ANTHRAX Singer Talks About Touring With MÖTLEY CRÜE And DIO

ANTHRAX vocalist John Bush recently spoke to KNAC.com about the group's latest CD, "The Greater of Two Evils", and touring, among other topics. Several excerpts from the interview follow:

KNAC.com: During those times when maybe a fan irritates you in a certain way or a guy from a different band says something that you don't like, do you ever think of speaking your peace through the press? Does anyone ever win a situation like that?

John Bush: "Is it ever a good thing to do? Hmm, I don't know. God love Dave Mustaine — I think he is an awesome talent and an all around great guy, but there is no denying that in the early days of MEGADETH all of the comments he threw METALLICA's way probably ended up helping them in some capacity. I don't know. It's just not my style. There have been plenty of bands that I've disliked, and there's been bands that I've loved. There are things that I appreciate that a band does and things that I think suck, but at the end of the day, what am I going to do? Am I going to go to the press with that? Who gives a shit? It's just my opinion. Just because I'm in a band doesn't mean that my opinion is any more important than anyone else's. I think of the bands who do that, about eighty percent of the time it comes back as a negative."

KNAC.com: On one hand some of it can make for a good story, but on the other, you run the risk of sounding like you're whining.

John Bush: "Yeah, it sounds like sour grapes or sounds like you're bitter or something. Why would you do that? I just seems kinda cheesy to me."

KNAC.com: Can you clarify what exactly happened at the end of that MÖTLEY CRÜE/MEGADETH tour a few years back? Did it end badly?

John Bush: "It ended badly in the sense that the tour wasn't doing very well. At the time there was a lot of competition during the summer of 2000. It was really busy. We were probably playing bigger venues than the bands at that time should have played. Ticket sales were struggling, and MÖTLEY wanted to cut everybody's pay. We couldn't afford to do that because then we would have been losing money. I mean, that was one of the reasons we did the tour was to make a little money—not shitloads — just some. Now, to take a loss to do that tour would have been an error, so three weeks in when they came to us wanting to cut our pay in half we couldn't do it. We weren't going to take tour support to do that tour. It would have been the stupidest thing we could ever do."

KNAC.com: That tour support would have basically just meant taking a loan from the record company, right?

John Bush: "Yeah, it all has to be paid back. For ANTHRAX to ever do that, it would have to be a situation where a group or us is playing to an audience who has never heard them before. If the case was where we were playing with a younger band like KORN or SYSTEM OF A DOWN where we would be playing in front of people who had never heard us, then it might make sense, but this wasn't like that. All we had out at that time was a greatest hits record that wasn't even that recent. It just didn't make a lot of sense to do it at that time. We were bummed because we had blocked off ten weeks for this tour, and we were back in three. It kind of screwed us up."

KNAC.com: What was it like recently hitting the road with DIO?

John Bush: "I had actually done a tour with him with ARMORED SAINT. It was great to be on the road with him and to be able to watch him every night because he is such an unbelievable singer. It was awesome. Again, that was a tour that probably wasn't exposing us to a whole new fan base, but we were also able to go out and play and make a little bit of money. We were just rocking out for the fans and doing what we do best."

Read John Bush's entire interview with KNAC.com at this location.