Tour Diary
Oct. 20th, 2022
Greetings to everyone, and Happy Holidays to all! The touring cycle for our new record, “The Sick, The Dying…And The Dead” has just begun, even if we are winding down the year for 2022, and only have one more show this year. We still have the outstanding show for the fabulous Megadeth Fans of Mexico and all surrounding areas that will be attending our concert in Mexico City.
Before I talk anything about new and future dates, I’d like to take this time to reflect on all of the touring we did over the year and thank our agents; Rod MacSween of ITB – Intl., and Pete Pappalardo and Justin Hirschman of AGI – N. America for so many awesome opportunities to show off Megadeth’s performances, and eventually this new album “The Sick, The Dying…And The Dead.”
I would like to thank our touring crew, all…well most of the bands we’ve played with over 2022, all their touring staff, except for a few random people, and all the stagehands around the globe that don’t ever get the thanks they really deserve. One crew member that I must give enormous thanks to is Maxi Williams for helping us on the last night of the tour.
More on that later…
You see, our monitor engineer, Stein Guitton was diagnosed with cancer before this last tour leg started, and we had our record producer, Chris Rakestraw, jump in and run one part of what Stein did, but we still needed to hire another monitor engineer. Try doing that a few days before you leave on a ten-week tour, and you get my drift on how hard it was to replace him.
Chris recommended a Front Of House engineer to run monitors for us, and although similar, it is not the same. Mike receives my sincere thanks and cheers for doing the best he could and doing a great job at that. Unfortunately, Murphy showed up last night, and before we even took the stage all four band members and all of the crews’ wireless audio monitoring earpieces stopped working. MegaCrew went into action, and so did the fantastic crew members of 5FDP, especially Maxi Williams.
Audio gear on the stage is different from Front Of House gear, and you guessed it, the last night of the tour, some Stage Audio gear failed, and Maxi was on it! He knew what to look for, and star
ted the incredibly high-pressure chore of finding out what failed. The team seemed to have found the problem and got us back up on stage. But that would be too simple…
We were supposed to start at 8:00 and had been starting a few minutes early, so when 8;03 ticked by, we were already 5 minutes late, and I said cut out “We’ll Be Back,” and continued to wait. At approximately 8:15-8:30 we got the green light to take the stage, and we went out, and from the first note, nothing worked for Dirk, or me. I didn’t see, but I heard it didn’t work for James or Kiko either.
We got the call at approximately 8:10 over our in-ear monitors to leave the stage and so we did…
At 8:35 I said we will need to cut out several more songs, let’s start back up with “Trust,” and we did. We played about 13 more minutes and the concert was over for us, because 8:57 was on the stage clocks. Pissed off, frustrated, and almost feeling defeated, we waved and said goodbye, as we walked in total frustration back to the dressing room for the last time this tour.
But the night was not over yet…
Not by any means…
Ivan Moody had asked me to come out onto the stage and I had said earlier that we were leaving right away for early flights, and I heard this next part from our crew.
“…Evidently, FFDP played a very short period of time, the electricity was plaguing them too, and ultimately, the power blew when an allegedly drunk driver hit a power pole, knocking out the power for several city blocks…”
I hope this didn’t happen. I really grew to like Ivan, Zoltan, and the more than 70-person crew (I think).
Love and bruises,
Dave Mustaine
