You have to hand it to TOOL. They are so huge and such a force in mainstream rock, that when they announce an arena tour they could just take out some radio-friendly band, but instead, they chose to take out bands they enjoy: Intronaut and YOB. These are bands who are used to playing dive bars and shitty venues. To get an upgrade to playing arenas is a dream come true.
Intronaut have posted a blog about the experience on LA Weekly, and everything seems pretty rosy for the California quartet. Here is one of my favorite excerpts from the blog:
We arrive at Reno Events Center and find a parking spot for our Dodge Sprinter van amidst Tool's six tour buses and six big rig trucks. This is the first of many hilarious examples of disproportion we would experience throughout the tour. Tool's production manager takes one look at our van and asks us if we'd be interested in having them carry our equipment in one of their trucks, since it takes up approximately 1/100th of one truck. We now get about one million more miles to each gallon of diesel. Thanks, Tool!
Seriously, that's just ridiculous, and incredibly nice of Tool's production people to help the little guy out. Definitely check out the whole blog for some interesting tales of what it's like for a small-time band to be on a big arena tour.
TOOL are clearly into Intronaut as well, as they have invited certain bandmembers on stage to jam out with them. Here is a clip of the 'naut's guitarist/percussionist Dave Timnick jamming it out in the middle of "Lateralus."
