HELLYEAH's TOM MAXWELL Says U.S. Festival Tours Don't Have Enough Variety
February 16, 2015In The Now Magazine's Tom Lamb's recently conducted an interview with HELLYEAH guitarist Tom Maxwell. You can now watch the chat below.
Speaking about HELLYEAH's touring plans for this summer, Maxwell said: "There's word, and they're talking about us maybe doing one of the summer tours here, but when we saw… I don't know, man… To me, these summer tours that are… Ozzfest did it right. A lot of great bands broke from that. And I'm not saying that the bands that are playing the summer tours now aren't good, but I just don't think there's enough variety. It's, like, you get the same fucking bands year after year after year, it becomes just kind of stagnant to me. I would rather just pair up with a couple of other bands and go do our own tour and not worry about all the bullshit. There's a lot that I don't agree with [on] these summer tours… 'festival tours,' they call 'em."
He continued: "It's such a racket. The promoters, everybody are just fucking robbing the bands blind. Some bands, they wanna do it, 'cause it's, like, there's all these people there, so you're almost forced that you have to say, 'We've gotta play,' even though they're fucking shorting us big-time. It's just a racket."
Maxwell went on to praise Ozzfest, Ozzy Osbourne's major touring festival which ran from 1996 to 2007, but has opted for either single-destination stops or minor runs in recent years before.
"[Ozzfests] were cool," he said. "It just seemed like there was, like… Every year you were looking forward to seeing who was on the bill. You always knew that Ozzy was gonna headline, so there was no fucking pissing match of who's this and that. Or [BLACK] SABBATH [was gonna headline]. So it was cool, man. I was fortunate enough to play [Ozzfest] that one year [with my former band NOTHINGFACE] — it was 2003 that we did it — and it was just great. It was so much fun."
HELLYEAH's latest album, "Blood For Blood", was the band's first release since parting ways with Tribbett and Kahaha in February 2014.
The new members of HELLYEAH are bassist Kyle Sanders and touring guitarist Christian Brady.
"Blood For Blood" sold around 17,000 copies in its first week of release to land at No. 18 on the Billboard chart.
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