Here are the New Releases for the week of September 7th, 2010
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CONFRONT: What are some of the pros and cons of playing festival tours compared to playing in venues?

SHAWN: There’s more pros then cons. You’re getting to expose your music in front of a ton of people and these are people who may not necessarily be into your band. With all these different bands playing hopefully they’ll stick around for our show and if we can get kids to dig us then it’s a good thing. The only thing that’s a little trying for our crew is that everything is a fast pace. There’s no sound check, it’s basically just technical stuff but we’re so used to that stuff that we don’t think of it a whole lot. We just go up there and do our thing. It’s basically just pros. There are so many kids out there having a great time. How can that suck?

CONFRONT: What’s it like to headline a show like this?

SHAWN: It’s great.

CONFRONT: Especially since you’re from Montreal?

SHAWN: I’m really proud. I’m glad something’s finally being done. I know this is the second installment of it. It makes me proud to see all these kids out there and they’re really loud and the bands are taking notice of that. Hopefully this will blossom into a yearly festival.

CONFRONT: You have lots of experiences as well.

SHAWN: Yes!

CONFRONT: Do you have a favorite one? Is there one that stands out in your mind?

SHAWN: Oh yeah god there’s so many good festivals. Probably Download festival in England. That would probably be my favorite. I’ve done that festival three times now and the average amount of people is anywhere between 80 and 100 thousand. They’re just rabid fans that go nuts when we play. We always have a great time. It’s always been a really good festival for us. I really enjoy it, I dig this. You get to see a bunch of your friends in other bands.

CONFRONT: Is there anyone you’re looking forward to seeing?

SHAWN: I missed Anvil and that kind of sucked. We drove up and they were playing their last song. I know a lot of these guys. There’s also Rob Halford, I haven’t seen him yet. Once we’re done here I’ll go catch a few tunes. Testament played before, Mastodon is coming up. We’re out on tour with Slayer and Testament and we’re all playing on this bill. I’d like to see Alice Cooper and he’s playing tonight. We try to see as much as we can in the time frame that we have to rehearse and do interviews. I try to see as much as I can.

CONFRONT: The music industry has been changing drastically lately, have you seen an affect on your band?

SHAWN: It’s affected every band because of internet piracy. It’s a fact. This is the third interview today and it’s all we’ve been talking about.

CONFRONT: Yeah it’s a huge subject now.

SHAWN: The whole industry is down about 50%. Well I think it is. I could be wrong; it could be a little lower. It’s crap. It’s a drag. It’s like going into a lot and taking a car. You’re just going to drive off in it without paying? It affects everything in the music industry. It affects the record labels which say “Okay you’re only selling this amount of records instead of what you did 5 years ago. So now the tour budget has to be lower”. It affects everything. It affects the production of a record, “Oh we can only give you this much money because you only sold this amount of copies.” So it really affects everything and that’s a real drag to me. I hope someone fixes the problem. When I was a kid we rode a train for an hour to buy a record, that’s just what we did. Our fans support us greatly and it’s not the fans that I’m talking about it’s the ones that say “Oh yeah I’ll get the new record from a buddy or iTunes or a torrent site.” It’s not just affecting music; it’s affecting DVD’s, movies & games! My son has all the Play station and Xbox and he’s like “I can get the new game off a friend” and I’m like “How can you do that? How can you rip all that information off of a game?” It’s amazing. That affects that industry. People have been downloading music many more years then they’ve been downloading movies or games and they’re going to suffer too and that sucks. It affects all of us. We keep plugging away and doing our thing and we’re trying to stay positive. That’s the truth.

CONFRONT: What advice do you have for up and coming bands with all of these changes?

SHAWN: That’s a hard question to answer. Try not to get disgruntled by the fact that it’s going to be harder for you to get signed, it’s going to be harder for you to get any type of tour budget, it’s going to be harder get any decent type of recording budget. Try and stick in there and make it happen. It can still happen and there’s still bands that are successful but it’s just on a bit of a smaller scale. Success is relative too; you don’t need to sell 8 million records to be a success. You can sell a fraction of that and still make money and tour successfully. All your fans are going to come and see you live and your records sale isn’t a reflection of your fan base because we have tons of kids at all our shows so we know they’re there. We have a whole new generation of kids at our shows and we’re grateful for that. For the scene as a whole just support the bands and I know it’s difficult because times are tough with the economy but times have been tough in the past too and people still support the bands.

CONFRONT: On top of that CD’s really aren’t that expensive anymore.

SHAWN: Exactly, they’ve all come down in price to try and get people to buy them. It’s a difficult thing to talk about and a lot of people are scared to talk about it. I’m not because I know it’s the truth and I’m not being an asshole about it and that but it’s affecting the industry right across the board from the most successful artist right down to that young metal band trying to get a deal. It affects so many different areas that so many people don’t even realize. That’s the travesty. It’s not just “Okay I got the new record from this band and I got it for real.” It just snowballs into this giant snowball of doom. It’s a drag but I’m hopeful that it’ll change and become better. I say we go back to vinyl.

CONFRONT: We’re writing a feature article on metal and we’ve noticed that a lot of people judge metal music and they put bands and their fans into a category…

SHAWN: Right.

CONFRONT: Are you trying to send a particular message with your music?

SHAWN: I don’t know if we’re trying to send any kind of message. We just make a record of the best tunes we can and we hope that our fans will buy it and dig it. Our track record is very good and a quarter of a century later we’re still doing well so we must be doing something right.

CONFRONT: Well from here there seems to be a lot of metals fans, even here in Montreal.

