GW:If Metal is as dead as so many critics have claimed, how come this tour has done so well despite having virtually no press or MTV coverage?
Dimebag Darell:It goes all the way back to when it started, man: If your a fan of heavy music then you'll always be a fan-you never lose your desire for it. It's a core base, and they come for the f*ckin' drive, they come for the supercharge. You can't get that with any other form of music. Thanks to the loyalty of our fans, there are still bands like us around.
J. Yuenger:Remember in the early Eightys, whenever Iron Maiden played a concert in your town, the next day you'd see all the kids in your high school wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts. Now, there's a band that attracts 20,000 people to thier shows, and every kid in the city has one of thier t-shirts, yet you'd never see them on TV or in a magazine.
Darrell:This tour is proof that you don't gotta be cool with the media or all over the radio and MTV to still have fans. I mean, when Phil asks the crowd "Is anybody gonna come see another Pantera show?" that's the loudest they get all f*ckin' night. And we're talkin' about kids that get here at four or five o'clock in the day for the show. We don't go on until eleven at night, but they're still juiced up. Think of those dudes up in the front row, man. When was the last time you stood in one place for six or seven hours and didn't eat, drink, sh*t, or piss? I mean, those motherf*ckers are there for a reason: This is the place to get it, right here!
GW:Touring seems to have become an increasingly risky financial gamble for bands these days.
Yuenger:Yeah, there's a million bands out there on the road, and most of them are doing bad buisness. The downside of the computer and MTV age is that, to a lot of people, live performance isn't such an issue anymore. There are a lot of factors other than modern technology involved, too, though-like the problem of actually putting on a show that's worth watching. Right now it's very "stylish" to not put on a show, it's very "stylish" to not be entertaining-
Darrell:-with three f*cking strings on your guitar and the D string purposly tuned a little flat [Laughs]. There's no guts to that stuff at all. There's no heart, there's no soul and there's no spine whatsoever. And