W.A.S.P. hit Zagreb, played a short set and showed less than a pale shadow of their once-great selves

Location: Zagreb, Tvornica Kulture
Concert date: November 30, 2004
Attendance: 1,100
Ticket price: 5,000.00 SIT

This report carries a greater or lesser degree of perversity, but we’re talking about the phantom glam eighties shock metallers W.A.S.P., which means I’m already half forgiven! A W.A.S.P. gig, in one short and punchy sentence, can also mean: “Goodbye, sanity!”

It’s unbelievable what a person, in all the smallness and inevitable transience of their life, gets to witness on this planet (read: dust you were and to dust you shall return), especially if they get a close encounter with a band like W.A.S.P. Killer! There’s that word again. Killer, at night in dreams. Killer, at work. Killer, in the car. Killer, on the street. Killer, at Petrol. Killer, at the border, and killer in the real Harlem of Zagreb (a proper ghetto of grim looks, shards, grey concrete and tons of trash), where Tvornica happens to be.

We left Ljubljana with a whole sack of delay. That was a good sign, because half-jokingly we comforted ourselves that W.A.S.P. would be late too, so it all evened out. Before Bregana we stopped for one last smoke and coffee, while the word beer in “metal-speak” is a given anyway. When I think how, over the many stops at gas stations, my little Peugeot turned into a beer tanker and a dive bar that reeked dangerously of a high share of exhaled alcohol substances. Well, and of belched garlic too, yuck, ugh…

Anyway, a few drops of tequila, lemon slices and a pinch of salt put things back in their place, and at 20:30 we were milling around in front of Tvornica. And look at that! Tvornica was dark, it was pitch black outside too, and the bigger tavern, the Croatian clone of Kratochwill across Šubičeva, was teeming with leather-clad people. And people just like that, similar and different, kept pouring in at the scene of the crime.

10 p.m. Still no lights in Tvornica! Boštjan and I are freezing like dogs, and there’s no sign of the tour bus that would give us hope that W.A.S.P. are in Zagreb. We turn around and trudge back to the car for another sandwich. The gig’s going to be cancelled, some of us conceded pretty quickly. Half an hour later, a van with Zagreb plates very stealthily “sneaked” along the pedestrian sidewalk right up to Tvornica’s side door. The door with the “izlaz” (exit) sticker opened and Tvornica’s lights came on. The van pretty much pressed its sliding door against Tvornica’s side door (we’re talking about the entrance for people with press accreditation and other VIPs and creatures of this world). And then there was a shadow. A shadow? A shadow in the dark, and what can be darker than dark? Cave-black, right? Of course the blackest creation could only be him. Blackie Lawless, in the flesh, beard and all. And suddenly something hugely black, two meters tall, stirred in the van and finally clambered out into Tvornica. The lost champion Blackie Lawless, no doubt, and behind him the other three companions. So W.A.S.P. in the lineup: Blackie Lawless (vocals, rhythm guitar), Mike Duda (bass), Stret Howland (drums) and Darrell Roberts (lead, rhythm guitar), meaning the original “The Neon God” crew. We breathed a sigh of relief. Now the gig could actually happen.

At 11 p.m. we miraculously crossed the main entrance of Tvornica, where the security guard made no secret of his delighted enthusiasm and interest in my “leather jacket” and thoroughly patted me down to that end. No need to mention that I felt like some random chick walking by, grrrr… But the hall was already nicely full. And what lookers the Croatian girls are, brrr… just thinking about it. Definitely far tastier fetishists than the rosy-cheeked sub-Alpine plums back home. It was packed, smoky and warm inside. The stands were nicely filled and so was the floor. About 1200 heads, at least counting by algebraic methods, which we were taught represent “healthy human reason”. Being reasonable, being sensible, being calculating, living logically…be my guest.

Okay, moving on. At least the music in the hall was great, since W.A.S.P. were already pulling our legs good. Iron Maiden’s The Trooper was the first of the cult tracks to warm my frozen bones. At 11:30 something magical happened. The lights went out and….after some tedious canned intro, silhouettes appeared in the fog of black blackness. Blackie and W.A.S.P., no support act. Smeared around the eyes, dressed in a hockey jersey, tight leather pants. Where’s the teased hair? Well, he’s kept some volume after all these years. The man is like a mountain on stage. Right, W.A.S.P. were once the tallest band in the world in terms of average body height (the girls would add, conditionally: “…and in other departments too!”)

