The Truth About W.A.S.P. Tour Money – Frankie Banali – Chris Holmes – Blackie Lawless – Johnny Rod

VIDEO DESCRIPTION: How Frankie Banali ended up joining W.A.S.P. on The Headless Children album/tour while Quiet Riot were working overseas. The money and personalities behind the scenes got complicated fast. See what was really going on between Chris Holmes and Blackie Lawless, and why Holmes now points to those days as a turning point.

Frankie Banali was best known as the powerhouse drummer for Quiet Riot, helping drive their 1983 album Metal Health to become the first heavy metal record to hit number one on the Billboard chart and making songs like “Cum On Feel the Noize” and “Bang Your Head” part of metal history. By the late 1980s he was an in‑demand player in Los Angeles, and his long acquaintance with Blackie Lawless led to him being asked to play on W.A.S.P.’s fourth album, The Headless Children, released in 1989. Banali tracked drums for the record while simultaneously working on a Quiet Riot album, effectively juggling both projects at once. He later said he considered The Headless Children one of the greatest conceptual rock records he’d ever been part of, and critics and fans often single out his heavy, precise drumming as a big part of why the album feels so muscular and dramatic.

The Headless Children marked the start of a long association between Banali and W.A.S.P., and he would go on to play on several of the band’s later studio releases, including The Crimson Idol, as well as touring with them in the early 1990s. On the Headless Children tour he brought the same combination of stadium‑ready power and tight, song‑serving groove that had defined his work in Quiet Riot, locking in with Johnny Rod and giving Blackie Lawless and Chris Holmes a harder, more sophisticated rhythmic foundation for the band’s darker new material. His crossover history – quietly moving between multi‑platinum success with Quiet Riot and the more theatrical, concept‑driven world of W.A.S.P. – adds an extra layer of depth to that era, showing how central his drumming was to the evolution of late‑80s and early‑90s metal.

During an interview with XS Rock, Quiet Riot/W.A.S.P. drummer Frankie Banali talked about touring with Chris Holmes: “I love Chris! He’s crazy. He’s as crazy as the day is long. I did a solid year of touring in Europe for ‘The Headless Children’ and at the beginning of it, Blackie stuck me rooming with Chris. After about a week, I said to Blackie, ‘You get me my own room or I’m going home.’ He’s a nut. [Laughs] People see him as a a bigger-than-life creature, which he is…but he’s also a really, really sweet guy.”

You can listen to the entire interview with Rock Interview Series below: