MACHINE HEAD, SHADOWS FALL Members Discuss DISNEY's Metal 'Ban'

October 19, 2007

Jim Abbott of OrlandoSentinel.com reports: As [Orlando, Florida-area] headbangers might have noticed, metal shows (at least some of them) are getting the cold shoulder at House of Blues lately. The Metal Blade 25th Anniversary Tour (with CANNIBAL CORPSE, THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, THE RED CHORD, GOATWHORE and THE ABSENCE) played Club Firestone last week, after being moved from HOB.

MACHINE HEAD's Sept. 17 show was moved from Downtown Disney to Firestone on short notice. SHADOWS FALL was supposed to play HOB this weekend, but that show was booted, too. Instead, the band will play a free concert at Vans Skatepark, starting at noon on Saturday.

House of Blues did offer a prepared statement saying that the company "offers a range of entertainment to match the audience at our venues. It was determined that the mix of entertainment at our two Disney locations should be different from our other venues."

But the bands are talking.

"Hello 1950s," says Robb Flynn of MACHINE HEAD. Opening night of the band's tour in Anaheim was canceled with two days' notice, then moved to a venue in Pomona. That was followed by the same treatment in Orlando.

"We were told that lyrics were deemed inflammatory, and our fans were deemed undesirable," Flynn says, "that they [Disney] are phasing out metal shows, and we weren't going to be playing there. It was the promoter's call to cancel the show under pressure from Disney.

"This was opening night of our tour, and we were pretty bent because the show was being moved 70 miles away, and we had a day to let fans know about the change." Like MACHINE HEAD, SHADOWS FALL has a history of successful HOB shows on Disney properties, so member Brian Fair was surprised that the band apparently is no longer welcome.

"We just don't understand what the actual policy is now," Fair says. "It's just, 'These shows are gone, and that's that.' We had to scramble to do something because we'd sold hundreds of tickets for each show." Some bands, such as MEGADETH and ALICE IN CHAINS, still managed to meet the HOB standards, but the Disney "ban" is becoming common knowledge among promoters who call me.

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