RON KEEL In those days, you’d walk into any gig and you’d see three or four bands that went on to sell multiplatinum records. And just those guitar players—George Lynch and Jake E. Lee and Mick Mars and Mark Kendall, the list goes on. I saw W.A.S.P. at the Troubadour, lighting stuff on fire, throwing meat out at the audience. I thought that was cool because we didn’t have meat, man. We had peanut butter and jelly. I’m like, “Wow, these guys are badass! They’re throwing steaks!”
BRIAN SLAGEL I think I got hit in the head once with some meat.
GINA ZAMPARELLI When W.A.S.P. came along … if Mötley Crüe was scary, W.A.S.P. took it over-the-top. They were so tall and the stage show was so menacing. There’s no words for it. I went to every single show. I couldn’t not go. They were unbelievable to watch. It was this progression of theatrical music that went from Alice Cooper to them to, later, Marilyn Manson. At that time, we’d never seen anything like it.
TRACII GUNS The first time I ever saw W.A.S.P., it was at the Troubadour on a Wednesday night. I was maybe fifteen or sixteen, and Blackie lit the W.A.S.P. sign on fire and Chris Holmes spit in the air and it landed on his arm … They were just, like, they were foul. It was awesome!
BLACKIE LAWLESS (singer, guitarist, bassist, Sister, London, W.A.S.P.) Our foundation was in theatrics. We didn’t want to stand there and play. That wasn’t us. Basically, it started out as entertainment for us. We quickly discovered that whenever you have the attention of eyes and ears, sight will always win over sound. People listen with their eyes, not their ears.
BRIAN SLAGEL There was a buzz around this guy Blackie Lawless. None of us had ever met him, but we all kind of knew who he was.
BOB NALBANDIAN Blackie had a reputation. I guess he was in the New York Dolls for a while, and he had had his band Sister. People seemed to know about him.
DON ADKINS Did Blackie ever tell you about his sports days? He told me his real name was Steve Duren, and when he was younger he had actually gotten drafted for the farm team of the Tigers. And he goes, “Yeah, I was a helluva baseball player. I had a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball in high school,” something like that. He was telling me the story of how he got drafted but then he got the offer to go be in the New York Dolls, what became the final version of them, and he took that instead.
BLACKIE LAWLESS I only did a couple of shows with [the Dolls]. I was nineteen years old. And I was stunned because it was like five guys all trying to be like Jim Morrison and succeeding … Much more has been made out of my time with the Dolls than should have been. The big thing for me was it got me from the East Coast of the U.S. to the West Coast.
CHRIS HOLMES Back in the late ’70s I’d worked with Blackie in Sister. I grew up in a place called La Cañada, right by the Rose Bowl. It’s where the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is. And the next town is Pasadena. Back in ’73, ’74, Van Halen would play backyard parties there. I met Eddie Van Halen and we became friends. He’d borrow my amps all the time, and I’d be able to go down to the clubs and see the soundcheck and stuff. I was in high school.
Then in ’78 I got in a motorcycle accident and I was laid up in a hospital and I was gonna be there for a while. Eddie had just gotten off the first Van Halen tour and he had taken his guitar and cut a big V out of the back of it. It changed the tone of the guitar—made it a lot more trebly. So he came and visited me in the hospital and asked to borrow my Ibanez Destroyer for their record. He wound up using it on Women and Children First, and then went out on the road again.
Anyway, then I get out of the hospital and I want my guitar back. So I go over to his mom’s house and she opens the door and I say, “Hey, I think my guitar’s here…” She goes, “Look in his room.” I go back into Eddie’s room and I find it, and it doesn’t even have a bridge or a pickup in it, the prick! But I kinda didn’t care.
AL BANE (leather designer) Chris Holmes was a friend of mine from high school. He was the guitar hero. Whereas I didn’t have an easy time—I’m Hispanic and it was a pretty white area and pretty damn racist. But Chris didn’t care about any of that. He treated people the way they treated him. So we became friends. Then one day he called me up and asked me to help him make a costume for this band he was playing in. It was called Sister.
