Rock News

BREAKING BENJAMIN MAPS OUT TOUR

Breaking Benjamin has finalized the first leg of tour dates in support of the band's new album, Dear Agony, which arrived in stores last Tuesday (September 29th). The trek will begin on November 29th in San Antonio, Texas, with gigs booked through December 17th in Milwaukee. The lineup of bands will change throughout the jaunt, with Sick Puppies and Rev Theory providing support on most of the shows. Other dates will find Breaking Benjamin also teaming with Papa Roach, Flyleaf, 30 Seconds To Mars and Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington's Dead By Sunrise.

Breaking Benjamin has kept off the road entirely so far this year, and guitarist Aaron Fink told us why the band is waiting a little longer to tour behind Dear Agony: ["You know, there's not really any point to touring before a record comes out 'cause no one knows the songs. And with YouTube and cell phones and everything now, you can't really play forthcoming songs because it'll be all over the internet before the album comes out. So those days are kind of over. So we're gonna let the album come out, and hope people enjoy it, and then they'll want to come out and hear those songs live."] SOUNDCUE


An 85-year-old Metallica fan got to meet the band on Saturday night (October 3rd) before their show in Tampa, Florida, according to TampaBay.com. After a story in last Thursday's (October 1st) St. Petersburg Times about the woman, named Margaret Priebe, spread throughout the Internet, representatives of the band invited both Priebe and her 48-year-old son Jim backstage, where she spent quality time with all four members of the group. Frontman James Hetfield also dedicated the song "Nothing Else Matters" to Margaret in front of 18,000 people at that night's concert.



Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Zoltan Bathory elaborated in a new interview with Rock Sound on the incident three weekends ago in which he went "missing" for several days following a show in Las Vegas, prompting the rest of the band to start a panicked public search for him. Responding to speculation that the whole thing was a publicity stunt, Bathory said, "For a PR stunt I could think of a million better things than 'woohoo rock musician gets s***faced in Vegas and disappears for few days.'" He added, "I'm not going to say the party did not get out of hand a little bit, but for f***s sake I felt like celebrating our new record coming out finally and my cell phone ended up taking a dip in a swimming pool somewhere so I was off the grid for a couple of days."



Rob Zombie recently raised eyebrows when he said in an online post that his upcoming solo album, Hellbilly Deluxe 2: Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls and the Systematic Dehumanization of Cool, is likely to be his "last true CD." But while some took that to mean that Zombie was leaving music behind, he told us that he meant something different: ["What I meant was I don't think they're gonna make CDs anymore by this time next year. I mean, I'll keep making music and, you know, maybe they'll keep making CDs that you can buy them on Amazon or something, but go out to a store and try to find them -- I mean, they're just disappearing. That's kind of what I mean. Everything in the industry that I've been hearing has basically been saying that, like, 'Oh, by the time you get to your next record we won't even press it up on a CD.