W.A.S.P., the shock-makeup metallers who, with their perverse arrogance, easily filled big concert halls across the USA and Europe in the eighties, just like the fathers of “modern metal” Iron Maiden, only with a far bolder and more aggressive tactic. Fitted with buzzsaws around the crotch, draped in the most bizarre leather and smeared with real, genuine animal blood around their mouths. Teased hair, lacquered nails, shocking from head to toe, you wouldn’t believe it. Terrorizing the US constitutional order, they set off to make money. And with that controversy they succeeded completely. W.A.S.P. were never famed as any special musical scholars. And matching the fame of the pillars of heavy metal of the time, like Iron Maiden or Judas Priest, was utopian in that respect. To get on a par with them, W.A.S.P. came up with another principle. Provocative image and provocative lyrics. These two specialties of the band fit perfectly with their own musical style. Open, cranked-up riffing. No complicating it, with guitar solos permitted only on condition that they in no way lower any of the audacity and arrogance spewed out by a foursome sworn to teasing the public with their sexual perversions in 1000 and one ways. As Blackie says: “This music makes you wanna fuck!” and believe me, this Blackie brainwave is undoubtedly not far from the truth.

And live this time it was the same, minus the “dolling up”. Apparently Blackie has outgrown that. The band opened the show with a medley of On Your Kness/Inside Electric Circus/Hate To Love You. At the start of the tour they opened the medley not with On Your Knees but with Helldorado. After that W.A.S.P. slowly and slyly began raising the atmosphere. First with the classic L.O.V.E. Machine, where the crowd fully woke up, and by Wild Child the whole hall (stands too) was nicely waving their arms in the air and wildly joining in on the chorus. W.A.S.P. slowly “chained” the masses firmly to themselves. In the pause after Wild Child, the crowd started yelling in unison: “Blackie, Blackie,…!, whereupon Blackie looks out at the audience from under his brow, as if to say, what are you doing, can’t you come up with anything smarter? He steps up to the mic and utters the magic Our Father: “Fuck…Like…A…Beast!!!” And people started bleating along after him: “Fuck like a beast,…!!!”, so that the hall shook properly, foundations and all. W.A.S.P. attacked with no brakes with Animal (Fuck Like A Beast). This is that special song in their history that the label wouldn’t let them put on the debut (“W.A.S.P.”, 1984), and you probably don’t need me to explain why, but today it has found its place on the Snapper Music digipack re-release (2003) as the opening song, which is what W.A.S.P. always wanted. Animal shook and shook, a real cannonball. Crazy, when you look around the hall, all hands were in the air. Blackie has incredible charisma, he’s a magnet, he carries some kind of fatal charm and needs no special effort to pull people over to his side. But when you look at him with different eyes, you actually feel sorry for him, what a wrecked, burnt-out and worn-down man he is.

Adrenaline was rising, people were getting all worked up… Heh, heh, heh, I won’t forget the scene of all scenes during the gig. Two “chicks”, each perched on her own guy’s shoulders, started making out with great zeal in the middle of the show. I rubbed my eyes, once, twice, three times. Are you really both women? Yes. In a whirl of voluptuousness, at some point they came crashing down like fallen angels from on high among the rest of the mortals on the floor. What happened next with them, I can’t tell you.

Next came one of the best songs from the latest record (“The Neon God pt.II – The Demise”, 2004), called Come Back To Black, where the band for the first time radiated a bit more seriousness on stage. Live, too, W.A.S.P. created that unique contrast of flashing drumming, torpedoing double bass pedal and a “bam!” of honed-edge riffing, filled out by Blackie’s unmistakable hoarse neighing. That adrenaline state that always comes “from below”, with no complex musical ornaments, solo detours or garnished transitions. A full-balls “bam!” that’s just plain sawing, “first-take” style.

The “epic” peak of the gig was The Headless Children, aaaaa fantastic! I was practically carried around the hall, the crowd went nuts, the devil’s chase was nearing its climax. Canned Hammond organ. Yes, those original Hammond lines that the legendary ex-Uriah Heep keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist, the brilliant Ken Hensley, contributed to the record “The Headless Children” (1989). Blackie was always obsessed with Uriah Heep (even as a “kid”), which W.A.S.P. once proved with a tribute to Uriah Heep and a cover of the Heep classic Easy Livin’, which they didn’t play live this time. W.A.S.P. also leaned on a “playback” during the gig for Blackie’s backing vocals. Okay, we’ll let it slide, because those backing vocals are so damn recognizable, specific and indispensable to the band’s sound, yet they consist only of Blackie’s singing. So, to avoid using “playback”, they’d first have to turn Blackie into five “Blackie clones”, who would then open their mouths in unison at every W.A.S.P. concert alongside the “fatherly” Blackie.

