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EVERY TIME I DIE Calls It Quits

EVERY TIME I DIE has called it quits, a little over a month after the band said it was working on its issues with singer Keith Buckley “privately.”

On December 3, the Buffalo-based outfit announced that it would play the last three concerts of its recent tour without Buckley, explaining that the frontman was taking time off from the road to “rest and prepare” for the band’s holiday shows, the annual events dubbed “‘TID The Season”.

Buckley later issued a statement on social media in which he accused his brother, EVERY TIME I DIE guitarist Jordan Buckley, and his other bandmates of platting “to replace me this entire time.” He added that he was being “ostracized” from the band he had “built for 20 years because I made a decision to do whatever it took to be a good human being.”

Keith Buckley managed to set aside his issues with the rest of EVERY TIME I DIE long enough to play the aforementioned “‘TID The Season” concerts in the band’s hometown of Buffalo, on December 10 and December 11. But earlier today, Jordan Buckley (lead guitar), Andy Williams (rhythm guitar), Stephen Micciche (bass) and Clayton “Goose” Holyoak (drums ) issued a statement in which they confirmed that they were unable to reach an agreement with their estranged singer and were indeed going their separate ways.

The statement reads: “Andy, Jordan, Steve and Goose‘s last show with EVERY TIME I DIE was on Dec 11, 2021.

“While we hoped to come to an agreed upon legal statement that outlined the truth, we were informed today of something planned to be released not mutually agreed upon that consists of inaccuracies and controls a narrative to benefit one.

“There has been no direct communication with Keith, because it’s either impossible for direct communication with him solely or we’ve been cut off to any and all communication by him himself.

“EVERY TIME I DIE was these 5 members, and we were never budging or accepting any changes. Simply, there is zero truth about the band continuing on with a new singer. Lastly, we wouldn’t be where we are today without every single person that’s backed the band in any & all ways.

“While we’re extremely disappointed in how this was played out online in front of you, your support and the memories we have because of you all will always be cherished.

“See you soon. Forever grateful,

“Andy, Jordan, Steve & Goose“.

Keith Buckley has since responded by sharing a letter sent to him by law firm Savur Law, dated December 20, 2021, saying that it had been retained by the rest of the band “for legal representation in connection with a separation agreement” between them and Buckley. The letter asks Buckley contact the law firm by December 27 to discuss “the business terms of an amicable separation between the parties”. It also orders Buckley to “immediately cease and desist from making any statements… that defame, disparage or in any way criticize the professional name, prestige, image, reputation, practices, or conduct” of the band. It also requests Buckley “immediately cease and desist all usage of the Band name, logo, or other intellectual property until there is a formal signed separation agreement between the parties.”

EVERY TIME I DIE‘s ninth studio album, “Radical”, was released in October via Epitaph.

The band’s LPs “The Big Dirty” (2007), “New Junk Aesthetic” (2009), “Ex Lives” (2012), “From Parts Unknown” (2014) and “Low Teens” all reached the top 50 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Both “Ex Lives” and “Low Teens” were No. 1 on Billboard‘s Hard Rock album chart.

Source: HRRL News Feed via Blabbermouth.net
EVERY TIME I DIE Calls It Quits
HRRL News Feed via Blabbermouth.net

KIX Singer Says It's A 'Wait-And-See' Game As To When Guitarist RONNIE YOUNKINS Will Return

KIX singer Steve Whiteman has offered an update on guitarist Ronnie Younkins, who is unable to tour with the band because he has been placed under house arrest after repeatedly getting in trouble with the police. Ronnie is being temporarily replaced by Bob Paré, an accomplished musician who studied at the Music Institute in Los Angeles and taught music theory and guitar at several institutions, including Western Maryland College and Maryland Institute of Music.

In a new interview with Canada’s The Metal Voice, Steve said: “[Ronnie] was pretty much being supervised in a halfway house for about a year. And I believe he’s finally got his freedom. So we’re just kind of waiting to see how he continues to recover. Because it got ugly there for a while. And we wanna make that he’s got his family life together, his own life together, before bringing him back into this temptation that’s just around all the time. So we’re all pulling for him. We’re in touch with him. It’s a waiting game at this point — just to make sure that, unsupervised, he’s gonna be able to keep it together.

“I know the fans would love to have him back, and we would love to have him back, but it’s gotta make sense for everybody,” he continued. “And right now we’ve got the guy that had come in to help us out to replace Ronnie, Bob Paré, is just doing an amazing job, and I don’t wanna rock the boat at this point to take a chance. So it’s a wait-and-see game to see how he continues to recover and can he continue with his sobriety and get his life back together.”

