Blackie Lawless says he could not turn his back on his current band to reunite with Chris Holmes, ten days after backing his cancer appeal.
On August 1, Blackie Lawless asked W.A.S.P. fans to get behind Chris Holmes. Ten days later he was explaining why the two of them will never play together again.
The W.A.S.P. leader was asked by Scott Penfold of “Loaded Radio” whether a final show with his former guitarist was possible. His answer was short.
“Well, I would have to turn my back on the band that I have. And to do that… I’ve been with these guys for over 30 years, and this is the band that I know. And I just couldn’t do that,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
That sits alongside the message Lawless posted on the band’s social media at the start of the month, after Holmes’s wife Catherine launched a fundraiser for his cancer treatment.
He wrote at the time: “The entire W.A.S.P. family are devastated with the news that our Brother and originator, Chris Holmes is now in a serious fight. We ask that all of you, who have been moved and touched by the Band stand with us all, to support, as well as to honor him with whatever you can do, be it financial, or words of peace and encouragement. Let him know what he’s meant to you. W.A.S.P. Nation Support You All !!”
Holmes, 68, has lived in Cannes since 2014 and began chemotherapy in France this summer for prostate cancer, four years after being treated for throat and neck cancer. He cancelled a UK and Scandinavian tour that had been booked for May. The GoFundMe set up by his wife has a target of €50,000.
On the original split, Lawless put it down to where he wanted to take the music after 1989’s The Headless Children.
“Chris is a great performer. But he — let’s just put it this way, that he wasn’t able to do musically the things that I wanted to do later on,” he said. “And it really was reaching a point of saturation where… You hear the old expression, ‘Well, we split up because of musical differences.’ Well, it really was that. I mean, at the end of the day, if you look at it, that’s what it was. Because I wanted to go into an area to do things that, to try, especially… Well, once we did [1989’s] [The] Headless [Children], I’d gone as far as I could go. To ask him to do [1992’s] The Crimson Idol, to be Bob Kulick? No. And that’s not to put him down. It is what it is. So, like I said, me wanting to move on, to express myself in different ways, it really ended up being the quintessential musical differences.”
He rejected the idea that tension between them produced the early records, pointing instead to the loss of original drummer Tony Richards, and explained a decision most fans will have noticed without knowing the reason.
“No, because in the very beginning, there was a chemistry,” Lawless added. “And it was with all the members of the band. It wasn’t just him. It was all of us. And when we lost Tony [Richards, original W.A.S.P. drummer], we were seriously damaged, and we knew that. And we tried on the second album — well, second and third album — to push me forward. And if you notice, after that third album, we felt that it wasn’t working, and we needed to go in a new direction. From that point forward, you never saw any bandmember ever on the cover of an album again. And it was for that reason. So from that point forward… Like I said, it was no longer the band that we had started out to be, and we knew that, and we felt that. We could feel it amongst ourselves, and we made the conscious decision, like I said, once we hit Headless, we never looked back. We never put a bandmember on an album cover ever again.”
Holmes gives a different account of why the relationship ended and why he will not return. Speaking to Thomas S. Orwat, Jr. of the Rock Interview Series in May, he tied it to money.
“Listen, we’re on the road, and [then-W.A.S.P. drummer] Frankie Banali‘s not gonna tour unless he gets $1,850 [a week], okay? And I’m getting $500 a week, okay? I went to Blackie, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem right. I’m one of the guys, main guys that people come to see, and Banali‘s not. But he’s getting $1,850. I get five [hundred]? That’s almost four times as much.’ Blackie grabs me and puts his arm around me and he goes, ‘You’re gonna make more off your publishing. What are you worried about?’ When he knew he was taking my money. When he knew they already wrote me down as a session player. What kind of person is that? You think I’d ever wanna even sit in a room with that guy? No. No. No.”
Holmes has said he only discovered the situation around 2006 or 2007, when a lawyer examined the paperwork at Sanctuary Music on his behalf, and that he was listed as a session player on the records. Lawless publicly rejected the claim that his former guitarist was cheated out of royalties in February this year. The dispute has never been resolved in public.
Holmes also said the later years were unsatisfying for other reasons, describing the band’s use of samples from 1997’s Kill F**k Die onwards as something he found difficult to stomach on stage.
“So it’s not worth it; it’s not worth it to me. And plus — how can you say it? He’s a malignant narcissist, and I don’t wanna be around people like that anymore. There’s no money in the world that’s [gonna make wanna be around people like that]. I wanna be happy. I wanna be around people I enjoy being with, that make me smile, that cr**k jokes. I don’t need to be around people like that. Plus, from [1997’s] Kill F**k Die on, W.A.S.P. was nothing but a depression to play with live because they were sampling, and it’s not live to me. And it hurt me in my heart to be playing, knowing that I was faking it to p[eople] — or the band was faking it. I wasn’t. But knowing that it was faking it. I really hated myself doing that.”
Asked about regrets, Lawless reached for Frank Sinatra.
He said: “Well, you’re always gonna have regrets. You get to a point where you’ve done 40-plus years. That’s one of the questions you hear a lot, where someone says, and I always quote the old Frank Sinatra song ‘My Way‘, when he says, ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.’ That really is where it sits at the end of the day. Did you have more good than you had bad? So, like I said, looking back, you do what you need to do to try to make it work or to try to make the records work. The music is the most important thing, and at the end of the day, that’s really gonna determine whether the band lives or dies.”
Holmes joined W.A.S.P. in the early 1980s and stayed until 1990, playing on the first four studio albums and the first live release. He returned in 1996 and left again in 2001, and has not performed with the band since.
