W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes sat down with The Metal Voice for a new interview and revealed the price he had to pay for his freedom in the band.
“I play the structure but I play what I feel that’s what I’ve always done all my life,” the guitarist said when asked about how he likes his solos live. “I used to get in a lot of trouble. I used to go out and do a solo and do a completely different one thank the song and I’d get screamed at for it. All the time. And then finally once I was getting docked money for doing that. You got to play close to the strong (They Said).”
He revealed the one thing he couldn’t stand about the band: “So I started playing close to the song and once I did that it was like it was boring to me. It was like walking down the street. It’s boring, I like to feel [the solo] from my heart. I always love to go see a band and they don’t sound exactly like the record, they play their parts a lot differently, I just love that. One thing couldn’t stand about W.A.S.P. everything had to sound like the record.”
He was also asked if it was true that the band docked him for not playing like the record.
“Oh yeah $500 bucks, they just just took out my pay,” he revealed. “It’ll straighten you up pretty fast.”
The band asked him to play the same way, but Holmes believes that great guitarists never play the same way twice.
“Hendrix never played the same way once,” he said. “The good guys never do.”
“When I was about 12 or 13, I saw the Jimi Hendrix movie, and that got me into playing the guitar,” Holmes told Guitar World last year about what influenced him to play guitar. “I thought, ‘What a job – I wanna do that!’”
W.A.S.P. is hitting the road with bassist Mike Duda, lead guitarist Doug Blair, and drummer Aquiles Priester. The 39-city tour starts on Saturday, October 26, in San Luis Obispo, California. The band will make stops across North America and will wrap up the tour on December 14, at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, California.