WASP – The Crimson Idol
Joe Siegler
- AllMyVinyl #52
- Band: W.A.S.P.
- Album Title: The Crimson Idol
- Release Date: 8 Jun 1992
- Date purchased: October 2023
- Location purchased: Gift
- Color of vinyl: black
- Number of discs: 1
- Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]
“Welcome to the morgue son…..”
OK, there’s a story to tell here about me and this album. First off I was already into WASP at this point. Crimson was their fifth studio album. At the time, it came off the excellent “Headless Children” album (I’ll get to that later), so I was really looking forward to their next album, as I LOVE Headless. That one came out in 1989, and it took three years to get Crimson out, but some behind the scenes stuff held it up a bit. First off, this was supposed to be a Blackie Lawless solo album originally, but pressure forced it to come out as the band name he’s most known for (hello Seventh Star). Back in 1992, we didn’t have Amazon in every country, so the regional barriers to buying things was very real. The reason I bring this up is that the album was released in Europe first (Jun 92), and wasn’t slated to come out in the United States for like almost a full year after the UK date. That was annoying, but there wasn’t much I could do about it then. Now I’d just order it from Amazon UK and ship it to myself, but Bezos hasn’t taken over retail yet at that point.
However, that didn’t stop the band from touring. WASP played some small venues in 1992, and in one of the last concerts I saw before I moved to Texas, my brother and I went to see WASP, as it was technically the Crimson Idol tour. It was at that point the second time I’d seen WASP (the other time was in 86 opening for Sabbath on the Seventh Star tour). So my brother and I went down to the Trocadero in Philadelphia (big time tiny venue, about 1,000 capacity), and saw WASP. It was great seeing ’em in this small venue. Loved the show, but the coolest part was that Blackie was selling CD copies of The Crimson Idol on the merch table, which we weren’t going to see for like 8 months in record stores – my brother and I both snapped up a copy immediately. Both my brother and myself still have these CD copies 32 years later. Only one other time did I see a band before an album was due to be released (hello Pat Benatar’s “Go”), and they had it at the merch table. That was super cool. Never did own it on vinyl back in the day though.
That brings us forward to 2023. Blackie Lawless was putting out the first five WASP albums (WASP, Last Command, Electric Circus, Headless Children, & Crimson Idol) in a box set. The set’s called “The 7 Savage (1984-1992)”. It also includes a live album and a disc of rarities and B-Sides. It also has a very nice booklet, and is in a very well designed box. As box sets go, it’s one of the more aesthetically pleasing sets out there. My brother gifted me a copy of this for my birthday in 2023. It was limited to 2,000 copies, and each one had a number in it (mine was #790). So I’ve been enjoying this as the primary version since I got it. The vinyl I’m playing today is the one out of this box.
A few years back the album was remastered for CD and included a 17 minute long audio track by Blackie Lawless explaining the “concept” of the album. Crimson Idol is a big time concept album. I love a good concept album, but this one is like Magica for me. I love the music on the album, but concept is lost to me. Once I stopped trying to “get” the concept, and just enjoyed the music, it clicked in for me. If I need a 20 min audio explaining it all, I don’t know if I care about the concept that much. Ronnie Dio did the same thing on the Magica album, as much as I love that album too. the spoken word track is unlistenable. The 1998 remastered version of Crimson also had two unreleased tracks called “Phantoms in the Mirror” & “The Eulogy”. This vinyl copy from the box set is a double album, so it’s got enough room for the original album plus the 17 min spoken word track and the two bonuses, which his nice. Not all box sets include the bonus tracks on vinyl (Hello Anno Domini!)
The lineup on this band changed a bit. At first I thought it was just because Blackie was shuffling people around (say goodbye to Chris Holmes who to me was just as important to early WASP as Blackie), but if it was supposed to be a solo album when created, then I get it a bit more. This extends a bit to the music, as Blackie is credited as vocals, rhythm guitar, keybords, and bass. Close to be being an actual solo album. Drums were handled mostly by Frankie Banali (the lone holdover from Headless). Also on drums was Stet Howland, who played for WASP for a while after this too. Doug Aldrich of Dio/Whitesnake fame plays guitar on Track 3. Lead guitar was handled by Bob Kulick, brother of Bruce from KISS fame. Bob himself played guitar uncredited on a few 70’s Kiss albums too. What combination of members played when my brother and I saw this was lost to time. Anyone out there know what the actual lineup was for the Crimson Idol shows in 1992? Plz reach out.
Now I’ve always had this album filed in my head as a great album. For the longest time I thought it was my favorite WASP album. I don’t feel that way anymore (Headless Children is), but it is still a damn good album. Most WASP fans will say this is their favorite WASP album, and I can’t fault them for that. There’s a LOT to like on this album. This is another one where I’m not breaking down the individual tracks, as it does kind of require you to listen fully to “get it”. Oh sure, there’s individual songs, but the reason I don’t listen to Crimson as much as I normally would another album is because of that – it kind of demands to be listened to in full.
I can’t go and NOT say something about the songs, though. By far, my favorite song on this is “Chainsaw Charlie”. Chainsaw is nearly 8 mins long (technically 7:48), but it doesn’t feel like it. In fact, of the 10 tracks that make up the original studio album, 6 of them are 5 mins or longer (OK, one is 4:59, but I’m counting it) and two of those are over 8 mins. So there’s some long ass songs on here but none of them feel like a slog at all. They move along nicely. Which his what I can say about Chainsaw – which was never gonna get played on the radio as there’s a few heavy duty profanities in the lyrics. But I doubt Blackie wrote a song called “Chainsaw Charlie (Murders in the Rue Morgue)” expecting to get it played on the radio. It’s got a great chugging guitar sound which kinda sounds like a chainsaw itself which permeates the entire track. Really awesome stuff.
Hold On to My Heart is probably the one I like the least – it’s a power ballad. Now there are some power ballads I do like. Heck, WASP had a killer one on the album before this (Forever Free). That one smoked. This one doesn’t do it as much for me. It’s not bad of course, but I would have preferred more metal in my face vs the slower ballad song.
Beyond Hold On, there’s not a single track I don’t care for. There’s a ton of great moments scattered through the entire album. I love the vocal delivery on “The Invisible Boy”. “Arena of Pleasure” reminds me of something that would have fit on the first album. Doctor Rockter’s chorus has me singing along every time. “I am One” is also a badass track. I love that it starts out sounding live, but isn’t (hello “King of Rock & Roll”). It’s got an AWESOME sound that runs through it, and I adore the chorus of this even more (“Long Live… Long Live the King of Mercy”). The background vocals behind Blackie’s main vocals are some of my favorite on the album. The Idol comes right before “Hold On”, and is a mostly slower song, but it’s a got a great power to it that reminds me of some of the slow dirge songs of early Sabbath in the 70’s. And then there’s “Great Misconceptions of Me”, which brings the entire piece together and closes out the story. It’s the longest song (of music) on the album at 9:44. I hear some of the musical themes scattered through the album, and I think works far better if you listen to the entire album in one go vs just listening to it on its own. Great track to close out the album.
There’s also the bonus tracks. I’ll admit I skipped the spoken word track. I just don’t care. Sorry Blackie. But the two songs there are great too – but I never actually listened to them before today (that I can remember anyway). Given they fell outside the main story, I never felt compelled to seek them out. But I did like them today – new WASP from the 90’s in 2024? Yes please. Now they do sound a little less produced then the main album. That’s not bad. They’re good tracks. Phantoms has a keyboard sound that reminded me a LOT of Jon Lord in Deep Purple. Eulogy has a very different sound to everything else on the album, I can see why this was left off. It feels like a “story” track – where if the original concept happened in 1992, you would have watched part of the movie while this was going (especially in the first half where I thought it might have been just an instrumental). I do like where it goes as the song builds up and changes gears halfway through.
One thing I’ll add. After I finished the vinyl, I went back into some of the songs on Apple Music as it’s easier to maneuver a mouse to find an exact spot on a song to hear something than it is to hunt and peck with the needle on the vinyl. To that, I discovered in listening that the vinyl’s remastering is darned good. Listening to the same segments of a few tracks showed me the 2023 re-release of this album on vinyl is better to my old ass ears than the version that’s on Apple Music. That actually surprised me a little. But in a good way.
Many years later, Blackie re-recorded the entire album and called it “Reidolized: The Soundtrack to The Crimson Idol”. That version also included a DVD which contained the film that was originally supposed to be released in 1992 with the album, but never was. Since the album was completely re-recorded, it was done with different personnel than the original. The lineup on the re-recording is Blackie on most everything again (vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass). This time Mike Duda also played bass, Mike Dupke handled nearly all the drums. The only exception to that is Blackie kept some drum parts from Frankie Banali on the Reidolized version on one song. That makes Frankie the only musician from the original (besides Blackie) to appear on the re-recorded version. The song (“The Peace”) didn’t appear on the original version, so Dupke handles the 10 original tracks that appear here.
So to sum up? The Crimson Idol is an EXCELLENT album. Perhaps not top of the pedestal to me, but right there too. It’s an album with some really great songs, and if this had come out as Blackie Lawless album, people would have probably called it a WASP album anyway, as it really does sound like WASP. If you listen to just one song on the album, make it Chainsaw Charlie. It’s a really darned good track. But there’s a lot more on the album than just Chainsaw. I did find myself genuinely enjoying this album when I listened today. As I said earlier, I always enjoyed it in the past, but had fallen out of listening to it regularly. It kind of faded into my memory as a great album that |I didn’t listen to much anymore. Today I rediscovered WHY this was a great album, and you should check it out too.
Jonathan Lives Here….
