GIGANTOUR

On the eve of this year's outing, Dave Mustaine and crew bare their souls for our amusement.

By Mikael Wood
Photo by Travis Shinn

In Dave Mustaine’s view, the difference between most package tours and Gigantour—the multi-band road show he assembled for the first time in 2005 and which kicks off its latest incarnation on April 12 in Denver, CO—boils down to “old hippie love bullshit.”
“I was brought up in a touring scene where you take care of everybody,” says the Megadeth frontman. “Where you make sure that everybody has what they need, in terms of soundcheck and space onstage and PA and lights. That’s all really important to me. But that’s old-school thinking, and there’s not a lot of old-school people touring anymore. Today it’s a lot of people who are perpetuating new thinking, which is every man for him-fucking-self. And I can’t stand that.”

Mustaine says Gigantour is his attempt to right the wrongs he sees in the world of live music—to bring the focus back to musicianship and camaraderie and value for your money. The roots of the 2008 lineup—which as usual features Megadeth in the headlining slot—actually extend back to the package’s genesis: Mustaine says he invited Finland’s Children of Bodom to be a part of the first Gigantour but had to scrap the plan when he learned that a bit of bad blood flowed between frontman Alexi Laiho and John Petrucci of Dream Theater, who’d already been booked. This year Bodom are joined by Sweden’s long-running In Flames, Arizona-based youngsters Job for a Cowboy, and Oakland’s High on Fire, whose frontman, Matt Pike, was the force behind legendary doom-metal outfit Sleep.

A few days before Christmas, Revolver gathered Mustaine, Laiho, Pike, In Flames bassist Peter Iwers, and Job for a Cowboy singer Jonny Davy, in Los Angeles for an exclusive roundtable discussion about what Gigantour means for its participants—those on the stage and off.

REVOLVER Dave, what kind of bands were you looking for to round out the Gigantour lineup this year?
DAVE MUSTAINE I wanted bands that weren’t necessarily smash successes but that have been around for a while and built a following. And I wanted bands that have had consistent musicianship. There was a period over the last 10 years where guitar solos weren’t popular anymore—they weren’t in vogue. Thank God they’re back in style, because I look at guys that don’t play solos as guys who aren’t fully accomplished guitar players. It’s like in baseball, the guys in the American League that just bat and don’t play, or the ones that just pitch and don’t bat. Being a well-rounded guitar player to me is being able to play rhythm and lead and acoustic.

REVOLVER Were the rest of you guys interested in joining immediately?
MATT PIKE Oh, for certain. I was like, “Dude, I’d be stoked for that.” We’ve all been on the same circuit, but all you guys are a little bigger than me. I’ve been like the underground bar band that everybody mumbles about but no one does anything about for a long time, so it’s a good thing for me.
JONNY DAVY Everything’s going over my head. I’m 20 years old, and my whole band are fans of all the bands playing, so it’s just kind of mind-blowing.

REVOLVER When Dave asked you, were you like, “Wait, what?”
DAVY Yeah, exactly.
ALEXI LAIHO It’s a great package. It’s gonna be a bunch of friends hanging out, as opposed to having some big-ass rock stars and their egos involved.

REVOLVER The lineup is pretty diverse, with bands from several different scenes and areas of the world. Was ensuring some degree of variety important to you, Dave?
MUSTAINE Absolutely. The art of promoting belongs to a bygone era. In America, most of the promoters aren’t promoters anymore—they’re talent buyers. So they’ll get four or five popular bands that are so similar, all you need to do is change the backdrop. You don’t even have to change the dudes—they fucking look exactly the same, they sound the same, they’ve got the same tattoos, and they all stand in the same fucking position, staring at their feet, not moving around. And it’s the same frontman that says “motherfucker” and “goddamn” in between every song. This tour, the bands are different; it was like the last tour and the one before that. If every band is credible on their own, then the sum is greater than the parts.

REVOLVER Is there an overarching concept that unites all the groups?
MUSTAINE Showing young people that you can be in a band and you can rip and shred without having to be in a negative, dark environment. When I heard that a girl got raped at Woodstock ’99, which we played, that changed my thinking about being a musician. To know that people were in the audience watching somebody get raped and they didn’t do anything about it—to know that a guy was onstage and didn’t stop playing—that’s fucked up. Maybe he saw it, maybe he didn’t. But somebody saw that.

