Blackie Lawless asked Bruce Dickinson how long a memoir takes. He was told six months. Six years later, the W.A.S.P. frontman reckons he is about halfway through.
He gave the update to Scott Penfold of “Loaded Radio“, discussing the book he is writing under the working title “Tales From The Square Mile“.
“When I first started writing, I asked [Iron Maiden singer] Bruce Dickinson, I said, ‘How long did it take you to do your book [‘What Does This Button Do?‘]?’ He says, ‘About six months.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Well, it’ll take six months.’ Well, six years later [it’s still not done],” Lawless said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
On when it might appear: “Well, I keep telling people a year. I’m at a point now where I’ve done most of the research. So, I’m about halfway finished. So, I mean, we’re getting ready to do this tour, so there won’t be a whole lot going on there. But I’m hoping, and I got my fingers crossed, I’m hoping next year sometime.”
The delay comes down to a change in what the book is.
“When I first got into it, I thought it was my singular story,” Lawless explained. “And that seemed reasonable enough, because it’s about my own story. But as I started to get into it, I started to realize that it is not just my story. It is about the town itself. And the more I started to understand that, the more everything started to change, as far as the book.
The title refers to a specific patch of Hollywood. Speaking to Ultimate Classic Rock in April, Lawless set out what he means by it.
“What it’s about is that square mile that I was living in in Hollywood at the time, and the influences that the town itself would have on not just me, but the music industry overall, and we are all tied to it, whether we know it or not. Because the way the movie studio systems were set up in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s had a direct influence on what the record companies would be later. So all this research, like I said, that went into to uncovering a lot of what I’ve been doing has just taken an enormous amount of time. But the little nuggets that I’ve discovered that I think people will find interesting for me were fascinating when I would uncover them. And there’s a lot of goofy coincidences that have happened in it too, the things that have been uncovered. So, like I said, I think it’s gonna be an interesting read when people see it. It’s not your gonna be your typical rock and roll book by any stretch,” he said at the time.
He also described the pace of the work: “I’m probably halfway done now, but the amount of research that it took to get a lot of these stories correct is really time consuming. And I find that there will be times where it’ll take me six, seven hours to write two paragraphs because of the amount of research that’s going on. Because when I first started this, like probably everybody else, I would’ve thought it would’ve been my singular story. And that seemed reasonable at the time. But the more I got into it, the more I realized it was not just my story.”
Lawless offered one example of what the research turned up: “Blackie Lawless is a combination of Zorro and Dracula. Those were my two childhood heroes growing up. Well, the first year that I was here, I slept on people’s floors. And the next year and a half, 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. Well, come to find out when I’m doing research on this book, that [Hungarian–American actor] Bela Lugosi had lived, the best I can figure, he was about 75 feet away from where I was when I was in that closet. Had I known that, I’d have been down there putting flowers on his doorstep every day. But I didn’t know that at the time. But there’s coincidence after coincidence after coincidence that people are gonna look at in this book, they’re gonna read it, and they’re gonna think, ‘There’s no way that this can be true.’ It is true. Every word of it is true. And like I said, the deeper I got into it, the more I started to realize it is not just my singular story, it’s about the town itself.”
Lawless believes the pool of first-hand witnesses to that period has narrowed to a pair.
“There’s only two guys left, if you think about it, that were there in the beginning, that saw the ’70s and, obviously, the ’80s,” he continued. “But there’s only two guys — myself and Rudy Sarzo [former Ozzy Osbourne and current Quiet Riot bassist]. Now, Rudy wrote a book [‘Off The Rails‘] a while back where he went into detail about what happened when he was with Ozzy and all that, and what happened when [late Ozzy guitarist] Randy [Rhoads] died and all that. I had lunch, or dinner, with Rudy about six, seven months ago, and I just wanted to pick his brain about what was going on with this. But I told him the approach that I was taking with this, and it was a very, very different type of approach to anything anybody had done before, and he was fully supportive of it. But that’s really what it’s about.”
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. Lawless has said the staging will be built to make those album covers appear onstage.
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.