SHAWN: Well Montreal has always been a great city for Metal. I think it’s one of the best cities in North America, if not one of the best cities for metal in the world. I grew up here so it’s not a surprise to me or Megadeth. Our track record here has always been great and now we’re headlining this amazing festival. I don’t necessarily think we’re trying to relay any message except for the message of music. We’re trying to write great tunes in hopes that we’ll get more fans. I think that’s what every band wants to do. Maybe other bands have different messages which are great but we don’t have a specific message to be honest.

CONFRONT: How has your music evolved over the past couple of years? With the metal scene evolving so much how has it affected your sound?

SHAWN: It’s cyclical. It took a nosedive in the 1990’s. How old are you?

CONFRONT: I’m 20.

SHAWN: You’re 20 so you’re still young. It was so successful in the 80’s with the MTV generation. There was so much great stuff happening in the 80’s and so much success so it had to take the inevitable nosedive in the 1990’s when grunge kind of obliterated anything associated with metal.  A lot of bands split up because of that which really sucked but here we are in 2010. Every year really since about 1999-2000 it started to slowly creep out again and resurface. Every year it seems to be getting more and more powerful again. With us touring for the last 6 years that I’ve been in this band, I’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of fans coming out to shows. These fans are so true and so hardcore to this music that even though it kind of took a nosedive the core of the fans always stayed there and now we have a whole new generation of young kids, such as yourself, who dig this type of music. We’re grateful for that. We see 14 and 15 year old kids who are kids of people who dug Megadeth in the 80’s. We’re real happy to have a new generation of fans and not become this nostalgia act because that’s not who we are. We’re about presenting new material and being valid, again we must be doing something right.

CONFRONT: It’s great to watch fans at these types of shows, I’ve never seen a fan base have so much fun. Metal fans in general.

SHAWN: Right! It’s band after band of great bands playing. I’m really glad that this is happening here. This is such a great city to do this; it’s amazing that nobody thought of this 15-20 years ago. They’re doing it now and obviously it’s a success and I hope this happens every year.

CONFRONT: Do you have any regrets about your career? Anything you’d like to accomplish that you haven’t yet done?

SHAWN: Nope. I’ve done everything and more in the six years that I’ve been in this band. I didn’t join Megadeth until I was 38 years old and by then I was well into my marriage with two growing kids so I never really thought that I was going to be successful at this level. When I got the call to join Megadeth it was such a thrill for me that everything has just been icing on the cake. I’m able to make a living and support my family doing what I love to do. How many people can say that? There’s a small percentage of humanity who can actually say “Yeah I love my job and this is what I was put on this Earth to do.” It’s kind of had to grumble about anything.

CONFRONT: So you’re just grateful about everything.

SHAWN: I am, yeah! I’m a happy person. I’m happy to be doing this and to be successful at it.

CONFRONT: What are the upcoming plans for the band after this festival.

SHAWN: We’re in tour mode basically until the end of this year, on and off. We’re talking into things. We don’t have anything etched in stone. We’re set up until mid-October with Anthrax and Slayer. After that we’re just talking about what we want to do and I know there will be more touring involved. I think next year we’ll be finished the world tour and take a break and write the new record and start all over again.

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Written By Melissa & Jenia

Alice Cooper - Copyright EVENKO

Heavy Metal began to take shape as its own genre of music in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple started to make their appearances. These artists are considered to be the main founders of this type of music, which is characterized by a highly amplified and distorted sound, complicated guitar riffs and a heavy drum beat. Since then, many sub-categories have been created such as; thrash, death, glam, black and power metal.

This type of music has continued to expand across the world. Places like the UK, Australia, Japan, parts of the States and Montreal have begun to hold yearly festivals due to the overwhelming and increasingly large fan bases.

Although Metal bands tour across Canada, Montreal is especially well known for Heavy MTL, which just completed its second incredibly successful two day festival. In 2008, over 35,000 fans made their way to Parc Jean Drapeau to watch bands that ranged from Iron Maiden and Mastodon, to Mötley Crüe and Three Days Grace.

In 2009 Heavy MTL was cancelled because too many bands had played venue shows in Montreal throughout the year. It became impossible to create a line-up when so many of the acts had just recently passed through town. That being said, the 2010 festival just wrapped up 2 weeks ago and was an enormous success.

CONFRONT Magazine was given two press passes for the weekend. The two of us gladly agreed to cover the event; we knew it would open our eyes to this genre of music which we were quite unfamiliar with. We’ll admit it; we were pretty intimidated when we first arrived at Parc Jean Drapeau. The music was completely different from what we have on our iPods and we stuck out like sore thumbs in the crowd. It didn’t take long for us to realize the appeal, though. Neither of us had ever seen thousands of people having so much fun – even if it did involve lots of moshing, crowd surfing and injuries.

Rob Zombie - Copyright Tim Snow, Evenko

Throughout the weekend, we had the opportunity to interview headlining bands Megadeth and KORN, as well as smaller but extremely talented acts; Airbourne, Baptized in Blood and Deadly Apples.

All the groups that we sat down with have lots of experience touring festivals as well as venue shows, and we were curious to know what the pros and cons were. The main response was incredibly positive with only a few negative points. Shawn Drover, drummer for Megadeth was the first to touch upon the major pro to festivals:

“You’re getting to expose your music in front of a ton of people and these are people who may not necessarily be into your band. With all these different bands playing hopefully they’ll stick around for our show and if we can get kids to dig us then it’s a good thing” he explained about playing for big crowds.

Win tickets for Vans Warped Tour and Heavy MTL! thanks to Evenko.ca
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Judith sits down with the band’s bassist on April 29th 2008 @ the Montreal Bell Center
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