BLACKIE LAWLESS Sister was put together in 1977.
STEPHEN QUADROS I saw Sister one time at the Starwood and I think it was Blackie, he actually set himself on fire and it kind of went a little haywire. I was like, “What’s he doing?” It looked like he actually burned himself a little bit. And the music was okay. It wasn’t great or anything. But when he put W.A.S.P. together, W.A.S.P. was light-years better than Sister. They were better musicians, they had better songs, and they had a better show.
CHRIS HOLMES When Blackie talked to me about joining W.A.S.P., I didn’t even wanna join the band. But I asked him, “How long until it gets a deal?” He said, “Guaranteed it’ll be in a year.” So I came in and we did our first show. We had Don Costa and Tony Richards from Dante Fox.
GINA ZAMPARELLI Don Costa did one show with W.A.S.P. And he was grating the flesh off his knuckles with a cheese grater. I have this memory of standing there going, “Oh my god. He’s not doing that!” It was sickening.
CHRIS HOLMES He was playing his bass with a pickaxe, all out of tune. I came into rehearsal the next time and I went, “Don, you’re probably one of the best bass players I’ve ever played with. But if you ever play out of tune onstage with me again I’m gonna chew your cock off and spit it in your face in front of everybody!”
The funny thing is, Don quit that day anyway because he had gotten a gig with Ozzy. Blackie was playing guitar at the time and he didn’t wanna disband us so he said, “I’ll play bass.” And that’s how Blackie became the Geezer Butler of bass that he is.
BRIAN SLAGEL The first time W.A.S.P. ever played at the Troubadour it was insane. The place was packed. They went up and they were unbelievable. They had this huge show. They had fire. They had girls tied to this gigantic cross. At that point nobody … Mötley was doing some theatrical stuff, but nobody had done anything like this. It was crazy. The music was really heavy and it was really amazing. We couldn’t believe this band had come out of nowhere and had this massive production.
KATHERINE TURMAN (journalist; co-author, Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal) I saw W.A.S.P. at the Troubadour and I was standing right up front. As a sixteen-year-old girl who was somewhat sheltered, I was just like, shocked. I mean, I thought it was awesome as well …
TRACII GUNS I thought Mötley Crüe were the greatest thing in the world until I saw W.A.S.P. When I saw W.A.S.P., I was like, “Ah, now this is how you do it!”
MIKE VARNEY Nobody ever came up in the clubs and did stuff like that. This was like a major arena show being done for, you know, four hundred people or something. That’s why the lore of W.A.S.P. grew so fast.
GINA ZAMPARELLI It sounds funny to say now but you felt like you didn’t know if you would live or die. It’s like you were going into something treacherous. Meat would be flying everywhere, the stage would be on fire … You didn’t know what was going to happen.
JAIME ST. JAMES (SINGER, BLACK ’N BLUE) I was at one of the early shows at the Troubadour. They had the W.A.S.P. sign behind them and when they lit that thing on fire … I was sitting up in the balcony and I could feel the heat roll across the ceiling and right down on me.
KEVIN ESTRADA (PHOTOGRAPHER) I remember the skin on my face was just boiling. It felt like it was going to peel off because that place was so damn hot.
CHRIS HOLMES That was kind of my idea, to play by firelight, you know? We just took the regulators off a barbecue grill, made a pipe around the sign, and hooked it up to a propane tank.
AL BANE Imagine a six-foot-by-three-foot frame, like a picture frame. We drilled holes in the plywood and fashioned up a big rectangle that the gas would go through. I built it at [NASA] Jet Propulsion Laboratory, because I was working in the plumbing shop at that time. I stole the pipe from JPL, drilled it, bolted it together, and took it home. We put that thing in the Troubadour and fucking burned the ceiling, dude.
