ICED EARTH Mainman Says He Would 'Drop Everything' To Support Bigger Band On Tour

ICED EARTH mainman Jon Schaffer was interviewed by Eddie Trunk on the "Friday Night Rocks" show on New York's Q104.3 FM this past Friday (May 20). A couple of excerpts from the interview follow:

On his back problems which has caused ICED EARTH to postpone all touring activities in support of the last album "The Glorious Burden":

"It's better than it ever has been… I mean, in the last couple of years, let's say. And I've had probably a good three-month stretch here with few problems.

"I had a procedure done in November of last year — it kind of came to that after the touring and stuff. It's just a pain, man… I mean, it really is. It kind of put a stop in the momentum that we had a little bit. [Then again] had we had an opportunity to open for a bigger band, then we would have done it. I would have just gone out and suffered. I mean, I've done that plenty of times.

"I had a neck injury back in '96, I had surgery on that in 2000, and for four years we were out touring, and I just dealt with it, getting cortizone shots in my neck and all kinds of stupid crap that made it worse. But I would have made that sacrifice had the right opportunity come up, but we just didn't have that.

"We're constantly being submitted by our agent to bigger bands to be a support band. ICED EARTH has opened for two bands in our entire career, that's it: BLIND GUARDIAN in 1990 in Europe and MEGADETH here in the States at the very end, and we were playing in gymnasiums in Wisconsin out in he cornfield. It was, like, their last 10 shows or whatever. It was back in… It was on the 'Horror Show', in that period, 2001… We've basically done this on our own, and we've tried many times to be a support band, and for some reason, things don't seem to happen. So I don't think that we would have done a whole lot more touring in the States as ICED EARTH headlining because at some point you're just preaching to the choir, and if you do that too much, it becomes redundant and it's not special for the fans to come out and see anymore. I've never been the kind of guy that wants to lead the band to overexposure, but at the same time, we need to reach new people. But that requires opening for a band that draws a bigger crowd. And like I said, if the right opportunity was to come up, we would drop everything right now and go do that, but we just haven't had that chance. I mean, in some ways, I do feel like the momentum got stifled a little bit, but then again, it really didn't. Because, like I said, if METALLICA called and said, 'Hey, you wanna open?' We're gonna do it, obviously."

On the upcoming ICED EARTH DVD, "Gettysburg (1863)":

"It's actually been in the works for quite a while from the idea of being an audio thing only — doing a Surround Sound mix of one of my epics, which is something [producer] Jim Morris and I have been wanting to do for years. I mean, we've been talking about this since we did 'The Suffering' trilogy on 'The Dark Saga'. I mean, the kind of music I write, we've always talked about how fun it would be to have that atmosphere in the Surround Sound. The original idea was to have a bonus disc in the release of 'The Glorious Burden' and just have it be a 5.1 mix of the 'Gettysburg' track, but that was gonna make it really too expensive, so the idea just [started] from that snowballed into, 'Let's create a video.' It is a very different thing for a metal band to release because of all that extra historical stuff on it, but I think it's unique and it's cool. The day wil come, too, when ICED EARTH does our concert DVD — that will happen, just not yet, and mainly for contractual reasons, because of our back catalog. Once those rights to re-record those old songs come back to me, then we could do 'em in a DVD format or another live album, or whatever, and release them, but it would have been a contractual nightmare to try and do that now. But this is something that I think… it's gonna appeal to a lot of people besides the metal crowd, but I also think that it's the kind of thing that probably won't appeal to every metal fan. I mean, nobody's holding a shotgun saying, 'You have to buy this.' It's just it's… for the real-hard die-hard collectors and stuff, I think it's a good thing and at the end of the day, if it inspires people, man, that's what it's all about."