Рабочие-строители из ада! Четыре пневматических самца, облачённых фактически в чёрную кожу с шипами на нарукавных повязках, шурупами на ремнях, стилетами на каблуках и настоящим металлическим лезвием от циркулярной пилы, сверкающим между ягодицами. Голыми ягодицами.

Это не работяги в аду. Они стоят, смотрят с негодованием, скованные вместе цепью, ниже красуется чёрный кованый из металла логотип, заключённый в круг газовой трубы, надпись гласит - W.A.S.P. И тогда оковы рушатся, и рабочие-строители из ада вырываются на свободу. Надпись вспыхивает пламенем, динамики взрываются тяжёлым, оглушительным, дорожным металлическим грохотом, толпа - ревёт, W.A.S.P. - рычат, Бог - на Небесах и все просто в восторге.

Крис: SISTER - это была глэм-рок группа точно такая же как MOTLEY CRUE. Мы хотели сделать шоу подобное драме ”Горбун из Нотр-Дама”. Я думаю, оно не было бы зловещим, никаких пентаграмм и прочей дьявольской атрибутики - просто сумасшедшим. Столь же сумасшедшим как ”Горбун” только больше огня…

Импресарио: И червей?

Крис: Да. Он имел обыкновение, есть червей. Обычно он бросал их в зал аудитории. Большие такие лошадиные черви.

Импресарио: Однажды ему пришлось, даже есть мёртвых червей, верно?

Крис: Хранить червей нужно было в холодильнике, а так как уже днём они были далеко не свежие то к вечеру просто испортились. А он должен был выйти и съесть их. Я не знаю, зачем он это сделал, потому что если их много съесть, можно получить тяжёлую болезнь мозга.

Пот на мускулах сверкает как горный хрусталь в свете прожекторов, когда лидер и вокалист группы Блэки Лоулесс берёт огромный тесак со сцены. Он вытаскивает волосок из своей длинной чёрной шевелюры, нежно кладёт его на острие, проверяя, как заточено лезвие. В основе платформы ударной установки, где барабанит Тони Ричардс, есть деревянная коробка. Говорят сырое мясо. Сырое мясо - это порядочно длинный кусок капающей кишки. Блэки снимает её подобно боа из перьев и с напыщенным видом ходит с ней по заднику сцены. Толпа начинает приходить в восторг и прятаться. Пронзительные голубые глаза высматривают на местах слабовольных. Свою порцию они всегда получают первыми. Он отгрызает и пережёвывает куски так, что кровь ручьями стекает по его груди, а затем выплёвывает всё в толпу, в то время как позади него группа вымучивает возбуждающие неандертальские рифы. Обед закончен и Блэки запивает трапезу приличной чашей с кровью...

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 New York 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. W.A.S.P. 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 and pillage in Hollywood many 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 W.A.S.P. 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 W.A.S.P. 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 W.A.S.P.

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!