CAME! SAW! CONQUERED!
By Sylvie Simmons
By Sylvie Simmons
November 13, 1993
The raw meat ran out, the codpieces went limp and the circus turned into a zoo - and another stalwart of the once thriving, pyrotechnic fuelled LA Cock Rock scene gets laid to rest! Sick of being the target of bombs bullets and barbed comments, Blackie Lawless, the most dangerous groin in Metal, had knocked W.A.S.P. on the head! Sylvie Simmons gets a first hand insight into 10 years of W.A.S.P. supremacy and depravity!
I can remember fucking under this table. This very table, right here, on the floor! I'd forgotten all about that! Blackie Lawless smiles and leans back in the plastic hose-downable seat. We're at The Rainbow on Sunset Boulevard: the notorious Rainbow, where the floors are sticky and the boobs are siliconed. There's a baby at the next table. I'm not talking about a babe; I mean an actual, small squidged lump of bawling flesh sitting with its mum and her friends screaming throughout the interview.
Blackie, the only Rock Star in the joint, is drinking something suspiciously non-alcoholic and talking about how he's not into fucking for recreation anymore. That's how much the place has changed. The whole scene has changed. Bands who once were mega have lost their record deals or their audiences, or both. Clubs are closing down or doing lousy business. Gazzarri's the club where a thousand bands who knew which side of the hairspray nozzle the hole was on got their beginnings is boarded, its owner dead, its walls stuck with posters for miracle diets and this weeks new age guru.
Blackie used to live up the hill from the Rainbow - so did Motley and a whole bunch of other bands. It took a sensible Brit like Lemmy to show them that the smart idea was to live down the hill from the Rainbow, so it's easier to stagger back home. Blackie left town for one of the outlying canyons, a 1989 time - warp, all old hippies, after his set -to with the PMRC led to death threats, bomb scares and being shot at twice. And W.A.S.P. have checked out too. First Blood.....Last Cuts is not only a greatest hits album, it's the end of the band. For all intents and purposes, says Blackie. W.A.S.P. are done.
W.A.S.P. began just at the first seeds of the scene were spilled in the back streets of Hollywood, and finished as the whole mad party fizzle out. Looking back on the history of W.A.S.P. is a lot like looking back on the history of LA Metal, with all its wildness, Stillness and total OTT-ness. You'll need an encyclopaedia, Blackie laughs. To do that! We'd started out the evening at The Troubadour, where an unsigned W.A.S.P. had prowled the stage under a home-made gas-lit logo, chucking bloody meat at a crowd of punks and sounding wilder than your wildest dreams. On the wall in the bar was an old W.A.S.P. poster: a close-up of Blackie's buzz-sawed crotch. Crotch close ups were de rigeur in the LA days - Motley's debut album sleeve, for instance. Willy- consciousness was a major feature of any self-respecting LA Metaller.
It's like looking at somebody else. Things I though comical then are hysterical to me now. And some things are actually frightening as well. There's nothing wrong with young bands doing that kind of stuff. God knows, this 'best of' record, the first half - Love Machine. Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) - is all about that. But looking at that poster, that crotch over there isn't the same on that's sitting here right now.
Undoubtedly. Wearing an exploding codpiece that backfired down your trousers could make a changed man out of anyone. The famed flame-throwing phallus was really only a natural progression for a bad that had from its earliest club show, even as an unsigned band, thrown in willy pyrotechnics. (Before W.A.S.P. were together, I built special effects for a living: one of the guys who worked for us, his dad owned a wood shop out in Pasadena and we built everything ourselves) - and for a scene that was totally obsessed with its dick, LA metal was... Fuck Like A Beast for 10 years.
Until they cooled down., cleaned up, settled down and the scene moved on. It was one big decade of decadence. And the exploding codpiece incident in Dublin stands almost as a testament to the craziness.
Well, the original codpiece was a saw blade, says Blackie. which was a valid symbol. I couldn't get a bigger saw blade to drag around between my legs, so I thought, what's the next best thing? An exploding dick! Shoots flames at 18 feet! How utterly ridiculous!
We'd tested that thing for about four months before we did it, had it down do it came off without a hitch. There was the equivalent to probably half a stick of dynamite, easy. We go and make Inside The Electric Circus, and those things are sitting for three months, and the powder is compacting. I go out on opening night and I've got a bomb between my legs. Literally!
Probably the only thing that saved my life, much less the intricate parts they're associated with, was the codpiece I was wearing, which was quarter-inch thick solid fibreglass. It cracked into three different pieces! It scared me so bad - don't think I've ever been so afraid in my life. I was numb from the waist down, and I was so afraid that it had just blown everything off. I didn't want to look down. It felt like I'd spread my legs and somebody had hit me between them with a baseball bat as hard as they could! It tore all the hair off my legs down to my knees, around my rear, everything. And people all thought it was part of the show!
W.A.S.P's early shows were mind (as opposed to dick) blowing. There had been other theatrical bands - California's Tubes, New York's Plasmatics, the mighty Alice Cooper - but for the most part, successful Rock had ceased to be visual. Successful bands of the era that spawned LA Metal were faceless bands like Boston, Kansas, Journey and Loverboy. If you wanted to see Rock, you went to an arena and watched fat men in jeans in the distance. Or you could see W.A.S.P. in a club the size of a shoebox torturing a woman tied to a rack, drinking blood from an upturned skull and wearing some of the dodgiest outfits ever. Like bottomless leather trousers - only they didn't have enough money to have them made to measure, so they got them too big...
