The Sting of Infamy

"Oh tell me my Lord, why am I here?" The first lines of The Neon God, W.A.S.P.'s recently released concept album, sound like the desperate cries of a man searching for meaning, as depicted on the disc's cover, arms outstretched to heaven. That they come from the pen that also has produced songs like "Dirty Balls" and "You F--king Suck" doesn't strike their author as at all inconsistent.

"Any artist, whether it's myself or anybody that's going to have a true career, to do that, you make records that reflect who you are at the moment," says Lawless. "The only way you can do that is you've got to be willing to crack your skull open and allow people to come in and walk around barefooted inside your head."

That head and the mind inside it created the band W.A.S.P. (We Are Sexual Perverts) in the early 1980s. Emerging from the LA metal scene that also included bands like Mötley Crüe, W.A.S.P. rose to prominence by putting on live shows combining the outrageous theater of Alice Cooper with the over-the-top glitz of KISS. On any given night, the audience could expect to have raw meat thrown at them or witness the band mock-slit the throats of scantily clad women. Lawless' exploding codpiece provided the fireworks. Lyrically, songs like "Animal (F--k like a Beast)" and "Hellion" matched the mood.

"If you go back and look at even my earliest work, I was writing subconsciously and did not know it," Lawless explains. "Now, I'm writing as consciously as I can, where I try to at least understand why I'm writing it." The newfound focus spurred Lawless to explore the eternal questions man has posed since his dawn.

"I was looking for what I thought was the greatest common denominator that we all have as humans," Lawless says. "Which is, 'Who am I? Where am I going? Does my life mean anything? Is there a God, is there no God?'" In Lawless' particularly twisted vision, man's eternal quest for definition is framed in the form of a two-part album called The Neon God, which follows the character Jessie Slane who is orphaned at age 6 and sexually abused for a number of years by a 6-foot-2-inch, 255-pound nurse named Sister Sadie. Then he escapes and falls in with a magician and becomes a cult leader. And that's only Part One (released this spring). Lawless is finishing work on the second installment this week, set to be released in September.

Born Steven Duren and raised in a Baptist household, Lawless is hesitant to credit his upbringing with his philosophical bent. "I wouldn't think the religious background pushes anybody. We all do whatever we're going to do out of our own free will," he says, before conceding, "Without that influence there, it probably wouldn't have been as great."

"I have very deep beliefs still but they're not something that I want to go around hammering people over the head with or try to influence in any way," Lawless expounds. "If I did that, I'd be doing the same thing I was running away from. So it's important that people find their own answers. And this record that I just did, I tell people quite clearly in the liner notes: 'This record will not find these answers for you.'"

W.A.S.P. enjoyed its greatest visibility in the mid-80s when it was targeted by Tipper Gore's Parents Resource Music Committee for its lyrics and behavior. Since then, though, W.A.S.P.'s record sales have steadily declined. Lawless, ever the pragmatist, has learned to find the value in his recordings elsewhere. "If it jump-starts the thought process, then this will be a successful record," he says. "You don't judge it by the amount of sales or the critical reviews or anything like that, but by what it does to the individuals' lives."

Despite his best efforts, W.A.S.P. is likely to be remembered for its '80s excess. Ex-guitarist Chris Holmes was immortalized in the 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, and VH1's recent 100 Most Metal Moments grants the bandmembers three spots, all involving their use of meat and the exploding codpiece ("We were attempting to do primitive avant-garde theater," Lawless explains).

Regardless, Blackie Lawless maintains a stiff upper lip. The Neon God tour, which picks up in Las Vegas, continues through September until the album's second part is released. While Lawless is eager to profile his new material, he promises that the show will feature plenty of the band's standards. "It's important that the artist listen to the audience, the same as the audience listens to the artist," Lawless says, while keeping his fingers crossed. "If you do that, you'll get an idea of where they are going and what they want. And if a record really proves to be successful, then they'll let you know that they want to hear more of it."