You can't have Halloween without horror stories. To mark the spookiest day of the year, Tidal reached out to several musicians to get their most terrifying tour stories. One of them comes courtesy of Mastodon's Troy Sanders, who got hit in the face with an Italian sausage sandwich while opening for Slayer in Las Vegas, in 2004. "The first note of the first song of our set — the timing couldn't have been better — I was hit in the bridge of my nose by an Italian sausage in a bun with hot mustard," the bassist recalled, going on to detail the precise moment of impact: "It kind of broke apart on my face, and it fell right down below me, and it all landed on my pedal board. I look down at my pedal board and I see bits of hot dog bun and bits of sausage and mustard."
"It took a second for me to wrap my head around what I think just happened," he continued. "Then, I remember my next thought was — I was blown away that hot Italian sausages are sold at this particular Slayer show. That was impressive. Then, the third split second later, I realized that there's spicy mustard in my eyeballs. [I was] blown away that someone would throw an entire, probably expensive, sausage at me. We hadn't even played one note! How can you hate us yet?"
The mustard stains may have faded, but the mystery remains: Who, or what, threw the sausage? Was it an irate Slayer fan? A phantom foodie? A rich ghost? The world may never know. In the meantime, here's hoping that Sanders walks away from Mastodon's upcoming tour unscathed, and mustard-free.
For more Sanders, you can watch him enjoy hot tubs and look back on "special moments" in the hilarious video below:
