Location: Treviso / Italy / New Age Club
Concert date: October 21, 2006
Attendance: 600
Ticket price: 30.00€
“Why are you schlepping to Treviso when they’re coming to Maribor?” quite a few people asked me. The answer is dead simple, and the facts are unacceptable! Our home henhouse is still way too cramped, and the work culture will need many, many more years before Slovenian promoters reach the personal maturity for a professional approach, one that might someday grow into cooperation with media that take concrete steps toward raising the masses’ awareness of rock culture. The moves of certain Slovenian local roosters, who most likely suffer from FOS (read: full of themselves), with their double-dealing and hypocrisy over promises and actions, cast a bad light on the image of rock culture for an entire nation and country. No biggie! The West is right there! So let’s go!
One of the few “shock” metallers who raked in fabulous sums in the second half of the eighties and can still pull off a halfway decent tour of Europe, they came back to the New Age Club in Treviso just like two years ago. The only original member and leader of the gang, the ultimate and only legitimate boss of the band, Blackie Lawless, has been pretty thoroughly worn out after twenty years. So these days W.A.S.P. concerts are famous mostly for their record-short running time.
After the torturous “choo-choo, wait-wait” stretch, where we sat around for a full hour and 40 minutes past the announced time, the show kicked off at exactly 10:40 PM. In a rush of their own ecstasy, the Italians grew a few centimeters taller, rising up on tippy-toes and all stomping rapturously in unison to the opening track On Your Knees. They clearly didn’t quite get the command coming from the stage, but that didn’t matter anymore. W.A.S.P. came to Europe this year with a new lineup again, which has been the norm for a few years now. Still, the sight of Blackie was downright encouraging, since he’d shed a few pounds, so he could once again comfortably slide into his “spandex” and musketeer boots.
In the new lineup Blackie kept only bassist Mike Duda; the drums are now pounded by Mike Dupke, who used to drum for Eric Sardinas, but the most interesting addition to the revamped lineup is definitely the arrival of guitarist Doug Blair. The guy was a W.A.S.P. member in the era of the album “The Crimson Idol”, where he contributed his guitar.
The band sounded superbly well-oiled and dictated a hellish tempo over an hour and twenty minutes, one that had the Italians seeing stars. After the opening gallop the crowd didn’t calm down at all, because the next classic was already here, L.OV.E. Machine, followed by the devastating Wild Child.
After the first four songs Blackie took a few moments for a breather and announced the rest of the night like so (written on a sheet of paper during the show): “Tonight we’re gonna do some stuff that we’ve haven’t done for a twenty years!” Straight into The Widowmaker, and they poured oil on the fire especially by including the excellent punchy ballad-like creation from the debut “W.A.S.P.”, Sleeping In The Fire, where the excellent Doug Blair first came visibly into his own, spitting out a first-rate solo in the song. It was followed by another very surprising pick by the band, Arena Of Pleasure, which with its Gypsy-style opening riff confirms Blackie’s former obsession with Uriah Heep. Now we were approaching the peak of the show, because here came The Headless Children, one of the strongest songs of the band’s career, and on top of that came the one-of-a-kind ballad The Idol, in which the splendor of the excellent Doug Blair’s soloing just wouldn’t end. Before The Idol the band allowed itself a short pause, the hall went dark, and Blackie strapped on a different guitar. The track was the atmospheric high point of the show and, given the rest of the repertoire, stood out visibly in the boss’s personal frenzy over the 80-minute get-together, underlining what depth and soul the man on stage is still able to breathe into this ballad today. By this song Blackie had sweated himself through, so his guitar, even though he’d only just swapped it in, looked like a car covered in morning condensation, while sweat dripped off his hands in practically streams. The outro was backed by yet another excellent guitar solo, and for the first and only time the stage was also hit by white smoke, which put the cherry on top for Doug, who found himself in the center of the stage at that moment. At the end of this emotionally charged number Blackie let out a terrifying scream that lasted several seconds and left the entire audience of the New Age Club speechless with shock. The hour flew by in the blink of an eye and the show wrapped up in a general “must play – must hear” party with a rendition of the band’s big hit I Wanna Be Somebody.
The Italians, a special breed of people with a special concert culture, which anyone unused to their ways of behaving would gladly, with the greatest relief, wipe out with fire and sword, went surprisingly quiet after the regular set ended, as if they couldn’t care less whether W.A.S.P. even came back on stage. After a couple of minutes they finally woke up, though, and invented a brand-new coinage for calling for an encore. If Slovenes yell “We want more!” after a show and Germans and Austrians yell “Zugabe!”, the Italians yell: “Anymore, anymore, anymore,…” I pinched my cheek a few times just to believe it. W.A.S.P. came back and dusted off two encores. Both were stretched out, with the first one, Chainsaw Charlie, especially on fire,medtem the second encore contained the thoroughly expected rendition of Blind In Texas. Exactly an hour and twenty. Done! The Italians absolutely demanded “bestialnu ševu” – Animal (Fuck Like a Beast), which wasn’t on the program, and no amount of “any-more, any-more” helped one bit.
This time in Treviso W.A.S.P. repaired the pale impression left by Zagreb two years ago. The fact that they use samples for the backing vocal lines and keyboards is nothing new anymore, but the overall impression was much more decent compared to the Zagreb experience. Routine aside, at least you didn’t feel like somebody was yanking your chain too hard. Why “too hard”? Like I said: an hour and twenty minutes, obvious routine, then the fact that you allow yourself to keep people waiting almost two hours past the announced showtime, plus the aforementioned fakery of adding canned samples, and all that at a price of 30.00€. Not even the witty mic stand, which looked like a cross between a skeleton and a Harley Davidson handlebar, which Blackie eagerly pounded on all show long, is any excuse. The only consolation was telling yourself in the end that you’d seen W.A.S.P., legends of glam / shock heavy metal rock. Blackie still looks way better than Mick Mars (Motley Crue), but his physical condition, sadly, isn’t satisfying! And sadly it’ll stay that way as long as the band’s shows are this damn short.
Anyway, if nothing else, it’s the one and only authentic moment of all, when the band’s classics, with which they once left stage devastation in their wake at shows in the second half of the eighties, spin past in front of your eyes and in your ears live. The set list was practically all “eighties” except for the repertoire from the album “The Crimson Idol”, and that was definitely a big, big plus of this witty, explosive glam metal night, which was, in the end, enriched in its own special way by the drool of gelled-up Italians. The fact that the show was played at a higher level than two years ago in Zagreb was undoubtedly down in large part to Doug Blair on guitar, since the band with Doug in the lineup is now far more convincing in performance than it was with Stet Howland. It was a colorful evening, witty in every respect, which you don’t miss all that much when you think about the band’s time-handicapped stage presence, which is by no means compatible with the price of a concert ticket!
Setlist
1. Intro (The End)
2. On Your Knees
3. Hate To Love Me
4. L.O.V.E. Machine
5. Wild Child
6. Widowmaker
7. Sleeping In The Fire
8. Arena Of Pleasure
9. The Headless Children
10. The Idol
11. I Wanna Be Somebody
—encore 1.
12. Chainsaw Charlie
—encore 2.
13. Blind In Texas
