W.A.S.P.'s BLACKIE LAWLESS On His Upcoming Book: 'It's Not Your Typical Sex, Drugs And Rock And Roll'

In a new interview with IndiePower TV, b>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". The title of the book is a reference to the square mile that Blackie lived in nearly five decades ago and the influences that the town itself would have on not just Lawless but the music industry.

"Well, the first year [after I moved to California], I slept on people's floors," Blackie recalled (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). "I did the floor tour. And then 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. And that was literally right across the street from the Hollywood Palladium, which is where [W.A.S.P.] played the last time [December 2024] we were [in Los Angeles]. Now, that's about 50 feet away from where I was sleeping in that closet.

"Blackie Lawless is a combination of Zorro [the fictional mask-wearing, sword-fighting champion of the oppressed in Spanish California in the early 19th century] and [Hungarian–American actor] Bela Lugosi," Blackie continued. "Those are my childhood heroes growing up. But what I did not realize, when Bela Lugosi died, the best I can figure, the apartment building he was in was about 75 feet away from where I was living in that closet. Now, had I known that at the time, I would've been over there putting flowers on his doorstep every day. But I didn't."

Lawless added: "I talked to [IRON MAIDEN's] Bruce Dickinson and some other people that wrote books, and I said, 'Well, how long did it take you to do it?' And they said, 'Oh, six months.' And so I thought, 'Okay, well, that's probably what it'll take.' Well, six years later, I'm still working on it. And the reason that I'm still working on it is because when I first started, I thought it was my singular story, and that seemed reasonable at the time. But the more I started working on it, the more I realized, no, it's not my singular story. It's equally about the town itself. And the research that I had to do on the town, because the town, it plows its history over. It's not like Des Moines, Iowa, or someplace like that, where something really important happens, they put up a street marker for it. You know, such and such happened here on such and such a day. Hollywood doesn't do that. It just plows over its own history. Every one of the recording studios, every one of the management offices that we had, had all been something before that was industry-related. And to give you an example, when I had the recording studio on Santa Monica and Vine, right next to me, literally, right there was an alleyway that separated us, but Gold Star recording studios had been there. And, unfortunately, it's a donut shop now, the last I saw. All those great records came out of there. But when we were coming up, and we were first getting started, there was a laundromat that's diagonally across that intersection there. We used to rehearse in that laundromat after nine o'clock at night. We would set up the equipment in between the washing machines, and that's where we would rehearse. Fast forward nine years later, and I'm at the light waiting for it to change, and I look over and that laundromat is still there. And I'm thinking, 'This is the longest 75 feet I ever walked in my life,' to get from the laundromat to being the proprietor of this recording studio. How does this happen? So you're living in a better place. You're driving a better car. You're eating better food, all that stuff, and you think that success is gonna change everything.

"I was naive enough to believe that I was gonna end up in Valhalla, but as much as everything changed, nothing changed," Blackie said. "I'm literally three blocks away from where I used to live. Like I said, the last show I just played [in Los Angeles] was right across the street from where I used to live. So I'm still working in that square mile, like it or not, that I'm still going back to these places, and I would do that for 20 years. And what I discovered about the town is, like I said, when you see the book, it's not your typical sex, drugs and rock and roll. I mean, there's a period of that, but by the time I moved to California, I had a lot of that... I wouldn't say it was out of my system, but I was ready to go to work. And my story is pretty different than whatever you've been used to reading."

Earlier this month, Blackie told Scott Penfold of Loaded Radio about "Tales From The Square Mile": "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.