THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN Frontman Talks About GIGANTOUR, Touring With DAVE MUSTAINE

Lambgoat recently conducted an interview with THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN frontman Greg Puciato. Several Gigantour/Dave Mustaine-related excerpts from the chat follow:

Lambgoat: Is Dave Mustaine REALLY clean?

Greg Puciato: "You know, I couldn't really tell. We aren't really a bro down band so it wasn't like we were trying to get bombed with Dave Mustaine, but I didn't see him drink or do anything. He had a pastor walking around with him on tour and riding on his bus, I think to help keep him on the straight and narrow path. The amount of visible drug intake on that tour was surprisingly low, but then again like I said we don't really hang out a lot anyway so if there was blow being hoovered off 50-year-old metal moms in the back of a FEAR FACTORY bus, I was probably sitting on a fucking laptop eating a hotdog."

Lambgoat: What's the most insane thing you saw Mustaine do during the Gigantour?

Greg Puciato: "This story is insane but not in the way you would expect. One day we were all in the catering area of this club — fuck, what was it… the one in Milwaukee, Eagles Ballroom? I think that's it. Well in the catering room there were all these collages on the walls with pictures of musicians on them. Right in the center of one there was a big picture of glory days James Hetfield. Like 1987 Hetfield with the white ESP explorer, roaring like a lion. Mustaine walks in and starts looking at all the collages, gets to that one, and just stares at the Hetfield picture for like three minutes. We're all like, 'Holy shit, look, look, he's gonna have a fucking freak-out or a breakdown or something.' Then he walks over to an open window, leans on the windowsill, and just stares out the window for 15-20 minutes. It was pretty intense. Just the shit that must have been going through his head. He was obviously affected. It was crazy just seeing 25 years of metal history colliding in that dude's head."

Lambgoat: Really though, I'd like to know what being on Gigantour was like. Do you dig MEGADETH?

Greg Puciato: "I think 'Rust In Peace' is one of the few perfect thrash metal albums of that period, along with '...And Justice For All' and 'Reign In Blood'. I definitely wore that album out when I was a kid. They lost it after that though. That was their perfect album. Gigantour was pretty bizarre. We had never done anything like that in the U.S. Never really done a metal tour like that. Gigantour was like this for us: we get there, stage hands and production people treat us like shit because they know we are gonna make their lives hard for 25 minutes a night, we go onstage, 4,000 forty-five year old dudes who still live in their mom's basement and collect swords and dungeons and dragons cards give us the finger and yell 'Faggot' at us, we throw equipment at them and instigate them in any way possible, people that work at the arena are horrified and come running toward the stage to try to get us turned off, we are done, people boo, we stuff ourselves with catering."

Lambgoat: You dropped off Gigantour early because of Ben's arm injury, and you've also mentioned that the crowd was not very responsive. What additional negatives were there doing a tour like that, and what were some of the positives (working w/ Mustaine, DREAM THEATER, or any other of the bands)?

Greg Puciato: "Well, there weren't any real negatives, we like playing in front of people who don't 'get' us. It's fun and adds extra weight to the aggressive and confrontational vibe that our music and performance already has. Positives were playing with and learning from sick musicians like the guys in NEVERMORE, DREAM THEATER, and SYMPHONY X, being on a tour with someone you admired as a kid, and more importantly for us as a band that tour really made us so competitive. We really wanted to crush every show to get under the skin of the people in the crowd who hated us, and coming out of that tour now back into our own environment in the clubs we are still carrying that feeling with us and it has made our shows probably the craziest they have ever been."

Read the entire interview at Lambgoat.com.