Blackie headlines another shit list, 7/22/05

 

BLACKIE LAWLESS HEADLINES ANOTHER SHIT LIST!

Updated with a Promoter who was put thru HELL!

7/25/05

Attn: Blackie Lawless,

Some of us here at Metal Sludge admittedly are fans of your band. We are also fans of Warrant, Dokken, Slaughter and even Sebastian Bach. Well, maybe not Slaughter’s music – but they are all mostly good guys.

Either way, we are just trying to communicate with other Metal heads and share our opinion. That’s what we do. Our current opinion is that you’ve short changed some fans, some hard working promoters, and club owners.

We think this sucks huge horse balls. So, we felt compelled to expose you for being a jack ass. And we have, and we will again. The behavior detailed in yet another e-mail (see below ) gives the whole touring industry a bad name.

Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 17:10:00 -0500
From: jaymz larson
To: ‘Metal Sludge’ <metalsludge@metalsludge.tv>
Subject: W.A.S.P.

I just read the article Dave Herrera wrote and I had to comment on my W.A.S.P. experience. I promoted the show that was supposed to happen on July 6th in Andover, MN. (Outside of Minneapolis) Here’s the story:

I booked the show from Chuck Bernal from Artists Worldwide. Chuck has always treated me very fairly and I enjoy working with him. Out of this whole mess, I can’t say anything bad about him. We made sure the ceiling was high enough to fit Blackie’s stand and figured there to be no problems. I called Danny, W.A.S.P. tour manager, over 10 times just to be sure the venue would work and we would have no issues. All he was concerned with was the ceiling for the stand..We advanced, ALL GOOD.

The day of the show comes and we are selling tickets and the phone is ringing off the hook. For a promoter, this is obviously a great thing! The band shows up at the venue and immediately starts complaining that the PA is not good enough and will not work. The sound man said he could arrive with a bigger and better PA, so the show can go on. Danny then starts looking at the ceiling and realizes the mic stand won’t work, even though we sent him the dimensions and talked about it over 10 times. It was very obvious to me that someone in the band did not want to play this particular show.

Danny decides this gig will not happen and W.A.S.P. is leaving. His final reason for not playing was that the fire exits were not close enough to the stage. This never came up in our conversations and should not even be an issue. This particular venue has more fire exits even needed by state law! But that’s it, no show..The bus pulls out of the parking lot and is not coming back.

The band left and I thought from our conversation that they would try and do a make up show at a different venue and honor my deposit money. I was wrong. They kept every penny of the money and told me the only way they would play another show is if I send them more money..So, I’m out 100% of my deposit money because someone in that band didn’t want to play that night. They even kept the money that was supposed to go to the other 3 bands! They got 75% of their guarantee, and left. This meant I still had to pay the other 3 bands 100% of their guarantee!!!!!? NOT GOOD.

The rest of the bands (Pearcy, Metal Church, LA Guns) loaded in their gear and put on a great show! We offered the fans a 100% refund or $5 off your per-sold ticket, and also took $5 off the gate price if people still wanted to see the other bands. The three bands did a great job and saved the day. None of them had a problem with the PA or any other part of the venue. Why would they? This place books national acts on a monthly basis.

I was warned by 4 other promoters not to do this show. I always heard bad things about W.A.S.P. and that’s why I kept in communication with Danny to
make sure we would not get cancelled. I did my best but when you are dealing with that group it doesn’t matter.

To any promoter that has to deal with this band, GOOD LUCK. You will defiantly need it. The biggest question I have is why does Blackie treat
people like this? It makes no sense. – He’s the definition of Bad Business -.

Jaymz Larson

Larson Entertainment

Cedar Rapids, IA

Blackie, would you care to address any of the current controversy that surrounds you yet again while on tour with W.A.S.P.?

P.S. Is there any truth to the matter that the meat you’re tossing to the fans is really just leftovers from Jeffrey Dahmers apartment?

Metal Sludge
S.L.U.D.G.E. Machine

---

7/22/05

Hey Blackie,

Glad to see Metal Sludge and our rabid fans are not the only ones who think you’re a fucking major jackoff.

Here’s something published yesterday, July 21, at Denver Westword about Blackie and the current W.A.S.P tour. This article speaks volumes about what a dick you are, Mr. Lawless. Check it out:

The Beatdown
After more than two decades, Blackie is still lawless.
By Dave Herrera

Published: Thursday, July 21, 2005

Back in 1983, Blackie Lawless claimed to be an animal who fucked like a beast. But today, it seems that the W.A.S.P. frontman is really just an asshole who fucks people over.

In one night, this relic from the Revlon era managed to enrage any enthusiasts he might have had left — giving two local acts a Danzig-style shaft, leaving fans standing in the rain for over an hour, and threatening to shoot a soundman who wasn’t even getting paid.

"Admittedly, I was not 100 percent prepared for him," says Todd Divel, who ran sound for Lawless and company at the Oriental Theatre on July 4. But nothing could have prepared Divel for the browbeating he suffered at the hands of this delusional megalomaniac — except maybe the section on Lawless in David Konow’s exhaustive tome Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal. According to Konow, who conducted extensive interviews with Lawless’s former bandmates Gary Holland, Randy Piper and Chris Holmes, the Ballcrusher had lined his shelves with books on how to intimidate people.