Next comes the romantic peak and, I can say, one of the most beautiful metal ballads, The Idol. Blackie, who had seemed enraged before and raged at the people that he’d “kick” everyone’s asses (“We came in here to kick your fuckin’ asses!!!”…was one of his comments), suddenly softened and became real from head to toe, far from that “impregnated puppet” Blackie he once played on stage. During The Idol Blackie stepped behind the monitors and his roadie slaved like a mule, carefully wiping with a towel the sweat streaming off the hero in rivulets and treating him to a few sips of water on the occasion. Meanwhile Darrell Roberts at the front of the stage “dusted off” the song’s very heartfelt solo. And his second solo, in the dramatic outro, burned even hotter. Blackie dedicated this song to his brother, who died in a car accident. The Idol live was one of the peaks of the concert. It brought an excellent contrast to the band’s performance and stage play. Well, so that everyone in the hall wouldn’t start crying, W.A.S.P. turned the “fade out” from The Idol into the intro of an arrogant cover of the legendary The Who called The Real Me, where I happily bawled the chorus again along with the band, like a lone boar. The regular set ended with a song people were particularly happy about. Another classic from the first record. I Wanna Be Somebody, where W.A.S.P. unleashed exceptional stage explosiveness and supersonic speed, with which they thoroughly whipped the audience to finish. Really?

Well, after the audience’s moaning and crying: “We want more,…!!!”… W.A.S.P. open the first encore with the excellent mid-tempo The Raging Storm, which was played truly superbly and ended perfectly. Another “Thank you and good night!”… followed, and then a return to the stage and a new “thank you”. I’m lying. On coming back out, instead of “thank you”, Blackie said: “You crazy motherfuckers! You never wanna go home, do you?” and they launched into the classic Blind In Texas, in which Blackie, who donned a Confederate flag for the occasion, tried hard to squeeze the audience dry, demanding maximum volume, shouting and general rioting from the crowd in the hall. And so it came to pass that the clock finally struck late enough and W.A.S.P. could finally go to sleep.

Finally go to sleep? Outrageous. The concert lasted just a good hour. An hour and 15 minutes, which stopped the Slovenian metalheads from doing what they usually do after a gig, repeating one after another in unison like old market ladies: “What a gig, killer, dude, what a gig, killer, dude,…” and instead they left the hall with their heads bowed this time. It’s common knowledge that W.A.S.P. concerts don’t last long. I don’t know the real reason, but I think Blackie, after all the wars he’s survived, is already worn, tired and exhausted, even though he’s barely a good 48. Which means lack of stamina is really getting to him.

W.A.S.P.’s concert policy just doesn’t sit well with us Europeans. It’s a method of intimidating the crowd, which suffers the whole time under the stress that a W.A.S.P. gig could fall through at any moment. Then “five minutes to midnight”, out of nowhere, miraculously, W.A.S.P. appear and play a good hour, which affects the crowd’s state of mind so they can then console themselves: “Madonna! Better just one hour than no concert at all!” And that’s not far from the truth. Quite a few W.A.S.P. gigs on earlier tours were cancelled because the boys were overloaded with intoxicating substances before the show, or the like, or they often just skipped a few songs from the already short setlist and cut the show short at will. So we got off lucky. But far from satisfied.

They left us half “worked up”, grrrrr…and I heard plenty of people moaning after the show (true as a nail), saying they’ll never go to see W.A.S.P. again in their lives. The hall was much fuller this time than a month earlier for Saxon, but the ticket was half as expensive again. Saxon played 24 songs in total, W.A.S.P. just 11 (the medley of three songs counts as one), and Saxon played 2 hours 20 minutes for three grand, W.A.S.P. half that for almost five grand. Where’s the logic here and all the other human principles friendly to reason, by Zeus and a shaved bee, by all the drums of Darkwood, and three hundred hairy perch!?!?!??

Not to even list the additional aggravating factors. It really did rain nastily all day, drizzling thick through the fog, which raised the level of ants-in-the-pants of customs officers and border cops, who, on crossing the border in both directions, were much more caustic and needling than usual with their tasteless and idiotic outbursts.

I can conclude that those of you who’d like to see W.A.S.P. live and never have, you’re missing absolutely nothing. At least the sound was very solid, the band galloped along compactly and convincingly, and that good hour was truly perversely fiery, though like most who survived W.A.S.P. live, I remain unsatisfied post-gig.

Setlist

Intro
1. Medley:
– On Your Knees
– Inside The Electric Circus
– Hate To Love Me
2. L.O.V.E. Machine
3. Wild Child
4. Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)
5. Come Back To Black
6. The Headless Children
7. The Idol
8. The Real Me
9. I Wanna Be Somebody
—first encore
10. The Raging Storm
—second encore
11. Blind In Texas