposts that point us in one direction or another — it's one thing to write about it, but to get to the root of it, what you have to do is go back and do some real self-examination and say, 'Okay, what led me to this? And then what led me to that?' And so forth."

He continued: "It reminds me. I've heard stories of psychiatrists, when they tell people, if they've gone through something that's intense in their life or they've lost a loved one or something like that, write them a letter," he continued. "And I found that doing this is very much like that. Because I've never done the thing that the psychiatrists have said — fortunately, I've never been put in that position — but it reminded me of hearing what they were saying, because it ends up being a letter to yourself. And you discover some interesting stuff — the good, the bad, the ugly and all that. And it's quite a revealing process, because the person you are now is not the person you were when you were doing some of those idiotic things, or when something intense happened in your life that wasn't idiotic. But again, what led you from point A to point B to become that person, and you look back on it now and you go, 'Wow, look how I've changed.'"

"Writing, whether it's lyrics or anything like that, you try to write them as multi-dimensional as you can because the listener, when they listen to it today, you want them in five years to be able to look at those same lyrics and see something totally different, because who they are in five years is not who they are right now," Lawless added. "So that's really what you're trying to do."

Lawless previously talked about his autobiography in May 2022 in an interview with Meltdown of Detroit's WRIF radio station. At the time, he said: "It's taken a whole lot longer than I thought it would, but it's been one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. It's a tremendous amount of work because there's so many things, over the course of a lifetime, that you forget about, especially when you do what we do for a living. Anybody that does what we do, it's not like the average person out there where you go to work and you do your thing and you get into a routine. And there's nothing wrong with that; it's different.

"I've often said that I've already… because of the schedule and the way that any band has to do things — you're here today; you're somewhere else tomorrow — it's like you've already lived four or five of somebody else's lifetimes," he explained. "And because of the amount of intensity that goes into the same amount of space that everybody has. Twenty-four hours for somebody that does this is not the same as twenty-four hours for somebody that's in a routine. And it can get a little on the insane side.

"The first thing I did was interview everybody that I could think of and said, 'What are your memories of this?'" Blackie revealed. "So I got those. But then where I got the majority of it from was really going back in my own head. And the deeper I got into it, the more things I had totally forgotten about. Because, like I said, there's so many things that will happen in a given day that the only thing you remember is the most intense thing. But maybe the two or three other things that were just under it were just as intense, but you don't remember it. You remember being on the flight the time the guys got angry with a stewardess and stuffed her in the overhead bin, but you don't remember the two or three things that happened under that. That's a true story, by the way."

Asked what he has learned about himself from digging into his life while writing his book, Blackie said: "In the preface of the book, I write that this has been a process of discovery — both good and bad. I would say, after it's all said and done, that it's been far, far more good than bad, because what it's done for me, it's been like writing a script to a movie. And again, like I said, there's a lot of stuff you forget about. But also at the same time, what it does is it helps you connect the dots of your own life, of maybe things that you didn't really think about were connected, and you go back and you look at it and you go, 'This is as plain as the nose on my face. Why couldn't I have seen this before?' And there's been a number of incidences like that — just things that are personal that might not be something that you could share with anybody else, because it wouldn't make sense to them. But then again there may be things that are. So I'm hoping that when people read this, they'll see a lot of themselves in it."

W.A.S.P. recently announced the "1984 To Headless" 2026 U.S. and Canada tour with KK'S PRIEST as very special guest. The tour will kick off on September 10 in California and run through October 31. W.A.S.P. will play the hits from the band's first four albums: the band's iconic debut LP in 1984, followed the next year with "The Last Command", "Inside The Electric Circus" in 1987 and "The Headless Children" in 1989.

W.A.S.P. is again offering fans VIP tickets that give fans a chance to meet Blackie, get a personal photo with Blackie, autographs, a W.A.S.P. traveling museum with new items added since the last U.S. tour, and take part in a very personal Q&A with Blackie. VIP tickets can be purchased at waspnation.myshopify.com.

W.A.S.P. will take the "1984 To Headless" tour to Europe and the rest of the world in 2027.