CHRIS HOLMES There’s butane and propane—two kinds of fuel. And one’s heavier and one’s lighter, so one goes up and one goes down, right? I don’t know which one does which. But all I know is you’ve gotta get the right mixture so it doesn’t go up into the ceiling. But one time it caught some of the cables on fire that went up to the monitors.
AL BANE All of a sudden the room’s at 110 degrees. Twenty linear feet of exposed flame. Whoosh!
CHRIS HOLMES But we always had fire extinguishers there. We’re not idiots.
AL BANE With W.A.S.P., they had a friend named Curt who came from a wealthy family. His dad was, like, a heart surgeon. So he had this bitchin’ six-car garage in La Cañada and all the tools you could ever want. Me and Chris and Blackie would go hang over there and work on stuff. We started making the fire sign and the torture rack and the raw meat box, all this stuff.
BLACKIE LAWLESS The whole germination came from The Road Warrior. Nobody ever picked up on that. We were astonished. We never got busted.
CHRIS HOLMES I didn’t like the little glittery, glam clothes. I was not gonna wear that crap. I was gonna wear leather Road Warrior–type stuff.
AL BANE We literally went into Curt’s garage and grabbed his mom’s garden tools and made things like spiked bracelets out of little three-claw planter tools. Chris put it on his arm and there’s an armband from hell. Okay, that works. Let’s keep going. What’s next?
CHRIS HOLMES I remember one time I found these really big shark hooks in the garage. And I thought, Man, these would be cool onstage … So I had this shark tooth on my arm and this chick reached up from the audience and grabbed me and it hooked her. She couldn’t get her hand off of it. I remember one of the roadies came up and pulled her off and ripped a big hunk of meat out of her hand.
BLACKIE LAWLESS Not many bands, at the time, were wearing huge nails coming out of their shoulders and stuff like that. Look at the saw blade thing. It was totally unique.
JAIME ST. JAMES Blackie would wear, like, real thin women’s nylons with some kind of codpiece thing with a saw blade crotch. I remember it was pretty insane because his balls were hanging out the sides of the fuckin’ thing!
AL BANE Blackie’s first codpiece was actually a twelve- or eighteen-inch blade from a table saw. Then we said, “Okay, we gotta mount this thing.” So we welded washers onto the side of it and cut the profile to fit the cup from a jockstrap. It would go underneath his legs and come up and then we riveted it onto the cup. All this stuff, the raw meat box, the fire sign, the torture rack, we were just making it ourselves.
BLACKIE LAWLESS With all the props and everything, when we came out, we looked like a million bucks. We looked like we had huge money behind us. But we were broke—less than broke!
CHRIS HOLMES The idea for the torture rack came from The Road Warrior, too. Remember the guys tied to the front of Humungus’ car with the hoods on their heads? That’s exactly where that came from.
LAURA REINJOHN (L.A. scenester) One night I was out at a club with a friend, and my friend said, “Oh, there’s that guy that everybody is talking about. His name is Blackie Lawless.” And I turn around and this real tall, kind of weird-looking dude comes walking over. I wanted to kind of burst out in laughter. Because it was a weird scene. He said they were doing a show, and would I be interested in being a part of it? I was going to school for journalism and I was still living with my parents at the time.
Anyway, they had a girl they were working with at the time, her name was Pam. And she was doing this thing where they put her up on a cross. It was kind of like a pre-Manson show. Real shlocky, a lot of blood, a lot of gore. Inappropriate lyrics. One thing led to another and I became that girl on the cross.
CHRIS WEBER (guitarist, Hollywood Rose) Laura, they used to tie her up and throw meat at her. Raw meat.
CHRIS HOLMES We had an abundance of women that wanted to do it. They were excited to be onstage naked, you know?
LAURA REINJOHN I was topless, and I had this custom-made leather thing that covered the bottom half of me. It was very misogynistic. Blackie would pretend to slit my throat, and we had this contraption that was rigged up so that I blew through a tube that had these blood packets. I’d chew on the blood packets and the blood would run down my throat and ahhh!
