Blabbermouth has revealed some unconfirmed tour dates for the 2008 version of Gigantour, the annual traveling metal fest started by Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine in 2005. As usual, the lineup is full of some of the heaviest names in metal – Megadeth, In Flames, Children of Bodom, Job for a Cowboy, High on Fire – and the tour is rumored to be kicking off in April. These are the dates floating around out there but as of yet, nothing official has been announced.
Apr. 07 – San Diego, CA – Cox Arena
Apr. 08 – San Diego, CA – Cox Arena
Apr. 10 – Los Angeles, CA – Gibson Amphitheatre
Apr. 11 – Phoenix, AZ – Mesa Amphitheatre
Apr. 12 – Albuquerque, NM – Journal Pavilion
Apr. 13 – Denver, CO – Fillmore Auditorium
Apr. 15 – Dallas, TX – Nokia Theatre
Apr. 16 – Corpus Christi, TX – Concrete Street Amphitheatre
Apr. 17 – Houston, TX – Verizon Wireless Theatre
Apr. 19 – Atlanta, GA – The Tabernacle
Apr. 20 – Louisville, KY – Louisville Gardens
Apr. 22 – New York City, NY – Hammerstein Ballroom
Apr. 23 – New York City, NY – Hammerstein Ballroom
Apr. 24 – Worcester, MA – The Palladium
Apr. 26 – Baltimore, MD – Pier Six Pavilion
Apr. 28 – Quebec City, QC – Pavilion De La Jeunesse
Apr. 29 – Montreal, QC – Bell Centre
Apr. 30 – Toronto, ON – Arrow Hall
May 01 – London ON – John Labatt Centre
May 03 – Detroit, MI – DTE Music Center
May 04 – Cleveland, OH – Tower City Center
May 06 – Chicago, IL – [to be announced]
May 07 – Milwaukee, WI – Eagles Ballroom
May 09 – Minneapolis, MN – Myth
May 10 – Winnipeg, MB – Convention Centre
May 11 – Saskatoon, SK – Prairieland Exhibition Hall
May 12 – Edmonton, AB – Shaw Conference Centre
May 14 – Calgary, AB – The Stampede Corral
May 16 – Vancouver, BC – Pacific Coliseum
I interviewed Megadeth bassist James Lomenzo (ex-White Lion) earlier this year for another publication. Read the interview after the jump.
Were you a Megadeth fan before joining the band?
A lot of folks ask me if I was a big fan of Megadeth. Megadeth. Metallica. They were all just a couple of years ahead of what I was doing in the ’80s with White Lion. I had just come off of vibing on ’70s music a lot more, kind of the heavy rock thing. I guess around early ’80s, I used to play with Ritchie Blackmore and do cover gigs. I’d be the singing bass player. I’d play with Bobby Rondanelli, his drummer from Rainbow, and him in these little clubs in Long Island. So my vibe was more in that direction.
Now playing with Megadeth, I didn’t become a fan because I was busy doing other stuff. The music wasn’t stuff that drew my ear. My familiarity with the band was what I’d hear them play at the club L’Amour in Brooklyn on the speakers and what would filter out through the radio and eventually MTV. I don’t think I knew 5 Megadeth songs when I joined this band.
How do you go from playing with a band like White Lion to, many years later, playing with Megadeth? It seems like quite the jump.
I always felt like with White Lion I got out through the back door. I don’t want to diminish any of the importance of White Lion, it was a great, popular band for the time and there were certainly challenging musicians in that band, but it was overwritten by the fashion of the day. I think a lot of people didn’t get the musicality as much as they thought “Oh, here’s a band with catchy melodies that looks the part.” That could have just devastated me as a player because my background was in the ’70s heavy rock-blues thing. I always felt fortunate that I got out of White Lion and just started integrating into other things.
I started playing with Zakk Wylde doing all kinds of projects that were jam based. Somehow I circumvented that stigma. I know a lot of guys, they kind of have been trapped in it and ultimately rewarded for it by staying true to themselves. I turn on the TV and I see guys like Bret Michaels doing all the TV shows. You know what? The Poison tour has been doing great for 2 years. There is something to be sad about nostalgia.
