It's been four years since Dave Mustaine's Gigantour called it a wrap. The traveling festival was a headlining vehicle for Megadeth. The festival landscape has changed severely in the time since, with most touring festivals – Ozzfest, Mayhem Fest, and even now Warped Tour – going away. Could this mean there is room for a Gigantour return?
Well, it looks like the festival will return in some form next year. Whether it's a coastal destination festival, or something that travels is still being determined, but on a recent interview on Jamey Jasta's podcast, The Jasta Show, Mustaine confirmed that there are plans to bring it back in 2018:
Well, I know that we're gonna be doing something next next summer out in the Pennsylvania area, where we're trying to pull together something like that. But you see, the problem with Gigantour is started out great when it was just purely my idea. The manager I had at the time there was very un-metal and consequently year after year it kind of lost its steam. You know you need to have – the very first Gigantour, it I had everything I wanted, two stages, rotating bands, everybody got along. It was an absolute success.
And then from there you know you can't take a tour called Gigantour and have it be three bands, that ain't Gigantour, that's a Mini Me Tour [laughs]. You know, we have talked about Gigantour. The choices we're trying narrow down is is it at one place festival that shows up on the east coast and west coast for the year or is it a moving festival? Like at a very large tour.
So for me, both choices have merit. The festival would be much larger undertaking, as you know. But I also think that if it was touring, it would give us an opportunity, if we did that second stage, going to have a lot of local talent grace that stage and that's one of the coolest things when you go on tour that I've always tried to do is take, you know, give us slot to a local band.
We would have never gotten signed if we didn't go out there and play whenever we could, and we played with some pretty horrible bands. [Laughs]
Mustaine was very forthcoming in the interview. Yesterday, we reported that he said the main reason Mustaine said he played the New York City Big Four show, while having to deal with a neck injury that required emergency surgery, was because Metallica's manager called him a pussy. We analyzed some of his recent comments in hilarious fashion on the Livecast last night.
Listen to the entire podcast interview on the Jasta Show below:
https://soundcloud.com/jameyjasta/episode-310-dave-mustaine
