Blackie Lawless has given an update on the autobiography he has been working on for six years. Speaking to Scott Penfold of Loaded Radio, the W.A.S.P. leader said the book — working title "Tales From The Square Mile" — is roughly half done, and he is aiming for a 2027 release.
The timeline got away from him early. "When I first started writing, I asked [IRON MAIDEN singer] Bruce Dickinson, I said, 'How long did it take you to do your book ['What Does This Button Do?']?' He says, 'About six months.' And I'm thinking, 'Well, it'll take six months.' Well, six years later [it's still not done]."
What changed was the scope. "When I first got into it, I thought it was my singular story. And that seemed reasonable enough, because it's about my own story. But as I started to get into it, I started to realize that it is not just my story. It is about the town itself. And the more I started to understand that, the more everything started to change, as far as the book."
Lawless noted how few people are left who saw that era first-hand. "There's only two guys left, if you think about it, that were there in the beginning, that saw the '70s and, obviously, the '80s. But there's only two guys — myself and Rudy Sarzo." He met Sarzo for dinner several months ago to compare notes; the QUIET RIOT bassist, who wrote his own book "Off The Rails" about his time with Ozzy Osbourne, was "fully supportive" of the very different approach Lawless is taking.
He offered one example of the coincidences the research has turned up. "Blackie Lawless is a combination of Zorro and Dracula. Those were my two childhood heroes growing up. Well, the first year that I was here, I slept on people's floors. And the next year and a half, I moved into my deluxe accommodations, which was a closet that was three feet by 12 feet. And I was in there for a year and a half. Well, come to find out when I'm doing research on this book, that [Hungarian–American actor] Bela Lugosi had lived, the best I can figure, he was about 75 feet away from where I was when I was in that closet."
The title refers to the square mile of Hollywood he lived in, and the influence the town exerted on the music business at large. "The way the movie studio systems were set up in the '20s, '30s and '40s had a direct influence on what the record companies would be later," he told Ultimate Classic Rock earlier this year, adding that the research is brutally slow: "There will be times where it'll take me six, seven hours to write two paragraphs."
On the release date, Lawless was cautious. "I keep telling people a year. I'm at a point now where I've done most of the research. So, I'm about halfway finished. So, I mean, we're getting ready to do this tour, so there won't be a whole lot going on there. But I'm hoping, and I got my fingers crossed, I'm hoping next year sometime."
Source: blabbermouth.net