This past November, Whiteman addressed Younkins‘s condition in an interview with “The Chuck Shute Podcast”. He said: “Last I spoke to [Ronnie], he’s working, like, two normal jobs. He’s still living in a rehabilitation clinic, and he still has a ways to go. Even when he’s set free to go out into the world, like he did before, we still have to make sure that he’s gonna be able to stay clean and sober. But right now he seems like he’s doing really well. He’s following all the rules and he’s doing everything he can to get his life back in order.”

Steve went on to say that Ronnie was sober for 20 years before relapsing and spiraling back down into addiction.

“He got Hep C, and he had to use intravenous needles to battle the Hep C, before the newer treatment came out,” Whiteman said. “And we all think that that just kind of took his mentality back to the days when he was using. I mean, that’s speculation, and you’d probably have to ask him that, but it seems like that’s when things flipped for him.”

Whiteman previously discussed Younkins‘s battle with addiction in a June 2021 interview with Sonic Perspectives. At the time, he said: “It’s been an up-and-down adventure with Ronnie over the past five or six years. Sometimes he doesn’t show up to gigs, and Brian Forsythe has to take over and play all the parts. Then he comes back for several months and does really well, only to fall off the wagon or get in trouble with the police. This last time, he got into trouble with the police and is currently in a halfway house under house arrest. That’s the biggest reason he is not out with us now. We were looking at Bob Paré a couple of years ago when Ronnie was going through a bad stretch, but Ronnie bounced back. When he shows up, he does great, so we didn’t make the move back then. This time we were forced to.”

Whiteman clarified: “I’m not saying that Ronnie is out of the band. We are just saying [he is not gonna tour with us] until he gets it together [and] his family and these people that are helping him say he is good to go. We are not going to bring him in until he is ready. He has shown in the past he can’t be sober on the road. Being out there in a rock and roll band is a very bad environment.”

He added: “We have a long history of 40 years together. You want to give him the benefit that he is going to recover and do well. There have been so many times over the last five or six years [when] we didn’t know if he was going to make it.”

Five years ago, Younkins opened up about his drug addiction, saying that his “disease had gotten worse” after he relapsed several years earlier following two decades of sobriety.

Younkins missed a KIX concert in Pennsylvania in March 2017 when the rest of the group was unable to reach him. He was eventually found “not in great condition and very upset,” according to TMZ. A month later, his bandmates revealed that he was “headed to a rehab facility” and promised that his spot in KIX would be “waiting for him” once he was ready to resume playing with the group.

While Younkins was in rehab, he took time out to join his KIX bandmates for a performance in June 2017 at the Sweden Rock Festival, where he gave a wide-ranging interview to Metal Rules that also touched upon his continued battle against substance abuse.

Speaking about his health, Ronnie said: “My disease has gotten worse. I had 21 years of sobriety at one point. Got sober and cleaned up in 1989, but I’d get on… A long story short, what led me back out was complacency in my program. I wasn’t doing enough of my work for the AA program like I did in the early years. Then,I went on Hepatitis C treatment, or they should call it punishment, the old one that has many side effects, in 2010. One of them being insomnia, and the doctor put me on Ambien, and it fucked me up. It’s a sleep drug, and I got hooked on it, and then I wasn’t working the program, like with my mom’s death — I worked through that at ten years sober. I worked through that with my sponsor. [My] dad died, like, in 2012. Some other shit had happened, and I worked through [it], and some serious things happened.

“We all have issues,” he continued. “We all have shit happen in our lives and, you know, I worked through them in the program, but my when my father died, and I was complacent in the program, and I was already high on this fucking Ambien. I said, ‘Fuck it.’ And, I went out, and I started doing heroin and cocaine again within a month after my dad’s death, and it’s been nothing but downhill since. I’ve been through two rehabs, [in] 2014 [and] 2015.”

Drug and alcohol rehab statistics show that the percentage of people who will relapse after rehab and even a period of some recovery ranges from 50% to 90%.

Most people do not manage to quit their addiction with their first attempt. They may try and fail a number of times before they manage to secure lasting sobriety.

For addicts that fall back into drug use, there is no guarantee that they will ever be able to stop again; their relapse may turn out to be a death sentence.

Over time, the life of the addict tends to deteriorate. This means that when people relapse, they may be going back to a life that is even worse than before.

Younkins added that he was “grateful” to his bandmates for standing by him through all his problems. “I love those guys in the band,” he said. “They’ve been my brothers, all of them, and Brian‘s been a big help, because he’s in the program as well, and yeah… So, I just want to get my shit together once and for all on a daily basis.”

Bob was a session musician for several independent label releases, and has spent most of his long career performing live in the Maryland and Washington, D.C. area with various bands, including FORCER, EVER RISE, PROJECT: EUPHORIA and, most recently, the RUSH tribute band SUN DOGS with KIX bassist Mark Schenker.