I generally feel fortunate and blessed to have been able to play with so many people and some really iconic musicians and play so many diverse types of this heavy rock music.
How different is it playing Megadeth material than you stuff you had been playing with other bands?
Megadeth is structurally more like symphony orchestra music than it is heavy metal music. There’s all these movements that go in and out of the music and sometimes they kind of change at the last minute. It’s a big memory game. Dexterity wise, it harkens to the super player vibe. Fortunately, in Megadeth, not so much from the bass but certainly enough. It’s more beholden to the guitarist to do all the dexterous stuff but the bass has to jump on board and follow along with a lot of that guitar stuff. Through all this time, I’ve taken some fortunate steps that kind of have led me to be able to play Megadeth’s music musically and efficiently which, if you would have requisitioned me 5 or 6 years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready.
Megadeth lost some steam in the early to mid-90s but it seems like now the band is back on track.
I don’t think Dave would disagree with that. They tried a few things in the mid-90s, Cryptic Writings comes to mind, and there was a source of tension in the band because of that. But that’s what people do. Neil Young tried some really extreme things and found his way back to what made him popular. Artists have to be given license to try this stuff. Unfortunately, the music industry isn’t structured to allow that to happen, so the masses can easily be fed up and lose interest and be diverted to something that is newer, fresher, and cleaner.
In the case of Megadeth now, we started working on this record as soon as I joined the band. It didn’t really change that much but it did pinpoint itself somewhere in the middle of the Gigantour. We had the luxury of not quite finishing the album when we started it out last year. We started out in England, then Gigantour came up and we had to get involved with that and start taking all these bands out.
What happened was we started playing with all these bands that were 10 years younger than us and they would inevitably come up – I had some White Lion fans there – and we had these heavy, popular bands come around and go “Man, Megadeth, that old stuff, that thrash, that energy, that whole thing inspired us so much.”
It’s funny because we started taking heed to that, Dave especially. I remember there was one moment of revelation where we were sitting backstage and Dave was like “I don’t know why we aren’t addressing that old style more, more of the thrash vibe. There’s got to be some way we can push what we’ve got right now and push it a little harder like we did when we were 19.”
I had just joined the band and I was just boning up on the style as a bassist and how it should be played. I was doing all that to be able to replicate the songs on stage so that when people came to see Megadeth it would sound familiar. In that, I learned how to contribute to a degree, in musical intent, into making it more of a Megadeth sounding record. Glen Drover and his brother Sean, who had been here about 2 years before me, were giant Megadeth fans and all kinds of metal. It was easy for them to push the direction into a classic Megadeth direction as well. All these elements point in the right direction. We’ve been rewarded by people telling us that it sounds like classic Megadeth without prompting.
Do you pay attention to how Megadeth is being portrayed on the Internet? From YouTube to MySpace, it’s an entirely new world for bands, especially those that have been around a while and now have to adjust.
We’ve been touring pretty heavily this year and have hit all the major markets. We’ve been blown away. People have been saying that the Internet is ruining it for everybody. To a degree, that’s almost true but it’s a really good marketing tool. It enables people to be able to get in touch with bands and artists and politicians like they’ve never been able to before. They can selectively find what they want.
Last year we had some of the music we were recording and we were playing in Japan and Australia towards the end of the year. We already had a lot of music for the album ready to go. Just to kind of taste test it we were playing “Washington is Next” and “Gears of War”. We played them in Australia and Japan and sure enough they showed up on YouTube. People started showing up to the shows, singing along and cheering to songs from an album that wasn’t released yet. That really says a lot. I’m dumbfounded at the reaction. It only tells me that there were a lot of base fans for the original vibe of Megadeth that have never really left.