CHRIS HOLMES Have you ever smoked pot, dope, whatever? Okay. If you take a water pipe and blow in the bowl, water comes out the mouthpiece, right? Same concept. People like that kind of shit. It’s male dominating. Macho-ism or whatever. Plus, the audience sees a naked chick with tits.
BLACKIE LAWLESS To understand us in the beginning, it may sound kind of silly to you now, but I thought what we were doing was social comment. I never cared about shock rock for the sake of shock rock. I thought it was boring, to be honest.
LAURA REINJOHN It was so bizarre and so, like, What the fuck? And the music was really, really bad. There was no message. It was just to be as over-the-top as possible. It was not a very glamorous gig by any means.
AL BANE That whole era, the bands that were succeeding were the bands that were pushing the limit on anything they could do. And it was because you had to draw a crowd. And at that point there were lots of crowds, right? But you had to draw them in. You had to have a reason to go. And now you’ve got this crazy fucking band that, you know, is wearing assless chaps and the fucking guy spits blood and he’s torturing a chick and there’s pyro and fire and smoke … They’re turning it into this spectacle and people had to go check it out. That’s the thing that people don’t do now. Nobody does anything. People are lazy.
BOB NALBANDIAN It was crazy, man. It was almost like the Wild West, just anything goes. It was before record companies and MTV got hold of all this stuff, and it was all underground and word of mouth. People just heard about this shit.
BRIAN SLAGEL It was a total DIY effort in the beginning, way before the labels got into it. And it was a great scene back then. Very independent-minded. I think the later versions of a lot of that stuff, the bands wanted to do it because they saw Mötley and Ratt become rock stars and they wanted to become rock stars. But for the early guys it was all about the music and the shows. Nobody there was thinking, I’m gonna do this and be rich and be a rock star. They were trying to do a show and make it something other than just guys in jeans and T-shirts. And Mötley and W.A.S.P., they were doing production. It was above what anybody else was doing on a theatrical level.
ALAN NIVEN The record companies wanted Duran Duran. They wanted new wave. Nobody took rock ’n’ roll seriously. They thought it was passé. So if you wanted to get further you had to be self-determining. You had to have some imagination. You had to have a little bit of wheel and deal. Because that was the only way that you were going to start building your following.
GINA ZAMPARELLI I remember Blackie saying to me one night, “Uh … I have to go because I have to go get some meat.” And I was like, “This is a weird world I live in…”
CHRIS HOLMES My mom came down to a show once. We played with Warrior, right? They played after us. And my mom sat there and she goes, “Chris, these guys sound a hundred times better than you guys.” Which they did! But I go, “Mom, there’s this one thing they don’t got. The energy. We got the energy!” You know, W.A.S.P., it was raw.
BRIAN SLAGEL They were really one of the first bands to really create a big buzz in the L.A. scene, where all of a sudden record company people were paying attention to them. We were all like, “Wow, that happened really fast.”
KEVIN ESTRADA I remember walking out of the Troubadour just, like, amazed. I went to school the next day—I was in tenth grade at the time—and I was telling my friend, “W.A.S.P. were awesome! They were incredible! They’re everything you heard about!” But then I said, “I don’t think they’re ever going to get out of L.A. They’re just too crazy. Too extreme.” But you know what? Two, three years later, they were playing arenas around the country.
MIKE VARNEY I made Blackie an offer to do the band’s first record on my label, Shrapnel. And Blackie said to me, “I’m gonna wait. I believe I can get a major label deal.” Then he goes, “One day I’m gonna walk up to the Capitol Records building, my feet on the cement, look in the twelfth-story window in the A&R department, and I’m gonna say, ‘I’m Blackie Lawless. My time has come.’” Like he was King Kong or something. Which I thought was really funny. Because he ended up being on Capitol Records.