Yeah, grins Blackie, We were the first ones to walk around with our rear ends flapping in the breeze!
That's the kind of stuff I see now and I fall out of my seat laughing. But it got us the largest record deal in history for a previously unsigned band ever in the world. We got a little money and the outfits got better.
I was in the house by myself one night and I was thumbing through my videos, and I put on 'Live At The Lyceum'. And I went, 'Jesus Christ'! No wonder it scared the hell out of people, because by that time we had the act down with the meat and the rack, and it was scary to watch.
I was in the house by myself one night and I was thumbing through my videos, and I put on 'Live At The Lyceum'. And I went, 'Jesus Christ'! No wonder it scared the hell out of people, because by that time we had the act down with the meat and the rack, and it was scary to watch.
I remember Chris (Holmes, W.A.S.P. guitarist) coming to me one day, when all the hoopla was flying around our heads there was probably a point in '84', '85, where we were receiving more publicity than The Sex Pistols and Chris goes, What the hell is the big deal all about?. He meant us. And I said, I don't know; I don't get it.
We were doing something that we thought was okay, but we had no idea it would interest people like that.
At the time, they took themselves very seriously. In interviews, Blackie'd waffle on that what they were doing was serious psychodrama.
I believed that at the time. I was not only selling you guys, I was selling myself on it too. It might have been horse crap, but it was horse crap I believed in!
What happened to me was, we were in Toledo, Ohio, right in the middle of the Inside The Electric Circus tour, and I was sitting backstage looking in the mirror, putting my make-up on, and I thought to myself, What a zoo this whole thing has turned into!.
I turned around to the rest of the guys and said, Are we going to continue to be this circus we've created, or are we going to go on to do something of true musical merit?
And what did they say?
They just looked at me, like, What the fuck is he talking about?! But I couldn't continue the way that I was. I had things inside of me that I had to get out - political, social issues.
No one's going to listen to someone with a saw-blade between his legs! It's taken me a long time to try to distance myself from that.
The first serious side we saw Blackie came from his role as spokesman in the Rock anti-censorship lobby. The PMRC was formed when Tipper Gore, the wife of the current US Vice President, overheard her child playing Animal... On the Electric Circus tour, there was only one show on that entire US tour where there was not a least one bomb-scare. You know what fanatics Americans are. They see something on TV and they go, Oh, I'll rid the world of this asshole!
The FBI advised me not to live by myself anymore. With all that, I started withdrawing into a cocoon. I didn't wanna be this monster I'd created.
When we first started, whatever anybody says, the only thing these guys are interested in is getting their dicks licked. But after you've done it for a while you have to realise there's more to life.
After you've been up there a while and you start to become on of the elder statesmen, you've got to stand up and be counted.
Blackie and Tipper Gore were meant to face off in a scene in the movie The Decline Of Western Civilisation Part II, but she backed out the day before. But Chris Holmes went head and did his bit.
The scene has become legendary; the guitarist on a lilo in the pool, his Mum watching him drink himself silly. That movie may not have encapsulated the LA Metal scene, but it did some up certain aspects of it.
Whew! I didn't know what happened until it was done, and I begged Penelope (Spheeris, the director) to take it out of the movie. But all the copies had been made already. It got worse after that, too. I have to be careful what I'm saying here, because I don't want to hurt anybody; it's not necessary. The par of the LA scene I am very uncomfortable with.
Myself, David Coverdale, Lemmy - there are a few of us that can put more than a couple of sentences together at a time, and we get lumped in with that 'Beavis and Butthead - type image, and that annoys me. But I can't say that it's completely unfounded either. I didn't assemble those people to do that move. They're there.
And when Chris left?
Its like you wake up one day and you look across the room and there's somebody sitting there and you don't even know them any more. It's the same person but you have nothing in common with them personally any more, much less musically.
W.A.S.P. ceased to exist in my mind when Chris left.
And so another bit LA band bites the dust. Why did so many bands fall apart? Why did the LA Scene die?
They lost their way. I can't say anything for anybody else, other than what I just said about me, which is that if they weren't true to themselves, if they didn't write about something that stood for something... you've got to stand up and be counted. You've got to have the courage to be yourself.
See, when you think of the LA scene, '82', '83, there's 20 bands and every one of them looked different and sounded different. There were no two of them the same.
When the whole scene happened every record company took one band and put them in a Xerox machine, and spat out a thousand that all looked and sounded the same. But in the beginning, everyone was themselves.
That was a special time. There was electricity. We all knew it at the time. 1983 on any given night of the week you could see Ratt, Motley or Quiet Riot, Dokken, Armored Saint, Black and Blue...
The childlike intensity of that era, Blackie sighs. I'll never experience that again.
They lost their way. I can't say anything for anybody else, other than what I just said about me, which is that if they weren't true to themselves, if they didn't write about something that stood for something... you've got to stand up and be counted. You've got to have the courage to be yourself.
See, when you think of the LA scene, '82', '83, there's 20 bands and every one of them looked different and sounded different. There were no two of them the same.
When the whole scene happened every record company took one band and put them in a Xerox machine, and spat out a thousand that all looked and sounded the same. But in the beginning, everyone was themselves.
That was a special time. There was electricity. We all knew it at the time. 1983 on any given night of the week you could see Ratt, Motley or Quiet Riot, Dokken, Armored Saint, Black and Blue...
The childlike intensity of that era, Blackie sighs. I'll never experience that again.
