Dave Mustaine has been teasing a new Megadeth-branded festival for a while, and it looks like we finally know what he's up to. A fest on the high seas – a Megacruise!
The first teaser was just posted to social media:
Mustaine teased a big "fresh" festival idea this past June, although its unclear if he was talking about this cruise or something else:
"We've got a huge festival that we're gonna be announcing," he said. "It's really a big deal. It's kind of the equivalent of Gigantour, but it's a much fresher idea. We've got that set up in about 10 cities in April, and then we're gonna do it again for a three-day weekend in the middle of the year, and we're gonna do probably about another 10 of those dates at the latter part of the year."
It looks like the idea has been percolating for years, as early as 2017. Here was what Mustaine said on a December 2017 podcast with Jamey Jasta, with plans for this year (2018) that clearly never happened:
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]
So perhaps this idea went through many iterations and they finally settled on a cruise.
Between the 70,000 Tons of Metal, Ship-Rocked, Chris Jericho's Rock-N-Wrestling Rager and now this – it seems like the high seas is the place to be for hard rock and heavy metal curated festivals.
Would you go on a Megadeth-themed cruise?
