Ex-GUNS N' ROSES Guitarist BUCKETHEAD To Perform At Cave In Tennessee

Former GUNS N' ROSES guitarist Brian "Buckethead" Carroll will perform at an underground cave venue in Tennessee this summer.

Buckethead, who was in the Axl Rose-fronted outfit between 2000 and 2004, will play at the famed The Caverns on Friday, July 26.

The Caverns is located between Nashville and Chattanooga in the middle of nowhere — Grundy County. The "city" where The Caverns calls home is Pelham, Tennessee with 334 residents, so we're talking about a destination venue that's very much off the beaten path.

For cave concerts, The Caverns can accommodate 850 people in padded chair seating or up to 1,200 people for standing-room only shows.

A venue pre-sale begins this Thursday, March 21 at 10 a.m. CT.

Fans can sign up to register for an early access code

Tickets, camping passes (yes, on-site camping is available),yurts and other upgrades go on sale to the general public this Friday, March 22 at 10 a.m. CT.

Buckethead, an eccentric musician who wears a fried-chicken bucket on his noggin and talks only through a hand puppet, quit GUNS N' ROSES in 2004 after becoming fed up with GUNS' inability to complete an album or tour, his manager told MTV at the time.

Three years ago, GUNS N' ROSES guitarist Richard Fortus talked about what it was like to work with Buckethead for a couple of years in the early 2000s.

"Bucket is very musical, but I think a lot of guys like that — phenomenal, prodigious talent — they're not necessarily… I think Bucket's music is great," Fortus said. "What he does on his own, he's out there, but he did understand how to make three guitars work, and that's a very difficult thing. And he would lay out and just stand there and be weird and Bucket-y, and then he would come in on the choruses, and it would be huge. He got that; he understood that. [He's] a phenomenal talent. But the thing is, socially, guys like Bucket spend so much time in their bedroom practicing that they don't really — it's just different for them socially.

"Being in a band, you've gotta relate to people," Fortus continued. "And I think Bucket struggled with that. I always got along with him, but I think he really had a tough time with that."

In January 2022, former GUNS N' ROSES guitarist DJ Ashba, who joined the band in March 2009 following the departure of Robin Finck, claimed that he took the gig with the Rose-fronted outfit because "seeing a guy" like Buckethead "run around with a chicken bucket on his head, it's, like, to me, that took the coolness out of the band that I grew up loving, and that's one of the main reasons I wanted to get in there and try to do whatever I could do to get justice, bring back that reckless rock and roll vibe of what Slash was all about and GUNS N' ROSES was all about. To me, it was in a sense losing that thing that I loved about the band," he said. "And I love Buckethead as a guitarist. No disrespect at all — it's just, in my opinion, he didn't really fit the band."

Two months after BLABBERMOUTH.NET and other media outlets reported on Ashba's comments, he appeared on The SDR Show, where he was asked to elaborate on his apparent criticism of his predecessor.

"The media, they twist every headline," DJ said. "I didn't mean that in any bad way. Buckethead could play circles around me."

When host Ralph Sutton said that Buckethead is "a phenomenal guitarist" whose "look didn't go with GUNS N' ROSES," Ashba agreed, saying: "And that's all I was saying. No discrediting him at all. I just, as a fan, that just didn't… that wasn't rock and roll, the reckless rock and roll band that we all grew up on. So, you know, to me, it's, like, I just didn't feel like he personally fit. And that was just my opinion."