It’s the last day of the Summer Slaughter tour and things are hectic in Anaheim.
“They won’t let us take our food inside,” guitarist Paul Waggoner says, adjusting the window blinds at the front of the group’s RV.
Security has been tight all day around The Grove and nearby Angel Stadium due to overwhelming crowds. To get to Between the Buried and Me’s BandWagon behind the venue, you had to plow through groups of stoned kids in dark jeans and Cannibal Corpse t-shirts, fazed by the 90-degree weather. In the same lot, oddly enough, waves of families scurry to the stadium a few hundred yards away for a Christian ministry service expecting 40,000 attendees — some with homemade “John 3:16” signs.
Despite contradictions wild enough to make a Starburst jealous, the mood inside the BTBAM-wagon this afternoon is calm and optimistic. Wrapping up a month-long co-headlining trek on the summer’s biggest metal tour, Waggoner and bassist Dan Briggs are gearing up for the biggest release of their careers: Between the Buried and Me’s upcoming album The Parallax II: Future Sequence (out October 9th). But for now, the topic of conversation is sports.
“We’ve been to a few ballgames on this tour,” says Briggs, a fan of the Cleveland Indians.
Waggoner even got to meet Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson at a BTBAM show.
“It was a pure state of euphoria.”
Some things to note: This is the first official Between the Buried and Me interview on Ryan’s Rock Show; in 2010 we interviewed Dan Briggs on his band Orbs. Following the release of ‘Parallax II’ on October 9th, BTBAM will head to Japan and Australia with Animals as Leaders. An early 2013 North American headlining tour is expected to be announced shortly. From left to right: Paul Waggoner, Dan Briggs.
Front page & article photo by Dorothy Gilbert