Garbage Days Revisited #39: W.A.S.P. - "The Last Command" (1985)

 

"'Ey dude, let's party..." - W.A.S.P. - Blind In Texas

W.A.S.P. were probably one of the last few glam metal bands to hang on in the charts after the grunge nuclear winter hit and ironically it was early '92 when I first got into 'em. They had a song called Chainsaw Charlie (Murders In The New Morgue). It had a cover featuring lead singer Blackie Lawless holding a bloody chainsaw while grinning maniacally. I inadvertently left my copy on the kitchen table after buying it, my parents found it and were genuinely concerned that I was converting to Satanism. I mean, I really don't think I need to explain why I loved 'em do I?

The truth is of course that I was very late in the day getting into W.A.S.P. and to be honest, the fact that they were still hanging in and scoring chart hits in 1992 even as Smells Like Teen Spirit was killing '80s metal off at a frightening rate, probably deserves respect. The truth is though that the group would only chalk up one further hit on these shores in 1993's Sunset And Babylon but similar to Love/Hate who were also keeping the dying flame of Sunset Strip rock flickering at this point, soon afterwards they'd drift off to the minor labels and rock's history books.

While with a lot of sleaze rock bands, it would take until the era of me moving back to Bradford and discovering the regular '80s night at Rio's to get back on board with them, to be fair, WASP were actually a little bit ahead of the curve as it was actually my student days when I stumbled back upon them thanks to a trip to Mike Lloyd records near where I was studying in Stoke-on-Trent. Casually going through the discount racks one Saturday, what should I see but a copy of a new WASP album Helldorado for a fiver. I was out with another metalhead mate and both of us went straight into "ah man, I used to love these guys when I was younger!" mode. This was the era where we were all discovering the not entirely dissimilar likes of Buckcherry and the Backyard Babies and we thought what the hell - it was duly purchased.

Fair play, Helldorado didn't disappoint. Gleefully disgusting and designed to wind up the straights with song titles like Dirty Balls, Saturday Night Cockfight and Don't Cry Just Suck, it was pure scummy rock 'n' roll designed to get drunk and headbang to. Now, fair point, if it had been a nu-metal or frat-punk band coming up with song titles like this I would have almost certainly dismissed it as stupid puerile nonsense but WASP played things so gleefully OTT on this one that there was no way you could take it as anything other than a gloriously riffed up wind-up to piss off Daily Mail readers and their loathsome ilk and it was on the flat's stereo for a good few months afterwards.

As it turned out, WASP were in the process of re-releasing their back catalogue at the time (I think Blackie had just bought the rights back from their old record company at the time) and we quickly picked up a couple of budget 2-for-1 releases, one with the group's first two albums W.A.S.P. and The Last Command and the other with their third and fourth, Inside The Electric Circus and The Headless Children on it. Although I think the later albums have some decent moments on them (their version of Humble Pie's I Don't Need No Doctor is still one of my favourite cover versions ever and the likes of Mean Man and Forever Free still sound good as well), it was the first two I was pretty much inextricably drawn to.

I was tempted to put W.A.S.P.'s self-titled debut album on here (LOVE Machine, Tormentor and I Wanna Be Somebody are all classics) but I think The Last Command is a bit more under-rated so went there instead. The thing with early W.A.S.P. albums is this - yes, they aren't big and yes, they aren't clever but there's something brutally primal about them (see my notes on the Slaughter & The Dogs GDR entry last week) which pretty much invites you to raise the devil signs and howl out the choruses. I think as well, there's a phase nearly everyone goes through during their teenage years where they're instinctively drawn to the loudest, most brutal and disgusting music they can find to terrify the hell out of their parents. It's why the '70s birthed Alice Cooper or why Slipknot were briefly so ubiquitous around the turn of the millennium - music to raise your middle finger and say "fuck you" to polite society to.

Right from the spiralling opening riff of Wild Child, The Last Command is all killer no filler from the sheer menace of Widowmaker through the frenetic Jack Action and Running Wild In The Streets to the full on ode to getting absolutely hammered that is Blind In Texas (still the band's set closer to this day). Yes, admittedly the likes of Ballcrusher are a bit "hmmm, you couldn't get away with this nowadays" in the post-MeToo era but even so, this is still an absolute riot of an album and still makes me smile after a long day all these years later.

I would continue to roll with W.A.S.P. for a good decade plus after rediscovering them but to me Helldorado was their last really killer album. At some point afterwards, the group’s legendary party animal guitarist Chris Holmes left for the second and final time, Blackie converted to Christianity and subsequent albums like The Neon God, Dominator and Babylon have seen the group go back to the heavier conceptual themes of albums like The Crimson Idol. Which is all very well and good (and all of the above have a few songs worth checking out) but as someone who got into the band for their straight-baiting beer-swilling gleefully grossout antics, I kind of wish they'd do something a bit more similar to my favourite albums of theirs rather than the dreadful MOR dross that was their most recent effort, 2015's Golgotha (which you may remember from our Worst Albums list the other month). Unfortunately, I don't think it's ever gonna happen.

As I write this, W.A.S.P. have just announced a 40-year anniversary European tour taking in some British dates and there's even talk of a new album on the horizon. I'm partly tempted to go as it's been a good few years since I last saw them - my current tally stands at twice, once at Bradford Rio's in the early noughties when they put on a pretty decent set and once at Leeds Academy a few years later where they really sounded on form...until I met the singer from the support band that night a couple of years later and he told me they'd been using backing tapes. His response to my reaction was "Shit, I'm really sorry mate, I feel like a parent who's just told his kid Santa doesn't exist!" Given that the group certainly aren't scared of varying their output (and they deserve immense credit for doing so), it's entirely possible that they might just hit on a winning formula this time out (and if so, it'll do nicely in terms of making up for the disappointment of Golgotha) but we shall wait and see. Either way, we'll always have those early albums and for that alone, Blackie Lawless and co will always have my respect.