Checking out Zac Brown Band on the Today show. They’re dang good.
Well, The Pulse Of Radio says Avenged Sevenfold guitarist Synyster Gates told Loudwire that he had to head right back on the road after he and his wife welcomed a baby boy into the world over the weekend. Gates went home last Friday (May 12th) after his wife went into early labor, forcing Avenged Sevenfold to miss that night’s opening slot on the Metallica tour in Philadelphia. He rejoined the band on Sunday (May 14th) for a show that night in New Jersey, also with Metallica.
Asked about his first two days as a father, Gates said, “The first day was tough, the second day was incredible. I can’t wait to get home. I’m glad we’ve got like 20 days off.” He added, “It’s f**ked when you have to leave. I didn’t cry when the kid came out, but I cried when I had to f**king leave, it’s horrible.”
Fellow guitarist Zacky Vengeance told us the Avenged Sevenfold family is happy to welcome it’s newest little “Metalhead”!
Singer M. Shadows told us Avenged is often a family-friendly operation on tour: “We’re very, you know, lucky, because we can afford to bring a family bus if you need your family out for this or that. And not all bands can do that, so it’s really, you know, we’re very fortunate in that regard that, hey, when Dad hits the road, we’re going with him. But eventually they’re gonna have to go to school and Dad’s gonna be gone. That’s my job, that’s what I do. And then you bring ’em out when you can.“
Avenged Sevenfold is scheduled to jump off the Metallica tour for the next three and a half weeks, rejoining the bill on Jun 7th in Denver. The band will perform a headlining show in Philadelphia on Jun 21st to make up for missing the Metallica gig last Friday. Avenged Sevenfold is touring in support of its seventh album, The Stage.
Meanwhile, in a bizarre coincidence, Metallica’s other opening act, Volbeat, had to postpone a headlining theater show in New Jersey on Tuesday night (May 16th) due to the early arrival of frontman Michael Poulsen‘s first child. The show has been rescheduled to Jul 17th and Volbeat will be back onstage with Metallica in Uniondale, NY on Wednesday (May 17th).
Last night, Metallica was on Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It was the first time the band performed on the late night CBS-TV show. It was very RED.
Also: check out this killer Baltimore video the band made. Love it!
Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor has revealed the story behind the mysterious title of the band’s sixth album, Hydrograd. Taylor told Detroit radio station WRIF that he was running through an “antiquated” airport in Eastern Europe a few years ago where the gate info was “on those old-school ’80s block-letter, number, digital horrible Timex watch kind of readers” and scrolling between different languages. As he ran past, Taylor thought he saw the word “Hydrograd.” (Think old school Penn Station NY train info billboard.)
Taylor said, “So my brain is trying to do geometry while also at a sprint because I don’t wanna miss my plane. I pass one and I look up and I could have swore it said ‘Hydrograd.’ And I kept running for a second and I was, like, ‘Hydrograd? Where the hell is Hydrograd? What?‘”
Taylor eventually realized that the word wasn’t “Hydrograd,” recalling, “It didn’t even start with an ‘H.’ It wasn’t even close.” But he still remembered the word, saying, “It’s a cool name. It was what I saw but didn’t really see.” Hydrograd is due out on Jun 30th and features the single “Song #3,” which is already Number Nine on the rock radio chart. The band has also made “Fabuless” available early to fans.
Stone Sour will play the Rock On The Range Kick-Off Party this Thursday (May 18th) at Express Live! in Columbus, OH. The event will start the Rock On The Range weekend, with Metallica, Soundgarden and Korn headlining this year’s festival. Stone Sour will also be special guests of Korn on the latter act’s “Serenity Of Summer” trek, which starts on Jun 16th in Salt Lake City and wraps on Aug 2nd in Cleveland.
Metal Sucks was trying to put out there that Seether‘s “Let You Down” was a rip-off of Tool‘s “Stinkfist.” Seriously? Do you people have anything better to do but try to find guitar riffs that sound like something else? Then you better get started. You have A WHOLE LOT of work on your hands!
