John Bush on 80s Heavy Metal Podcast: Armored Saint, Anthrax Talk [13:59-19:01]

in a while. Sure. Yeah, I'll make a note about it on its own. Right. Very good. Well, John, I've read, but I'm not clear on it, and I'll ask for the clarity on it. I've read that it's you with Category 7 opening. I've read that it's Category 7 is your band that's going to play the anthrax stuff as well as a set of Cat 7 stuff. What is, what is it that we're going to be seeing? Is it, is it an opener, and then new, other guys, or is it all Cat 7? Yeah, some anthrax songs. Well, no, it's going to be both, actually, because I want to play two sets. Okay. It's, it's the Cat 7 guys minus Jack Gibson because Jack had some prior commitments, the touring minds. So, unfortunately, he can't do it, and it's a bummer because I love Jack and he's such an awesome person. Sure. Great guy. Actually, a little easygoing guy. I love it. But, Joey Vera is going to fill in for him because Joey's my pro and then Joey played in an anthrax for a brief period of time, so it makes some sense. But it made sense to try to kind of piggyback the two things together because Category 7 really hasn't chatted a chance to play many shows. As a matter of fact, we played one, so, yeah, and that was the whiskey in LA, so we're going to play that again, but we never even played New York, which is where Mike Orlando is from, it's a bummer. So, we're going to play a short set of key FC 7, and then we're going to come back out with the same guys. I said, if I started a band from scratch, I can't imagine any guys who I'd rather have than, you know, Phil, Mike and Bettner, I mean, those guys are just incredible musicians, and I know they'll tear it up, so it's going to be a lot of fun. Sure. Now, John, you've had a couple of tours with Category 7 that have gone down because, and you guys have been very honest about it about just saying that it's low ticket sales, which I think is a problem most people are having in general now. I just think that the concert scene is kind of effed up after the pandemic, really. It never has come all the way back. How frustrating is it for you that you put together literally a supergroup, and it just hasn't hit the way I'm sure you guys thought it was going to? Well, I've always had low expectations, which I do about everything, because that's just the way I approach stuff, but, you know, the record itself kind of happened really naturally, and just out of like, hey, let's write some tunes, and then we wrote a couple and then we wrote a couple more, and the next thing, you know, we had enough for records or like, let's just make a record. So it's kind of, to me, it was real honest from that perspective. We wrote some killer tunes, and it just made sense to record and put them out, just because you're a bunch of known guys, doesn't mean you have an obvious success level that's going to happen. Sure. You know, there's still whole marketing and trying to convince people, is this a real band, or what is this, is this a project, that was a big issue for people, including people internally. And it was like, look, why are we worried about this? Like, let's just put a record out. I mean, I know there's the marketing aspect from the label and the management, but like, I'm a musician, man. My goal is to just write songs, and if they're great, we should record them, and as simple as that. So that was my approach the whole time. Record got great critical claim. I mean, James Heffields, that was one of his favorite records, you can't get better than that. So, the reality is, is that it just doesn't mean you have a sure shot, and everybody is busy in this band. We had a lot of conflict scheduling-wise, because everyone's doing other things, because everyone's out of the bands. You know, Dumbledore and Kerry King, and Bynur played with Overcalde the time, and Shadows fall, and that's just like, we're busy, and Micro-Rolando is an engineer who records and does a lot of engineering. So, it's not like we had so many easy things, so we found three weeks in America, or like, we could do this, and then, you know, maybe some people got cold feet, and you know what? We should have done the shows anyway, even if there was a hundred people at every gig, quite frankly, we should have done them, it was a mistake. We should have made it done it. We would have had shows that were going to do better than that, of course, but we might have had a couple stinkers, as we call them, so what? And we should have done them, and that was a mistake. And then South America, that was just a bad idea, because we really didn't have a legitimate person promoting the shows, and you know, South America, and I love South America. It's one of the best continents in the world as far as fan base goes, but you still want to do things correctly, and if you don't, you know, you've brought a risk of going there and making mistakes, and it's a long way to go, and it could be real dodgy. So that was a mistake, and we should have done that. But in retrospect, it doesn't really matter, you know, the record is a great record, and I'm really proud of it, and you know, we move on, keep going, and now we're going to do this thing, and we're going to, like I said, piggyback with this anthrax thing. Just for at least these three shows, I don't know what the future holds are, I really don't. I'm just going to find out what happens, we're going to kind of go along the way and see what comes up out of all this.