W.A.S.P. opened the "1984 To Headless" tour of the United States and Canada on Thursday, September 10 at The Magnolia in El Cajon, California, with KK'S PRIEST in support — and built the night almost entirely out of the band's first four albums: 1984's "W.A.S.P.", 1985's "The Last Command", 1986's "Inside The Electric Circus" and 1989's "The Headless Children".
Two songs in the seventeen-song set had never been performed live before. The show opened with URIAH HEEP's "Easy Livin'", which W.A.S.P. covered on "Inside The Electric Circus" forty years ago but never took to a stage. And then, fourth in the running order, came "Mr. Cool", a song that predates the band entirely.
"I was about 18 years old when I wrote this song," Blackie Lawless told the crowd. "And a bunch of interesting things happened along the way. We did a demo of it. It got released as a single by a band that Chris [Holmes, former W.A.S.P. guitarist] and I had a long time ago called SISTER. It got sold for $5,000. And I have never, ever played this song live. So I'm doing this for me, and I hope you like it."
The song's DNA did reach the records eventually: "Mr. Cool" was reworked into "Cries In The Night" on "The Last Command".
The full El Cajon setlist: "Easy Livin'", "Fistful Of Diamonds", "The Flame", "Mr. Cool", "B.A.D.", "Thunderhead", "Forever Free", "The Real Me", "The Headless Children", "Mephisto Waltz", "I Wanna Be Somebody", "L.O.V.E. Machine", "Inside The Electric Circus", "I Don't Need No Doctor", "Golgotha", "Wild Child" and "Blind In Texas".
Lawless laid out the concept on SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk" in February. "It was an idea that we had back in, like, 2018, but when we started doing the groundwork on it, we were rudely interrupted by COVID," he said. The plan was to open from "The Headless Children" and work backwards: "I wanna establish that upfront, that you're gonna hear stuff that you have not heard probably for 39, 40 years."
He was careful, though, about how far into the vaults to go — and told a cautionary story about the last time. "You hear people that wanna hear obscure B-sides; I mean, we're talking deep, deep tracks," Lawless said. "We were somewhere in Norway, and we went out and we did three or four B-sides from those early singles, and the audience stood there mortified. And no band has ever died an uglier death on a stage than what happened to us that night."
His conclusion was about the ticket buyer rather than the setlist. "It's not just the money for the ticket. People have been working all day. They gotta get up, get off their butts, get out there... And if you're gonna coax 'em to go into those shows, you better give them what they came there to hear."
The tour runs through October 31.