Source: HRRL News Feed via Blabbermouth.net
KIX Singer Says It's A 'Wait-And-See' Game As To When Guitarist RONNIE YOUNKINS Will Return
HRRL News Feed via Blabbermouth.net

JETHRO TULL's IAN ANDERSON Pokes Fun At Guitarists Who Rely On Roadies To Tune Their Instruments: 'What Wimps'

In a new interview with Darren Paltrowitz, host of the “Paltrocast With Darren Paltrowitz”, JETHRO TULL‘s Ian Anderson was asked about his decades-long reputation as someone who doesn’t shake hands with people. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I’ve suffered from chest infections since I was quite young, and throat infections and upper respiratory tract infections. It’s been a pretty constant problem for me intermittently. So I’ve got used to trying not to unnecessarily attract the common cold viruses, be they rhinoviruses or coronaviruses or the flu virus. Because it really is, for me, not just a question of three or four days of feeling a little under the weather; I usually end up [spending] four or six weeks with serious bronchitis and feeling really rough. And of course, chances are I’m on tour during that period.

“The last 20 years or so, I’ve carried a face mask in my hand luggage,” he continued. “I remember the first time I bought one was actually in Tokyo, in the airport. And I remember buying a couple of more in Dubai airport. They were just there in case I needed them — if I was in an environment where I was particularly worried about getting a virus. And I’ve been an inveterate hand washer for many years. Playing the flute or the guitar, the last thing you want is greasy hands, either from shaking hands or opening doors or doing whatever. You really wanna have dry, clean hands when you’re playing instruments. So nobody is allowed to touch my instruments and nobody is allowed to shake hands with me or otherwise contaminate me in those precious moments between leaving my dressing room and getting back to it. No one touches my microphone. I handle things that are potentially sources of contamination. I take care of that myself. I’d just almost prefer to do that.

“The idea of having a guitar roadie who unpacks your instrument, changes the strings and tunes it up for you — for God’s sake, you want your bottom wiped as well?” Anderson said. “Somebody that hands you the soap in the shower? What’s that all about? What wimps. You should take a pride in your instrument and take a pride in keeping it clean and keeping it in tune.

“These racks of guitars backstage that I see… I was teasing Joe Bonamassa about his 17 guitars or something he had aligned at the back of the stage. I said, ‘Joe, what are those for? You can’t possibly play all of those in a night.’ He said, ‘Well, I just have them with me in case I suddenly decide I want to play that one.’ Meanwhile, of course, he’s paying tens of thousands of dollars to ferry these things around the world, along with probably a couple of roadies who do nothing else other than look after his guitars. But it makes him and indeed other people feel secure. And I guess they’re very proud of the instruments and very proud of their collection of guitars. But they do have to consign them to the grubby fingers of other people when it comes to the practicalities.

“I just cannot conceive of somebody changing my guitar strings for me,” Ian added. “That is equivalent… If I was an armed policeman in the USA, strapping a Glock 17 to my thigh, I would not be entrusting to somebody else to even clean it or to load 20 rounds of 9 mil into the magazine and put it in and make sure everything was hunky-dory and hand me the gun back and send me out there into the cruel and crazy world. Would anybody? It’s bad enough when movie actors can’t be bothered to check their movie prop guns. I think stuff like that is so important. It feels like a matter of life and death when you go onstage with an instrument that it’s gotta work for you. You don’t wanna have that little element of doubt that maybe it’s not quite in tune or mechanically it’s not operating perfectly. So I think it feels like a matter of life and death, and indeed the embarrassment that comes from something not working properly, you really do die a death. And I’ve seen a lot of artists, including me, and that’s happened to ’em onstage, and it’s not a pretty sight.

“I remember the first time we played with Jimi Hendrix in Stockholm. Everything was going wrong for him. His guitar wasn’t working. I mean, it was just terrible to watch. It was sad. And he was getting so frustrated and angry. He just couldn’t get his guitar in tune. It was a white Gibson SG that he was playing unusually, and he couldn’t get the damn thing to go in tune at all. But then SGs are just really not terribly good instruments, in my opinion, in spite of the fact that Tony Iommi [BLACK SABBATH] has made a very good living out of playing those things.”

JETHRO TULL‘s first studio album of new material in over 18 years, “The Zealot Gene”, will see a January 28 release on InsideOut Music.

Source: HRRL News Feed via Blabbermouth.net
JETHRO TULL's IAN ANDERSON Pokes Fun At Guitarists Who Rely On Roadies To Tune Their Instruments: 'What Wimps'
HRRL News Feed via Blabbermouth.net

Why Elton John Was 'Terrified' to Come to America

"Everything will be fine,” his first U.S. booking agent assured. Continue reading…
Source: HRRL Classic Rock News via ultimate Classic Rock
Why Elton John Was 'Terrified' to Come to America
HRRL Classic Rock News via ultimate Classic Rock