REVOLVER You want Gigantour to be a more positive experience.
MUSTAINE Gigantour is about celebration. It’s one of those festivals where it’s about treating the musicians right so they can do their job. When you enjoy what you’re doing, it becomes effortless—you forget where you’re at. It becomes magical. I was at the Led Zeppelin show in London and, yeah, it wasn’t the greatest thing in the world for some people. But for me it was. I’m a Led Zeppelin fan. I could look past
Robert Plant’s limited range. He’s in his 60s—of course that’s gonna happen. I mean, I’m the same guy who still thinks Sophia Loren is beautiful.
PIKE It’s the gap in her teeth.
MUSTAINE She still smokes anyone that’s out these days. That’s me looking at beauty. I can listen to a guitar solo from a player like David Gilmour, who can do more with just a couple of notes than one of those extreme steroided-out players that are Mike Varney guys on Shrapnel records. I like note placement, and I think when you listen to the bands on this year’s Gigantour, the music’s thought out. It’s not just mindless riffing.

REVOLVER That’s a bond between each of your bands.
MUSTAINE In my experience, the hardest moment of the tour is saying goodbye to everybody. We all just become this hulking centerfold for Meat magazine. One of the best parts is the baseball game we do for charity. You see these guys out there that just shred on guitar and they couldn’t fucking hit a baseball with a tennis racket.

REVOLVER Who’s gonna win this year’s game?
PIKE I’ve got some East Coasters in my crew that are hardcore baseball dudes. My drummer’s way into sports and hardcore punk—that’s his gig. While we were home for a while during the summer we’d just get wasted and play punk-rock kickball.
LAIHO What’s kickball?
MUSTAINE It’s like baseball but you kick it instead.
PIKE It’s fucking stupid.

REVOLVER Do the rest of you share Dave’s dissatisfaction with the music industry?
PIKE What musician doesn’t? The music business is fucking retarded, but if you have heart and if music’s your life and you love it like everybody in this room does, you stick it out for the long run anyway. You suffer the consequences for your art, and that can be kind of ugly at times. It fucking hurts not getting any sleep and not being able to talk to your girlfriend and not eating.

REVOLVER Jonny, you’re the youngest guy here. Has seeing how the music industry works been an interesting experience so far?
DAVY It’s pretty weird realizing how much politics there is in it. I mean, I still feel like the shitty metal band that plays in their garage.
MUSTAINE You’re in your room practicing air guitar and you forget to cover your ass with your other hand.

REVOLVER Peter and Alexi, are things better at all in Europe?
LAIHO As far as record sales in general, I think they dropped like 50 percent or something. It’s pretty much the same situation as in the States, which is the Internet. But I don’t have any solution, and I download music.
MUSTAINE Confess your sins.
LAIHO When you download an album, though, you don’t get cover art.
PETER IWERS It’s hard to make a record that has a good cover to inspire people to actually buy the CD. When I grew up, studying covers was the whole thing—taking it back on the bus and studying it. I was a huge Maiden fan, for instance, and their covers had small details that you always wanted to find. We want to keep that.
MUSTAINE I remember looking at the back of Kiss’s Hotter Than Hell, where Gene Simmons is sitting in the chair with the girl, and she had that star over her tit. I’m thinking, That’s a great-looking half of a tit. As a kid, you really knew you were cool when you’d get a doublewide record, because the seeds would roll to the middle. That was part of the whole culture back then, smoking pot and looking at the records and just tripping.

REVOLVER Are people turning to something other than album covers to develop that deeper relationship with the music they listen to? Or are they simply interacting with music in a shallower way?
LAIHO I think in metal it hasn’t changed that much. Metal fans like to actually have the cover. In other music, it’s definitely different.
PIKE My band sells as much vinyl as it does CDs at our merch table. That means there’s kids actually listening to vinyl, which I think is awesome. That’s where you get the true double-gatefold stuff that made my childhood complete.
DAVY With me, personally, I download CDs, and our band kind of started during the download era. So it’s weird almost hearing that from you guys, because we’re just so used to it. We have that younger-generation fanbase who are gonna download our albums, and we’ve just accepted it. The way I look at it, the more people that hear our music, the better. I have no complaints.

REVOLVER Does the new Internet era have its benefits?
LAIHO In life in general, yeah, for sure. But even that’s complicated. For example, there’s like 10 different Alexis on MySpace, and people talk to whoever the fuck it is and think that it’s me. On our last American tour we ended the whole thing in Montreal, and after the show there was this fucking blonde chick with huge fucking breasts just freaking out at the back of our bus. I was like, “Uh, OK.” Then she came up to me and said, “You fucking asshole! I paid $3,000 just to get here!” I was like, “And you are…?” Apparently some Alexi had agreed with this stripper from Alaska that we should have a date, so she had come down to Montreal just to meet me.
DAVY It was some guy on the Internet pretending to be you?
LAIHO Yeah, she was so fucking pissed at me, and I was trying to tell her, “Look, I’m sorry, but it wasn’t me!”
PIKE That’s fucked up.
IWERS One good thing about the downloads is if I have a party and we start talking about music, it’s a good way to get something in a few minutes. I use iTunes, and you get it instantly for $10.

