Blackie Lawless has given an update on the book he has been writing since 2020, and set expectations for anyone anticipating a standard rock memoir. Speaking to “IndiePower TV“, the W.A.S.P. frontman said “Tales From The Square Mile” is roughly half-finished, that he is aiming for a release next year, and that the project grew far beyond his own life story.
The title refers to the patch of Hollywood Lawless occupied when he first arrived in California nearly fifty years ago.
“Well, the first year [after I moved to California], I slept on people’s floors. I did the floor tour. And then I moved into my deluxe accommodations, which was a closet that was three feet by 12 feet, and I was in there for a year and a half. And that was literally right across the street from the Hollywood Palladium, which is where [W.A.S.P.] played the last time [December 2024] we were [in Los Angeles]. Now, that’s about 50 feet away from where I was sleeping in that closet,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
He also described discovering, long afterwards, how close he had been living to one of his boyhood idols.
“Blackie Lawless is a combination of Zorro [the fictional mask-wearing, sword-fighting champion of the oppressed in Spanish California in the early 19th century] and [Hungarian–American actor] Bela Lugosi,” he added. “Those are my childhood heroes growing up. But what I did not realize, when Bela Lugosi died, the best I can figure, the apartment building he was in was about 75 feet away from where I was living in that closet. Now, had I known that at the time, I would’ve been over there putting flowers on his doorstep every day. But I didn’t.”
Lugosi died in Los Angeles in August 1956, aged 73.
Lawless said he went in with a badly wrong estimate, having asked people who had done it before.
He explained: “I talked to [Iron Maiden‘s] Bruce Dickinson and some other people that wrote books, and I said, ‘Well, how long did it take you to do it?’ And they said, ‘Oh, six months.’ And so I thought, ‘Okay, well, that’s probably what it’ll take.’ Well, six years later, I’m still working on it. And the reason that I’m still working on it is because when I first started, I thought it was my singular story, and that seemed reasonable at the time. But the more I started working on it, the more I realized, no, it’s not my singular story. It’s equally about the town itself. And the research that I had to do on the town, because the town, it plows its history over. It’s not like Des Moines, Iowa, or someplace like that, where something really important happens, they put up a street marker for it. You know, such and such happened here on such and such a day. Hollywood doesn’t do that. It just plows over its own history. Every one of the recording studios, every one of the management offices that we had, had all been something before that was industry-related. And to give you an example, when I had the recording studio on Santa Monica and Vine, right next to me, literally, right there was an alleyway that separated us, but Gold Star recording studios had been there. And, unfortunately, it’s a donut shop now, the last I saw. All those great records came out of there. But when we were coming up, and we were first getting started, there was a laundromat that’s diagonally across that intersection there. We used to rehearse in that laundromat after nine o’clock at night. We would set up the equipment in between the washing machines, and that’s where we would rehearse. Fast forward nine years later, and I’m at the light waiting for it to change, and I look over and that laundromat is still there. And I’m thinking, ‘This is the longest 75 feet I ever walked in my life,’ to get from the laundromat to being the proprietor of this recording studio. How does this happen? So you’re living in a better place. You’re driving a better car. You’re eating better food, all that stuff, and you think that success is gonna change everything.”
Gold Star stood at 6252 Santa Monica Boulevard, at the corner of Vine, from 1950 until a fire closed it in 1984. Phil Spector built his wall of sound there, the Beach Boys cut “Good Vibrations” in the room, and Iron Butterfly‘s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and the Ramones‘ End Of The Century were recorded there too. The building was demolished and a small shopping plaza put up in its place.
Lawless said the geography has followed him.
“I was naive enough to believe that I was gonna end up in Valhalla, but as much as everything changed, nothing changed. I’m literally three blocks away from where I used to live. Like I said, the last show I just played [in Los Angeles] was right across the street from where I used to live. So I’m still working in that square mile, like it or not, that I’m still going back to these places, and I would do that for 20 years. And what I discovered about the town is, like I said, when you see the book, it’s not your typical sex, drugs and rock and roll. I mean, there’s a period of that, but by the time I moved to California, I had a lot of that… I wouldn’t say it was out of my system, but I was ready to go to work. And my story is pretty different than whatever you’ve been used to reading,” he said.
W.A.S.P. open the “1984 To Headless” North American run on September 10 at The Magnolia in El Cajon, California, playing The Wiltern in Los Angeles the following night and finishing October 31 in Anaheim.
The set draws on the band’s first four albums, the 1984 self-titled debut, The Last Command in 1985, Inside The Electric Circus in 1987 and The Headless Children in 1989.
KK’s Priest are very special guests throughout. K.K. Downing put the scale of it at more than 40 shows: “Great news! KK’s Priest is going to be returning to the US and Canada this September and October 2026. With over 40 shows, this is going to be an epic metal and steel tour featuring lots of Priest classics.”
VIP packages include a meeting with Lawless, a photograph, autographs, a Q&A session and access to the band’s travelling museum, which has new pieces added since the last American run. They are sold through waspnation.myshopify.com.
The tour reaches Europe and other territories in 2027.
