Death Angel Act III Tour Wrap Up
- Bleeding Priest
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
Hey all, I’m back from Death Angel’s tour and ready to get busy with the site again. Speaking of tour, let me give you a brief summary of the four weeks on the road.
The tour started off with a party of sorts in Seal Beach, CA at the Affliction Clothing headquarters. Hosted by Jose “Metal Ambassador” Mangin from Sirius’s Liquid Metal. It was a birthday party for his wife as well as a tour warm-up for the band. It was an intimate setting with a couple of hundred people in attendance. All you can drink tequila made it quite the rager.
Since this was the first tour for the band using in-ear monitors and playing to a click track it was important to work out any potential kinks before the tour officially started two days later in Denver. Jose was an awesome host and the event was a blast.
We met up with the touring package of Vio-lence, Lions At The Gate, Misfire in Denver. It was a solid package all around. Vio-lence (Sean) are old friends of ours, especially Ted and I. They’ve had some serious lineup shifts in the past year but this current version is very solid.
Guitarist Ira Black is a very old and dear friend of mine. We did some time together in Vicious Rumors. He and I did some things. It was a real kick reminiscing over some pretty crazy shit we did in Europe together. I could write a book on the Vicious Rumors experience alone. Perhaps I’ll do a blog post here about those times.
Vio-Lence really came through for us in the 11th hour too. Toxic Holocaust were originally supposed to be the support act for the tour but had to back out within a month of the tour start. Not many bands can jump onto a 4 week tour with three weeks notice, but they did and kicked ass every night.
Lions At The Gate were kind of the odd band out on this tour musically speaking. Their style is more in Nu Metal territory but they proved themselves every night and won a lot of people over. Super cool guys and very easy to work with as well.
Openers Misfire were probably the most fun to hang with. More times than not I’d see some of them at the same bars I went to after the gig. Solid crew of dudes who play kick ass Thrash.
I’m not going to go through every show but some highlights were Denver, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Joliet, San Antonio, Reading and of course SF. All the shows were great really except for Davenport IA. There was a major snow storm happening the night of the show. The city pretty much shut down. All events were canceled except ours. And the Capitol Theater is HUGE!! A few hundred still showed up but in that giant venue it looked like 20. We still gave it our all though and the folks that were there did as well.
In Albuquerque the mayor visited us backstage before the show and gave us all “keys to the jail”. The guy’s a bona fide metalhead and super cool dude. I asked him “if I get arrested tonight this will get me out right?”
A crackhead came on the bus in Dallas. Mark, our sound guy Thilo and myself were hanging out in the front lounge post show having drinks and listening to tunes. I got up to grab something from the cooler by the front of the bus and glanced up and saw a stranger’s face peering through the curtain. It startled the living shit out of me. It was definitely a street person.
I calmly but firmly told him to get the fuck off the bus. He was mumbling something when Mark sprang into action and pretty much verbally ripped the guy's head off. He left without incident. That was the first time that’s ever happened. Needless to say we kept the bus locked at all times after that. Regardless if people were in the front lounge or not.
I went to a shit ton of record stores across the country and unloaded a lot of Hectic Records / Bleeding Priest Records product. Some of the standouts were Chain Reaction in Denver, Ragged Records in Davenport, and Extreme Noise Records in Minneapolis (This store fucking ruled. Total Crust Punk and Metal shop. It reminded me a lot of Thrillhouse Records in SF but with a much bigger Metal section).
Indy Records in Indianapolis (another awesome shop that has pinball machines and shows as well), and The Attic in Millvale PA were great too, (Attic was without question the best one I visited on the whole tour. They boasted perhaps the largest Metal section I’ve ever seen. The amount of bootlegs they had for just The Priest alone was staggering. A guy could go broke in there easily.)
Nexxus Records in Brooklyn (The guy lowballed me on my product but the store was all Metal and Punk so you have to respect that), Wooden Tooth in Tucson (Both locations) and Going Underground Records in Los Angeles as well. Getting the Hectic/Bleeding Priest product (Trencher, Nefarious & Hellhunter records) out into stores across the U.S. was a total success. I think I could’ve been a successful door to door salesman in a past life. I clearly have a knack for it and quite enjoyed it honestly.
The band got along very well on this run and I can’t think of a time where there was ever any tension between the five of us. It was a very relaxed environment…between the band members.
Our crew was a tad strange. One of the techs was the most unfriendly person (at least to me) I’ve ever had to share a tour bus with. I’d be OK if I never saw that guy again for the rest of my life…but he did a good job so I probably will. But my drum tech Steven Garcia on the other hand was a godsend. Not only was he incredibly efficient, attentive to detail and genuinely seemed to care about the job at hand but he was also a great hang and had me laughing for hours over this photo. It’s a long story that maybe I’ll tell here someday.
Things wrapped up with two sold out nights at The Fillmore in SF. It was a pretty epic way to end an extremely challenging but fun tour. Playing Act III in its entirety is no easy feat but folks really seemed to take to it…especially in our hometown. Headlining one night at The Fillmore was a dream come true but two nights? I never would’ve thought it was possible. Definitely a pinnacle in the band’s and my career. It’s going to be hard to top that.
So that was the tour in a nutshell. I’m sure I forgot some details of note. If they come to me sometime down the road I’ll weave them into a show review or something. Now that I’m back home I will see you in the Bay Area Metal trenches. Peace!
–Bleeding Priest
