Dave Mustaine interview (excerpt)

Megadeth mainman Dave Mustaine recently spoke to Jerry Ewing of Total Rock about the group’s upcoming tour, Gigantour, and the “Greatest Hits: Back to the Start” collection, among other topics. Several excerpts from the interview follow:

On Gigantour’s co-headliner, Dream Theater:

“I think because of the musical ability of that group, it transcends the stigmatism of, you know, ‘You’ve gotta have wings of skull-heads in your logo.’ I certainly don’t know much about them, other than what I have heard of them is very, very top-level musicianship, and I have been friends with the drummer for quite a while. It’s odd that I would know this dude for so long and I don’t know nothing about his music. But what I’ve heard since we’ve talked about playing together, I’m pleased that we chose them. Again, it just adds diversity to what’s going on and it makes it a little harder for you to walk away from the stage, because there’s always gonna be something for somebody.

“In America, with a lot of the tours that are going around, there’s something called double selling where you get a band that’s gonna buy the same ticket whether you are the headliner or they would buy the same ticket for the band that’s opening for you. And that doesn’t make much sense, because do you want to attract other people, do you want to get an opportunity to play in front of new fans? That’s why you have an opener. I mean, it’s not like a stand-up comic before a television show where you get an audience primed to laugh at any stupid one-liner from the script to the TV show. You wanna have diversity. It all comes back down to what I said earlier about European and U.K. festivals. I did a festival one time in Finland, or Scandinavia, and it was R.E.M., Oasis, Faith No More, Sheryl Crow, Bob Diddley and Megadeth. Now that is a diversified bill.”