How is the spotlight affecting you? LOG are practically a household name. You got Grammy recognition, the Modern Drummer 2007 award, how are you processing that into your life?
Forever we have pushed ourselves to keep going to the next step and sometimes you don’t even know what that next step is. I mean, nobody expected us to get a Grammy nomination or to be able to get onto Conan O’Brien’s show, but when you wake up and hear that you got the Conan O’Brien show, the next day you wake up and you start working for the Jay Leno show.
It’s constantly work, and I mean, if we just sit down and say, ‘Wow, we did all those things, I think that’s when people start getting lazy and the music suffers. For us it’s real important to keep pushing as much for us as for everybody else. It’s been a long time since a band as heavy as us has played on the main stage right before Ozzy. I think by doing the things that we are doing and working as hard as we are, we are helping the bands on the second stage this year, making it easier for those guys to get out and do this kind of music. It’s opening up the public’s eyes to heavier music, especially with this free Ozzfest I think a lot of people are learning what heavy metal has going on today.
Great to see that you guys have kept your musical integrity so tenaciously.
Thank you very much. I mean, you see it as much as we do. You see your favorite bands go downhill after a while, because of a lot of success or the wrong label or dudes just getting lazy, and we don’t want to be that band. We will not put out an album if it’s not better than the last one we put out. We want to keep pushing forward and being better than we were yesterday.
What have you learned along the way, having been out with the masters like Megadeth, Slayer and Ozzy?
Yeah, had we not had the opportunities that we had touring with Megadeth and Slayer and on Ozzfest a couple of times and the headlining tours that we have done, if we hadn’t had those chances to kind of learn from bigger bands what are the right things and the wrong things to do…we have been able to take a lot out of those experiences and been able to keep our own ship a little tighter.
That’s not to say we haven’t had our failures and whatever else. At least you learn from these guys and these classic bands, Megadeth, Slayer, Ozzy, Sabbath. You see how they are able to do what they do and maintain for a long period of time, and that’s essential. Hopefully, the bands that we are bringing out on tour, they are able to learn a lot of things from us. When we were the opening band we were paying attention everyday how that headlining band worked, what kind of crew did they have? How they ran their ship. Those kinds of little things are really important. Half our job is putting out a great record, the other half is then going out to tour on it, and it can get really tough out on the road. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea and to make it through that you need a strong personality and a strong work ethic. That’s the biggest thing that we learned from touring since the beginning.
