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Monster Truck, as answered by keys player Brandon. Catch Monster Truck in the UK with Black Stone Cherry, kicking off in Cardiff Thursday December 6th. Slash’s Greeting (2012) Way back in the old days of Monster Truck, when we were only the four band members and a merch guy in the van and trailer and one hotel room, we had driven 45 hours straight from home to Portland, Oregon to begin our tour opening for Slash and Myles Kennedy. We arrived to the venue in the mid afternoon and after barely setting our bags down in our dressing room, Slash himself walked in, shook all our hands and personally welcomed us to the tour and said that if we needed anything we should let him or any of his crew know. Never before or since has anyone EVER done this. What a badass. Golfing with Cantrell (2013-2014) Beginning in summer 2013, we did a few tours in North America opening for Alice in Chains. The whole of the AIC band and crew are super awesome people and they took us in and we were part of the family in no time. They play a lot of golf and once they learned Steve and I played, we were playing too. On subsequent tours with them, I got smart and shipped my clubs with the gear. Because the crew couldn’t always play on show days, more often than not it was just me and Jerry. We were quite evenly matched, so it turned out that we were a good twosome, although he often scored better, because I refused to take any mulligans, despite all his coaxing. Losing Power Onstage — At Our Biggest Show Ever (2017) We did a couple tours supporting our buds in Billy Talent, first in arenas in Germany at the end of 2016 and then across Canada in early 2017. By the time we hit the Air Canada Centre (now Scotiabank Arena) in Toronto, which we’d never played before and is the biggest and most important arena play in Canada, we were in really great shape and really excited. Not only was it the biggest show of the tour, but also basically our hometown show, and the show with all the industry there. So needless to say, tensions were running high. Four songs into our set, stage power cut out for only a quick second, but it blew a bunch of fuses — I lost a keyboard, Steve lost his in ear monitors, Marv lost his bass amp. We were absolutely rattled but carried on like pros, so much so that not a single person noticed, even our FOH engineer. Deep Purple (2017) Our final tour of the Sittin Heavy cycle was pretty much the best support tour you could ask for — six weeks (in May and June) supporting Deep Purple in arenas in Europe. It’s not only the best time to be on my favourite continent, but Purple takes lots of days off, so it was almost like being on vacation. We had multiple days off in some of our favourite cites. We had a total of four off days in Prague. We had great night out in Hamburg with Chad from Nickelback and our buddies Wintersleep. I had one of my favourite nights ever at Berghain in Berlin. But of course the highlight of the tour was meeting Don Airey and seeing him play keyboards up close. He was such a wonderful and accommodating guy and I’m so grateful to him for being as good to me as he was. My favourite thing he said was in response to me describing some B3 tricks I saw him doing, ‘Jon Lord taught me that, which you can know, but it’s a secret so don’t tell anyone!’ The Jet to Cabo (2018) We played a run of shows with Nickelback at the Hard Rock in Vegas. Knowing it’s never smart to fly home the day after the last show, I was booked to fly home later, therefore allowing me to make the most of the last night, and because y’know, it’s like, Vegas, baby. Somewhere around dawn, while passing a bottle of Patron back and forth and watching the sun rise over the strip from his suite, Chad asked if I had any plans the next day and that I should come to his place in Cabo and ‘the jet’ was leaving at 3. And so began the story of my first trip on a private plane.]]>
