Blackie Lawless has been asked about the PMRC for forty years, and in a new interview with Rock At Night the W.A.S.P. frontman gave the least sentimental version of the answer yet: it was a campaign to get a politician elected, it failed, and it changed nothing about his band's records.
"Well, honestly, after it was all said and done, more was said than done," Lawless said. "It really didn't change things for us one way or the other. They wanted attention, and what better way to get attention than to go after an attention-getter? So they chose us."
He named the target directly — Al Gore, then a U.S. senator and the husband of PMRC co-founder Tipper Gore. "They were trying to put a man in the White House, and it didn't work. You got a guy that had a personality that was like watching paint dry. And he wonders why he couldn't get elected... After it was all said and done, and the truth came out, it was all about them trying to put a man in the White House. It was not about censoring records. They could have cared less."
The notoriety, in his telling, was worthless. "They made us a household word, I'll admit that. But when you make somebody a household word, somebody's grandmother in Wyoming — I don't mean to pick on Wyoming this evening; could be anywhere, Iowa, you name it — they don't buy the records anyway, so what difference does it make whether they know who you are or not?"
The cost, though, was real, and Lawless has been blunter about that elsewhere. At a 2022 Q&A in Huntington, New York, he said the campaign made him a recluse: "A couple of thousand death threats and bomb scares and getting shot at a couple of times usually has a tendency to alter your outlook on life a little." He described fame as a smorgasbord guarded by an evil genie — you take everything or nothing — and called it a life-altering experience he has never been able to come back from.
The mid-'80s campaign produced "The Filthy Fifteen", a list of songs the PMRC wanted banned over violence, sex, drugs, alcohol or the occult. Metal and pop were lined up together on it: W.A.S.P., JUDAS PRIEST, MÖTLEY CRÜE, AC/DC, DEF LEPPARD, TWISTED SISTER and MERCYFUL FATE alongside Madonna, Prince and Cyndi Lauper. In November 1985 the RIAA agreed to put "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" stickers on selected releases.
W.A.S.P. take the "1984 To Headless" tour across the U.S. and Canada this autumn with KK'S PRIEST as very special guests, opening on September 10 in California and running through October 31. The set is drawn from the band's first four albums — the exact records the PMRC spent 1985 trying to bury.