Trying to get Sully Erna of Godsmack on the hotLine for our Memorial Day Cover It Up special edition of hardDrive! Meanwhile, the frontman is walking back his previous comments that the band intends to commemorate its 20th anniversary in 2018 with a massive world tour that could feature the group playing its self-titled 1998 debut disc live from start to finish. Erna told Wisconsin radio station 93X, “We don’t know that yet. That’s been circulating, ’cause I opened my mouth a little bit soon, but as we get deeper into writing this new record, that may change. So we’re not making any promises on that yet.”
Back in March, Erna told Houston radio station 94.5 FM about the tour, “We’re gonna do a massive production. We’re gonna kind of base it around the theme of the first record. We’re even talking about coming out and doing the first record front to back to open the show.” Erna also said in the Houston interview that Godsmack originally planned to put out a new album in 2017, but explained why that changed, saying, “We wanted to do something this year, but we were just, like, ‘You know, let’s just wait another second,’ because if we release this at the top of 2018, it will be our 20th-year anniversary of the first record, and we wanna do something special.”
When we asked him a while back if Godsmack’s career has been more good times or bad, Erna replied: “I gotta say more good times. You know, it can get rough out there though, so there is a lot of crap that goes along with it, man. You know, and it’s not so much bad times, it’s really just a lot of hard work, and it really grinds you out there, you know. Touring takes a lot of years off your life.”
The band’s seventh studio album will follow up 2014’s 1000 Horsepower. Erna said, “I have to write a really great record for us, and that’s the tough part.” Godsmack has a few festival shows on tap over the next few weeks and will appear in Camden, NJ this Saturday (May 20th) with Bush, Live and others.
Blabbermouth reporting Los Angeles rockers Black Veil Brides have completed work on their fifth album for a tentative mid-September release. The follow-up to their 2014 self-titled effort was produced by John Feldmann at his Southern California studio.
Speaking to Front Row Live at last night’s (Sunday, May 14) inaugural “Strange 80s” benefit concert at the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles, Brides guitarist Jake Pitts stated about the band’s upcoming disc: “We’re pretty used to being in the studio. [Fellow BVB guitarist] Jinxx [a.k.a. Jeremy Miles Ferguson] and I have our own studio. That’s what we live for. If we’re not touring, we’re always in the studio. We’d done a record with John Feldmann previously, so this time, going in with him, we have a relationship with him, we know how everything works. It was really, really painless and we just gelled really well together and made the album.”
Jinxx added they entered the studio in Nov 2015, about a month after performing at the Aftershock festival at Gibson Ranch just outside Sacramento, CA. “We just got off tour and we just went straight in the studio with Feldy. And every day we had a new track or two; we were just writing up a storm. And we’re pretty stoked with the turnout.”
Asked how the members of Black Veil Brides continue to challenge themselves every time they go into the studio, Jake said: “For me, I think it’s just, as far as songwriting, trying to outdo ourselves and not putting out the exact same thing. So many bands just play the same kind of riffs and breakdowns and everything, and everything sounds the same, so it’s just trying to create something that sounds different, even from what we’ve done, but still not get too far off track and make fans be, like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and ‘I don’t like this anymore.’ But try to get a bigger fanbase but make everybody happy at the same time. So we try to mix it up with heavy stuff, the ballads, the radio rock kind of stuff, and just kind of give the albums a little bit of everything for somebody.”
Added Jinxx: “And I feel like we’ve matured a lot as writers as well as a band, and we just went back and sought out our influences growing up — our favorite bands growing up, our favorite albums. And that’s what we did. And me and him [Jake] sat down and we just wrote riffs based on that. Basically, what we enjoyed, what influenced us growing up, what made us wanna pick up a guitar and play, and that’s what we put into this album. And we’re super stoked to share that with the world.”
Goldfinger frontman John Feldmann previously helmed the Brides‘ 2013 effort Wretched And Divine: The Story Of The Wild Ones.
A new BVB song called “The Outsider” was released last December and can be streamed here. They released its first-ever concert DVD and Blu-ray, “Alive And Burning,” in Jul 2015. The cover artwork for the set was designed by the band’s longtime friend and previous album cover illustrator Richard Villa.
Happy 52nd today to Krist Novoselic from Nirvana and Happy 43rd to Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D.