W.A.S.P.'s BLACKIE LAWLESS: 'Like Most Entertainers, I've Lived In A Bubble My Whole Career'

In a new interview with Brian Aberback of The Aquarian Weekly, Blackie Lawless spoke about the 40th anniversary of the release of W.A.S.P.'s first album. To celebrate this classic metal album, W.A.S.P. is, for the first time in 40 years, playing the entire album from top to bottom, start to finish, on a fall 2024 North American tour, dubbed "Album ONE Alive", this fall. Support on the trek is coming from ARMORED SAINT.

Regarding how the "Album ONE Alive" tour came together, Blackie said: "It first started to come about when we started doing meet-and-greets on the last tour. We had never done them before. We didn't know what to do, so we started looking at what other bands were doing. It was basically an autograph and a picture and a handshake. We looked at that and thought that didn't seem great. I wouldn't want that if I was a fan. We were trying to figure out better ways of doing it to make it an enjoyable experience, something that people could take away for a lifetime. What I thought is, 'Let's give them time.' Time is the most valuable thing that any of us have. When we would do the meet-and-greets, I'd go down the line and I'd ask every one of them, 'What's on your mind? What do you think and what do you want to talk about?' It ended up being really, really good. First of all, it was a non-chaotic environment, because when you get half a dozen people on the street trying to come up to you, talking to you all at the same time, it's chaos. In a controlled environment where everybody's relaxed, it becomes really conversational, like what we're doing right now. Everybody can really give themselves a chance to ask something that they've wanted to ask for a long time and get a genuine answer, and for them to understand that I'm getting as much out of it as they are. Because I'm doing little mini market surveys while I'm doing it, I'm picking their brains. Had I known what I know now about doing that, I would have done meet-and-greets a long time ago. That's how the idea for the tour and the production started. When I first started listening to what they were saying, I'm hearing it from a perspective I've never heard it before. When somebody is telling you about how some lyric changed their life and tears are running down their face when they're saying it, they're not acting. That's genuine.

"You have to remember, like most entertainers, I've lived in a bubble my whole career, and it's not until you get in that environment — having an intimate moment with somebody where they're really letting it all hang out, tell you something that you did that changed their life, saved their life — that became a common theme night after night after night. How can you hear those things and not be changed? It started giving me a whole new appreciation, because, again, I'm on the inside of the bubble. It started giving me a whole new appreciation of going back again.

"And it wasn't just that — tight around the same time, maybe about a year before we did that last tour, I started working on a book. but having an idea to write about and flushing out the ideas are different things," he explained. "To really accurately describe an event, let's say something that happened to me, like I got shot at twice; to accurately describe that I've got to really go back and start digging to put the pieces of the puzzle together. After so many years, you remember, but you have the surface memory, but you don't have the deep, detailed memory. When you start digging those things up again, it's like Peter Gabriel says, 'Digging in the dirt to find the places I got hurt.' It's a lot like that. You start discovering things — a lot of it good, a lot of it not so good. It's a real growth experience. It really made me start thinking about, 'Maybe it's time to start looking backwards,' though that's not to say we're going to live there, right? Who says you can't visit the past? I remember hearing John Lennon make a quote one time when THE BEATLES broke up and everybody was all freaked out; he says, 'Don't worry about it. Those records will always be there. You can visit them whenever you like.' The simplicity of that statement was so great, and I thought, 'Okay, let's do the same thing, why can't we go back and visit from time to time?' It also connects to this tour. As part of the VIP package, we're taking a little mini museum out with us. It's four big road cases and they open up and they're six feet high. When they're all put together, they're 16 feet long. Where we got the idea from was the racquetball court at Graceland, where all Elvis had his gold and platinum records and his outfits and all that, so we're doing a little miniature version of that. It will have all our gold and platinum records. In front of the gold and platinum records are outfits, guitars, memorabilia that the fans have sent us, caricatures, models of us, photos, and posters that people have never seen. When I started going through the boxes of everything that I hadn't seen for 20 and 30 years, it was like every box I opened was like Christmas morning. I kid you not; I would start giggling looking at stuff that I had forgotten about, a if it was wowing me like that, the fans are going to absolutely lose it when they see this stuff."

Asked if there was any trepidation about putting this tour together, whether promoters would support it, Blackie said: "I didn't think it was that great, to be honest. I just came from a production meeting. The guy's saying the same thing to me that you're saying right now. He asked me the same question about the promoters, and I told him, 'When I came up with the idea, I initially didn't think it was that great, and the first couple of guys I quizzed, they were all over themselves.' After about going through 10 different guys, all of them were acting the same. I thought, 'You know what, maybe it's me. Maybe we got something here,' because the enthusiasm wasn't just good, it was bubbling over the top."

Regarding why he had doubts, Blackie said: "Because, again, I'm on the inside of the bubble, and I just don't see it like everybody else does. You know the old saying, you can't see the forest for the trees. That's what it's like. I was so exhausted."

W.A.S.P. kicked off the "Album ONE Alive" tour on October 26 at Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo, California.

Along with bassist Mike Duda and lead guitarist Doug Blair, whose tenures in the band are 29 and 26 years respectively, W.A.S.P. is joined by longtime drummer extraordinaire Aquiles Priester.

The 39-city run is making stops across North America in Vancouver, British Columbia; Toronto, Ontario; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Dallas, Texas; New York City; Orlando, Florida; and more before wrapping up on Saturday, December 14 at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, California.

W.A.S.P. is again offering fans VIP tickets that give fans a chance to meet W.A.S.P. frontman Blackie Lawless, get a personal photo with Blackie, autographs and take part in a very personal question-and-answer session with Blackie. VIP tickets can be purchased at waspnation.myshopify.com.

Because of the extensive back injuries Lawless suffered during the European leg of W.A.S.P.'s 40th-anniversary tour, the band's previously announced 2023 U.S. tour was canceled.

W.A.S.P.'s massive European leg of the 40th-anniversary world tour wrapped on May 18, 2023 in Sofia, Bulgaria at Universidada Sports Hall.

W.A.S.P. wrapped up its first U.S. tour in 10 years with a sold-out show on December 11, 2022 at The Wiltern in Los Angeles. This marked the 18th sold-out shows for the U.S. tour, which kicked off in late October 2022. W.A.S.P.'s performances included the return of the band's classic song "Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)", which hadn't been played live in over 15 years.

W.A.S.P.'s latest release was "ReIdolized (The Soundtrack To The Crimson Idol)", which came out in February 2018. It was a new version of the band's classic 1992 album "The Crimson Idol", which was re-recorded to accompany the movie of the same name to mark the 25th anniversary of the original LP's release. The re-recorded version also features four songs missing from the original album.

W.A.S.P.'s most recent studio album of all-new original material was 2015's "Golgotha".