I think they are recognizing that the band’s intent is purely Megadeth based on the way the band started. We’ve been playing “Sleepwalker” as an opening song and I look out at the crowd and I get goosebumps when I see people singing the lyrics. I’m still trying to remember some of them! People are treating these songs as if they’ve been around forever. I’m an old rock fan. If I see the Rolling Stones come out with a record, if they can even get a single song played during a concert, it’s an amazing event. I think Megadeth has found a really nice stride and resurgence and connected with the original audience and building that audience.
Are you amazed that Megadeth can reach such a wide age range of fans?
My daughter goes to middle school. They had a drum teacher teaching the kids how to play drums after school. I offered my services to the music teacher and said “If you ever want me to come up and do a little thing …” He said, “We’ve got a class of 11 bassists. If you want to come up, I’ll put them all in a room with you and you can show them whatever you want.” So I did that. Five of those kids were keenly aware of Megadeth and, in fact, knew how to play songs that I hadn’t even learned yet. These kids are like 11 years old. This tells me everything I need to know.
This band is a perennial band that’s put itself in the ground. I thought, when I joined this band, “How great to join this band that helped develop this style of metal. You know, the punk/thrash/melodic/political stuff. There’s a lot of dimension to this stuff.”
I think it’s amazing how hands-on Megadeth is with the web. It seems like a very thin wall separates the band from it’s fans.
When I played with some of these iconic artists, they’d be like “We’re rock royalty.” You wouldn’t expect that you could meet Mick Jagger and you shouldn’t. When I first came into this band, Dave was like “I don’t know how this plays.” My gut told me that it would probably be better to be removed and stay out of trouble. If you make yourself too accessible, you open yourself up to too much.
The Internet is a weird thing in which people’s opinions – even though sometimes they are wrong – can be heard. And because it’s in print, it can look like it’s right. I have my own website and I like to take advantage of that for bass players. I like to instill this pride of bass playing and to also inspire bassist to move up because we do get the short end of the stick. There’s so much variety and so many great players before us.
I was using my site for this type of thing. Dave, and our marketing team, suggested that maybe we should become active. We saw the message board growing exponentially. Dave mentioned that maybe it was time to start connecting with these people more. With all the competition out there, how do you get your stuff played and to the audience? For God sake, they are coming to us!
So, yeah, we’ve made a conscious effort as a band and as individuals to address the fans that are interested in talking to us. It’s a way they can get to meet us. We can share a bit of what we’re doing and what we’re thinking and actually even tailor some of the stuff we’re thinking about. It works on a lot of levels.
I spend a lot of time on the Internet; my daughter spends a lot of time on the Internet. Why not use it and shake hands with people, tell them what you’re doing, and then they can decide whether or not it’s what they are looking for. It seems to be a helpful tool and I’m glad guys like Metallica aren’t using it.
If the Megadeth thing hadn’t come along, did you have something else lined up?
I’ve always kept myself out there with the network of people I know. In fact, that’s how I got a call to talk to Dave and find out about Megadeth. A friend of mine who’s got a guitar company called me up and was like “I’ve got this band looking for a bassist if you want to send a demo.” The thing is, at this point, it was going to be Megadeth or something else that is big and huge that’s been around forever just for my ya-ya’s sake, like The Who.
Having been in David Lee Roth’s band for a while, were you surprised by the Van Halen reunion or did he talk about it back when you were playing with him?
I’ve always had an inside track on that. I get those phone calls every now and again. I think it’s great. I’d personally love to see Michael Anthony up there, but I understand Wolfie is pretty outstanding. So as a bassist, I’m really interested in seeing a 19-year-old blow the doors off. It’s well overdue. When I was playing with David Lee Roth back in the early 2000’s, he would say “I’m talking to Eddie. I’ll put you guys on retainer because I don’t want to lose you. I don’t really think it’s going to last that long so I want to make sure you’re there when it doesn’t.”
I think there’s been enough time under the bridge since then that everybody has their priorities straight. I’m excited. I know Dave’s been in great shape for years and he’s been singing all this stuff cold. Eddie, you know, obviously everybody knows what’s going on there. I think if he’s on the straight-and-narrow, he’s really going to naturally blow people away. I’d really like to see Michael Anthony up there though, that’s all.