REVOLVER That kind of easy access to the history of recorded music has increased listeners’ knowledge, right?
MUSTAINE Yeah, but the problem is that you still don’t have enough packages like Gigantour that are going out and showing you good bands. You usually get tricked into getting a record with one really good song. But then it’s like a mail-order bride—you take the veil off and she’s got a mustache.

REVOLVER Have the current challenges involved in selling records led to a renewed emphasis on live performance?
MUSTAINE It’s one of the last places we have that we can call our own. I don’t know how much the rest of you guys have played with bands that program shit, but we played with Garbage, and I think they’re an interesting band, but it’s mostly computers. I like the live factor, where you get there and you play what you play. If you can’t play it, then don’t do it.
LAIHO Playing live is what it’s all about. I think making albums is just for the sake of getting to go out there and play live. For me, that’s the ultimate.
PIKE I play in smaller clubs than all these bands, and I make it as sonically devastating as I possibly can for the audience—so they hear it and it’s like getting punched in the stomach. That’s the mentality of what we’re doing.

REVOLVER Are any of you at all worried about how another band’s audience will receive your band on Gigantour?
LAIHO There’s always gonna be that one group of people, but you have to ignore that fucking shit. There’s nothing you can do. You can start crying about it in the microphone, but that just makes you look like a fucking pussy.
PIKE There’s some people you could chop your own head off and throw it at them and they’d still boo you. It’s like, “I just did the ultimate, dude! I sacrificed myself for you, you bitch motherfucker!”
LAIHO There are dudes that actually pay fucking $30 just to get into the show to throw a bottle in my face. I can take that hit, but you just paid 30 bucks for the opportunity.
IWERS When people don’t like what I do, I just try to do it better, to try to show them that we’re good.
MUSTAINE I get heckled by my own fans.

REVOLVER Are Megadeth fans into being exposed to new bands?
MUSTAINE I think so. I think they’re pretty used to me taking out all different types of support acts. Everyone I’ve taken out has gone on to great success: Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, Pantera, Korn. You can go down the list. A lot of our fans know that I picked these guys, so there’s a respect factor there. When we were just out with this In This Moment, Maria Brink was getting some guys saying, “Show us your tits!” She’s a woman, she’s in a concert wearing a dress that looks like Barbie, there’s guys drinking—what are they gonna say? “Show us your tits!” Hopefully they’re not gonna say, “Show us your cock!” But I told her, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Dave is my friend and he invited me here, so you look stupid.’”
PIKE Or she could go the other route and just buy a big dildo and show ’em her cock.

REVOLVER How do you guys handle life on the road? Is it a difficult existence to adapt to?
LAIHO The most important thing is that you have to get along with the other guys in your band. Think about it: You live with these people 24-7 for two years in a row, traveling in this fucking steel tube. You better get along—otherwise it’s gonna be fucked. You also have to put yourself in a certain state of mind. You know you’re not gonna go home for a while, so you better not start crying that you miss your girlfriend or you miss your dog or you miss your whole fucking country. Now that you’re on the road, this is your home and this is your life. End of story.

REVOLVER Does the lifestyle encourage excess, whether it’s sex or drinking or drugs or whatever?
PIKE It can create a pattern, but if you start feeling yourself slipping into that pattern, just get yourself out of it. It’s about the situations you put yourself in. You find yourself in a room full of cocaine, and you’re like, “I could either leave or I could do the whole thing.”
MUSTAINE Or you could sell it all!
LAIHO If you don’t know when you’ve reached the limit—when it’s gotten out of hand—then you’re fucked. I can get pretty crazy on the road sometimes, but the thing—probably the only thing—that keeps me sane is the music. I can’t get all fucked up during the show, because I wanna play.

REVOLVER Is that true for everyone? Is it the music that keeps everything afloat?
IWERS Music and whatever I have going on back home. You just try to adjust on tour and do the best you can. “This is what I do, this is my life, and I’m not gonna fuck it up.”
MUSTAINE This is getting to be like therapy.
LAIHO I don’t judge other characters—band members or crew or anybody—who do whatever the fuck they do. A lot of people drink, do drugs, whatever. The point is as long as you do your fucking job, then it’s OK; it’s not my fucking business. But if you fuck something up because you’re a boozer, then that’s not OK.
PIKE That’s totally unacceptable.
LAIHO I’ve never fucked up a show because of booze, and I never will. If I do, I’ll kick my own ass, that’s for sure.