MACHINE HEAD Guitarist Talks 'The Blackening', HEAVEN AND HELL Tour

Colonel Angus of Wormwood Chronicles recently conducted an interview with MACHINE HEAD guitarist Phil Demmel. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Wormwood Chronicles: You're not a political band but a couple of the tracks on the new CD ["The Blackening"] are very political. Was the current political climate in the U.S. the inspiration for those tunes?

Phil Demmel: Yeah, definitely. The world is kind of a fucked up place. There's a lot of things going on right now. I think we wanted to get away from… Robb was writing a lot of personal topics on the last couple of records. He wanted to bring it back to the first couple of records that had more social issues so we're talking about the Christian right-wing coalition that's going on. It's hard for the four of us to agree on a certain subject, be it politics, religion, sports, whatever. There are a couple of things that we do agree on and that is we are all against this war. So that is where a couple of the songs came from.

Wormwood Chronicles: "The Blackening" has made it onto the internet before its release. What are your thoughts on music downloading?

Phil Demmel: Well, I look at it like this. There are going to be those kids and people that are not going to buy CDs anyway. They are doing us a service by going "Hey, this album is great." They are able to test drive it and give us a good review. You gotta have a good record for it to sell anyways. This is actually serving as a vehicle for us. There's a huge buzz off of this leakage of the record. Those kids aren't going to buy it anyway but hopefully they will come to the show or they'll buy a T-shirt.

Wormwood Chronicles: You will be opening up for the HEAVEN AND HELL tour. How did that come about?

Phil Demmel: We were up for supporting MEGADETH. MEGADETH was going to go out and do a headlining States run. We were up for that and we were going to support them. Then the HEAVEN AND HELL thing came up and they were going to take MEGADETH with them. So we were [like] "There goes our post-release States run." Then we got submitted for it. I was like the pessimist, "We're not going to get it; they are not going to take us out." Dave [McClain], in particular, was going, "Yes, they are, we're gonna get it." Sure enough, we landed it. We are all so stoked because we're such big fans of that Dio era. It's amazing. We're super stoked.

Wormwood Chronicles: What is your favorite "Spinal Tap" moment from your career?

Phil Demmel: You mean, my absolute worst, like my most horrific moment? Well, I'll give you a "Spinal Tap" moment. I've got a scar on my shin; you can barely see it now. It was when I was in VIO-LENCE. We were playing Pittsburgh. I was jumping off the monitors, so I ran across the stage and leapt off the wedge and it gave in. I fell backwards and plowed the whole drum set. The songs stopped and the next day, we wore peg pants back in the day, so the peg pants were all tight like this [Phil grabs his pant leg and pulls it tight around his shin], and you could see this huge lump that came across like this [made a motion that it went from almost his knee to his ankle]. Yeah, it hurt but I'll never forget it.

Read the entire interview at www.wormwoodchronicles.com.