MACHINE HEAD To Film Los Angeles, San Francisco Shows For Upcoming DVD

MACHINE HEAD‘s upcoming shows in Los Angeles (Friday, February 20 at The Regent) and San Francisco (Saturday, February 21 at The Regency Ballroom) will be filmed for a new concert DVD.

Says the band: “To commemorate the success of [MACHINE HEAD‘s latest album] ‘Bloodstone & Diamonds’ as well as the unquestionable success of our ‘An Evening With Machine Head’ tour dates, we want to document the crazy, insane, over-the-top fans we have and show the world what the ‘Head Cases of America’ are like, and what better place to do it than our home state of California!!!

“Help spread the word, Head Cases!! We want Banana-Men to come out, Spidermen to come out, Darth Raider and the Raider Nation in full regalia!! We want this DVD to be a ‘Heavy Metal Mardi Gras’!!! (Complete with 24-hour drinking sessions!!)

“Make sure to take an Über and catch the band that has inspired a thousand DUIs!!!

“Let’s rage, Kalifornia!!!!”

In a recent interview with Full Metal Jackie, MACHINE HEAD frontman Robb Flynn stated about the band’s current tour: “When you’ve been off the road for a while, and especially when you’re in the studio, everything in the studio is delayed satisfaction. You’re recording a drum part, you’re recording a guitar part, you’re recording a vocal part, you’re building this cathedral brick by brick by brick, and it’s this long process with… the reward is so minuscule and incremental that you don’t really get it, and then you come out on tour, and you play that song that’s done, and it’s this instant reaction, it’s this instant satisfaction. It’s the opposite of what [the studio] world is. And to be in a band and to create music and make music for a living, you to have that yin and yang. You have to have both sides of it.”

He continued: “We played Houston, Texas, and they were chanting ‘Machine Fucking Head,’ and then they just started smashing the walls. All the people that were on the backside of that balcony on the sides, they would just smash the walls as they were saying it, and it was so fucking loud. The owner of the building, the owner of the venue was just, like, ‘I’ve never seen a show this crazy here.’ He was, like, ‘I thought the freaking house was gonna come down.’ He was, like, ‘It was magical,’ and it was — that’s what it was: it was magical. And that’s how it was last night; this amazing show.

“[I’m] super looking forward to New Orleans tonight because they do this thing that we call the Machine Fucking Head Stomp, where they stomp their feet and go, ‘Machine Fucking Head.’ They do it in time, and it’s crazy. It’s the only place in America that does it, and it’s so killer.”

Flynn added: “Those moments… Connecting, just having this musical bonding… So much of music, to me, is about… I think when it’s the best that it is, it’s a release for everybody. It’s a release of so many emotions — sadness and anger and joy and this feeling of connection. And, to me, that’s everything. That’s what it’s all about right there.”

Robb went on to describe MACHINE HEAD‘s current trek as a “fucking epic tour. It’s the longest tour we’ve ever done in America. Forty-three dates, two months. Now we’re hitting every nook and cranny. I mean, we’re hitting all the major cities, but we’re also hitting… We made a point that we really wanted to get into the smaller places that are, like, three and four and five hours outside of the big cities that still have these diehard metalheads that they just often can’t make the trip. So we’re hitting Minot, North Dakota, and Missoula, Montana, and Bend, Oregon… places that are really… Ticket sales are killer, and we’re stoked, man. We already had four shows sell out in advance. New York sold out in advance, Boston sold out in advance. Austin… Phoenix… It’s killin’ it, man. We’re having a blast out here.”

MACHINE HEAD‘s last concert DVD, “Elegies”, was recorded at the Brixton Academy in London, England in December 2004 and was made available in October 2005. In addition to concert footage, the DVD featured film clips and a short documentary about the making of the band’s “Through The Ashes Of Empires” album.

“Bloodstone & Diamonds” sold around 18,200 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 21 on The Billboard 200 chart. Released on November 10 via Nuclear Blast Entertainment, the CD was produced by Robb Flynn and Juan Urteaga, and like the last seven of eight MACHINE HEAD albums, was masterfully mixed by Colin Richardson. Additional tracking, editing, and mixing was done with Andy Sneap (MEGADETH, EXODUS, TESTAMENT, ARCH ENEMY) and Steve Lagudi.