BLACKIE LAWLESS On WASP's 40th-Anniversary Tour: 'We Try To Give People The Best Bang For The Buck'

During an appearance on the latest episode of “Talk Is Jericho”the podcast hosted by wrestling superstar and FOZZY front man Chris Jericho, WASP's Blackie Lawless was asked if he was surprised by the fan response to the band's first couple of US tours in 10 years, starting with the fall 2022 trek and continuing with the ongoing 40th-anniversary tour. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “We didn't know what to expect, but we found over the years, if you invest in what you do, hopefully you'll get return on it. And what I mean by that is you make the best records you can make, but also when it comes time to do the tour, this is not a cheap show that we do out here. It's expensive to start up weekly running costs, you don't wanna know about it. I mean, it's not cheap. I understand that in a lot of situations, a lot of artists aren't able to do that, but this is not a situation where we do fly dates. It's too expensive of a production. And we hope that the fans recognize that when they see what we do, because we literally take a Broadway stage with us have two different — well, three, if you wanna get technical — but we have two primary set changes you will see between the first half of the show and the second half of the show. And it's just like seeing any other Broadway production, if you would go to New York or something like that. So to set that stuff up on a daily basis, you've gotta have a lot of personnel, you've gotta spend the money to start with, so it's detailed, to say the least. But that's the way we used to do it, and to try to give people the best bang for the buck, I still think that's the best way to do it.”

He added: “Hey, nobody likes boring. Nobody likes normal. Let's do something out of the ordinary. Let's dare to stick our heads up above the crowd and say, 'Look at me.' We've made a living doing it.”

Asked if that was his mindset from day one back in 1984 when he first started writing the WASP songs, Blackie said: “Actually, no. Not at all. I tell you the truth, you're talking about a band now that never had any intention of ever playing live. Because in LA, we knew in those days, with the major labels, you didn't get record deals by playing live; you got record deals by making a great demo tape. So what we did is we recorded three different versions of what would eventually become our first record. And the last version that we did, we sent 'em out to the majors. Six weeks went by and we didn't hear anything. And we had lived in LA long enough to know that at the six-week mark, if you hadn't heard anything, you weren't going to hear anything. So, we talked among ourselves and we thought, 'You know what? We think these songs are okay. Why don't we take 'em out and play 'em live and see what kind of reaction we get?' Then we started asking ourselves, 'Well, what do you wanna do? You wanna stand there and look at your shoe tops and get arrested for loitering?' We had a very dark sense of humor. We were going out to flat-out entertain ourselves, and we would think up ideas and just start giggling. It's, like, 'Okay, let's do this.' But you quickly discover, there's a line between something that's outrageous and something that's ridiculous. And that line sometimes gets blurred.”

Blackie continued: “When I came up with the idea of ​​the saw blades, one of the guys that worked for us in the crew, his dad had a metal shop, but it was also a woodworking shop — a huge, huge complex. And we would go in there, and he gave us the run of the place. And I came from a construction background, so I knew how to build stuff the early props there. And one day somebody had changed one of the saw blades. There was a table saw that had a 12-inch saw blade on it expediency, he just put it in the window so he could get the new blade in place. And I'm looking at it in the windowsill and I just started laughing. And the crew asked me, 'What's so funny?' I said, 'I just had the most insane idea.' I said, 'This is either gonna be the greatest thing ever, or I'm gonna get laughed out of town.' So that's where that line, where you don't always know… We look back at it now and say, 'Well, why didn't you recognize that from the beginning?' Because sometimes you don't know until you test it on people, and we did that with all those early props. We didn't know what was gonna work and what didn't, and fortunately for us, most of it worked.”

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of WASP's classic debut album, the band 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 track is coming from ARMORED SAINT.

WASP 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 Blairwhose tenures in the band are 29 and 26 years respectively, WASP 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.

WASP is again offering fans VIP tickets that give fans a chance to meet WASP front man Blackie Lawlessget a personal photo with Blackieautographs 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 WASP's 40th-anniversary tour, the band's previously announced 2023 US tour was cancelled.

WASP's massive European leg of the 40th-anniversary world tour wrapped on May 18, 2023 in Sofia, Bulgaria at the Universidad Sports Hall.

WASP wrapped up his first US 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 US tour, which kicked off in late October 2022. WASP'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.

WASP'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.

WASP's most recent studio album of all-new original material was 2015's “Golgotha”.