While the Oriental’s staging crew unloaded and assembled a mammoth microphone stand — a junkyard contraption that reportedly weighs in excess of a thousand pounds and looks like a poor man’s knockoff of the stand HR Geiger designed for Jonathan Davis — the Blackster, by way of his road manager, informed Divel that he wanted all of the local acts cut from the bill. When Divel, himself a musician who plays in the Monkey Butlers and Three Miles West, balked at the demand to scratch sets by Moore and Havok — the latter of which had fronted part of the dough to make the show happen in the first place — Lawless and crew passive-aggressively took matters into their own hands.

"So I realized that they’re kind of pacing themselves slowly," Divel recounts, "because they wanted to push their time to as close to doors as possible, so that when it comes down to it we say, ‘Well, we’ve gotta cut the local acts because we’ve gone too long.’"

The codpiece-clad character, whose ego is as big as his mike stand, has used this tactic for years. In 1997, when W.A.S.P. toured with Motörhead, Lawless "often delayed sound checks until right before the doors of the venue opened, leaving the band with no time to prepare," Konow writes. On that same tour, while Lemmy and company were on stage, Lawless threw all of Motörhead’s personal effects out of the shared dressing room and into the hallway — which prompted the metal god to later deck him. At a tour stop in Boston nearly a decade earlier, Lawless made Metallica change "outside in a garden shed in the dead of winter," reports Konow. "When Lars Ulrich came backstage to borrow one of his heaters (there were several lying around), Lawless ordered him out of his dressing room."

Metallica? Don’t tell Blackie, but I’m pretty sure the shoe’s on the other foot these days. Who the hell does this guy think he is, Gene Simmons? In fact, in early interviews, Lawless — a native New Yorker who replaced Johnny Thunders in the New York Dolls — said he’d taken his cues directly from the Kiss bassist when he formed Sister, a proto shock-rock act that preceded W.A.S.P. But even Simmons, who’s clearly had few self-esteem issues over the years, found Lawless’s egomaniacal demeanor absurd. In 1985, when W.A.S.P. opened for Kiss, "their stage show featured giant replicas of the band’s heads that floated above the stage," Konow notes. "Simmons looked at Lawless’s head and remarked, ‘Yep. That’s about the size of it.’"

Same clown, different circus this month in Denver. At the Oriental, Lawless and his crew put Divel through the ringer. At one point, when the soundman was slow to comply with Lawless’s inexplicable demand for a forty-millisecond delay in his monitor, the frontman lashed out. "Blackie takes a step back and looks at my monitor guy, and he goes, ‘Can you run front of house?’" Divel recalls. "And the monitor guy says, ‘No.’ And Blackie goes, ‘Can you fucking learn?’ And the monitor guy goes, ‘Well, um, no. I’m kind of busy at the moment.’ Blackie then starts yelling at his tour manager. He’s like, ‘This is bullshit. I’m going to put a fucking bullet in that guy’s head.’"

But Divel didn’t need to worry, because a little later, when Lawless noticed some fans had taken shelter from the driving rain in the venue’s lobby, he had a half-dozen security guards and MOD Productions’ Cory Morrison escort him to his dressing room. "Apparently he said, ‘Fuck. You told me there wasn’t going to be this many people here. I don’t want people to see me,’" Divel reports. "He just completely freaked out. The guy has no basis in reality."

Neither do the fans who’ve continued to follow him since his L.A.-based outfit caused a minor firestorm in the mid-’80s by issuing "Animal (F*ck Like a Beast)" — Lawless’s one claim to fame in a career that’s otherwise a footnote in the annals of metal — which became a focal point in the futile witch hunt led by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center. Because after performing for just 46 minutes at a deafening 118 db (excessive for a venue that size, Divel says), Blackie and his boys headed for their bus, and never engaged their fans at all.

Shockingly, Lawless’s manager didn’t respond to my requests for an interview. After all, he’s got to be good at damage control by now, right?

And the night’s damage wasn’t done. Due to the lackluster turnout for the W.A.S.P. show (which also featured erstwhile Ratt frontman Stephen Pearcy, LA Guns and Metal Church) and the recently canceled Jam Against MS benefit featuring Hal Ketchum and Montel Williams — which pre-sold only 83 tickets out of a possible 1,600 — MOD president Michael O’Donnell and partner Morrison were forced to dissolve their company. Morrison says the pair had poured their heart and soul — not to mention $150,000 — into preparing for the W.A.S.P. show over the past six months, renovating a theater that had tumbleweeds in the aisles when they took it over.

But the combined losses from the two shows was just too great to absorb. Now a new company, 44th Avenue Productions, led by Scott LaBarbera, has taken over operations at the Oriental. O’Donnell and Morrison will both continue to work at the theater, and while they’re surprisingly upbeat about the changes there, neither is willing to bury the hatchet — unless it’s in Lawless’s skull.

"Think about it, Blackie," O’Donnell wrote in an open letter to MetalSludge.com. "Do you really think your fucking mike stand will fit into a shitty bar? Because that’s where YOU are going to be. It’s not 1985 anymore."

I’m sure that will come as news to Lawless.

(The original article appears here.)

P.S. Go fuck yourself, you decrepit fat slob!

Metal Sludge
Sludge Like a Beast