W.A.S.P.'s "Album One Alive" 2024 US Tour, with special guests Armored Saint, is currently doing the rounds in North America.
In a new interview with The Aquarian Weekly, Blackie Lawless explains how the tour came together.
Says Blackie: "It first started to come about when we started doing meet-and-greets on the last tour. We had never done them before. We didn’t know what to do, so we started looking at what other bands were doing. It was basically an autograph and a picture and a handshake. We looked at that and thought that didn’t seem great. I wouldn’t want that if I was a fan. We were trying to figure out better ways of doing it to make it an enjoyable experience, something that people could take away for a lifetime.
"What I thought is, 'Let’s give them time.' Time is the most valuable thing that any of us have. When we would do the meet-and-greets, I’d go down the line and I’d ask every one of them, 'What’s on your mind? What do you think and what do you want to talk about?' It ended up being really, really good. First of all, it was a non-chaotic environment, because when you get half a dozen people on the street trying to come up to you, talking to you all at the same time, it’s chaos. In a controlled environment where everybody’s relaxed, it becomes really conversational, like what we’re doing right now. Everybody can really give themselves a chance to ask something that they’ve wanted to ask for a long time and get a genuine answer, and for them to understand that I’m getting as much out of it as they are. Because I’m doing little mini market surveys while I’m doing it, I’m picking their brains. Had I known what I know now about doing that, I would have done meet-and-greets a long time ago.
"That’s how the idea for the tour and the production started. When I first started listening to what they were saying, I’m hearing it from a perspective I’ve never heard it before. When somebody is telling you about how some lyric changed their life and tears are running down their face when they’re saying it, they’re not acting. That’s genuine.
"You have to remember, like most entertainers, I’ve lived in a bubble my whole career, and it’s not until you get in that environment – having an intimate moment with somebody where they’re really letting it all hang out, tell you something that you did that changed their life, saved their life – that became a common theme night after night after night. How can you hear those things and not be changed? It started giving me a whole new appreciation, because, again, I’m on the inside of the bubble. It started giving me a whole new appreciation of going back again.
"And it wasn’t just that – tight around the same time, maybe about a year before we did that last tour, I started working on a book. but having an idea to write about and flushing out the ideas are different things. To really, accurately describe an event, let’s say something that happened to me, like I got shot at twice; to accurately describe that I’ve got to really go back and start digging to put the pieces of the puzzle together. After so many years, you remember, but you have the surface memory, but you don’t have the deep, detailed memory. When you start digging those things up again, it’s like Peter Gabriel says, 'Digging in the dirt to find the places I got hurt.' It’s a lot like that. You start discovering things – a lot of it good, a lot of it not so good. It’s a real growth experience. It really made me start thinking about, 'Maybe it’s time to start looking backwards,' though that’s not to say we’re going to live there, right? Who says you can’t visit the past? I remember hearing John Lennon make a quote one time when the Beatles broke up and everybody was all freaked out; he says, 'Don’t worry about it. Those records will always be there. You can visit them whenever you like.' The simplicity of that statement was so great, and I thought, 'Ok, let’s do the same thing, why can’t we go back and visit from time to time?'
"It also connects to this tour. As part of the VIP package, we’re taking a little mini museum out with us. It’s four big road cases and they open up and they’re six feet high. When they’re all put together, they’re 16 feet long. Where we got the idea from was the racquetball court at Graceland, where all Elvis had his gold and platinum records and his outfits and all that, so we’re doing a little miniature version of that. It will have all our Gold and Platinum records. In front of the Gold and Platinum records are outfits, guitars, memorabilia that the fans have sent us, caricatures, models of us, photos, and posters that people have never seen. When I started going through the boxes of everything that I hadn’t seen for 20 and 30 years, it was like every box I opened was like Christmas morning. I kid you not; I would start giggling looking at stuff that I had forgotten about, a if it was wowing me like that, the fans are going to absolutely lose it when they see this stuff."
Read the full interview at The Aquarian Weekly.
W.A.S.P.'s tour landed at the Royal Oak Music Theatre in Royal Oak, Michigan on Sunday (November 10). Front-row video of the band's full set, courtesy of Big Talk, can be viewed below.
Setlist:
"I Wanna Be Somebody"
"L.O.V.E. Machine"
"The Flame"
"B.A.D."
"School Daze"
"Hellion"
"Sleeping (In The Fire)"
"On Your Knees"
"Tormentor"
"The Torture Never Stops"
Encore:
"Inside The Electric Circus" / "I Don't Need No Doctor" / "Scream Until You Like It"
"The Real Me" (The Who cover)
"Forever Free" / "The Headless Children"
"Wild Child"
"Blind In Texas"
Remaining dates for the tour are listed below. Tickets and VIP packages available here.
November
13 - Montreal, QC - MTELUS
14 - Quebec City, QC - Theatre Capitole
15 - Boston, MA - Orpheum Theatre
16 - New York, NY - Hammerstein Ballroom At Manhattan Center
17 - Philadelphia, PA - Franklin Music Hall
19 - Cleveland, OH - The Agora Theater
20 - Pittsburgh, PA - Stage AE
21 - Stroudsburg, PA - The Sherman Theater
22 - Silver Spring, MD - The Fillmore
23 - Charlotte, NC - The Fillmore
24 - Orlando, FL - The Plaza Live
26 - Nashville, TN - Ryman Auditorium
27 - Atlanta, GA - The Eastern
29 - Houston, TX - House Of Blues
30 - San Antonio, TX - Aztec Theatre
December
1 - Dallas, TX - The Factory in Deep Ellum
3 - Little Rock, AR - The Hall
4 - Wichita, KS - The Cotillion
6 - Albuquerque, NM - Revel
7 - Tempe, AZ - The Marquee Theatre
9 - Tucson, AZ - The Rialto Theatre
10 - San Diego, CA - House Of Blues
11 - Reno, NV - Grand Sierra Resort and Casino
12 - Las Vegas, NV - Brooklyn Bowl
13 - San Francisco, CA - The Warfield
14 - Los Angeles, CA - Hollywood Palladium
