Coal Chamber, ICP View "Production Issues" Differently After Tour Fallout

By MTV News Staff

August 19, 1999 / 6:00 PM

So precisely what are the "production issues" that prompted Coal Chamber to leave its tour with the Insane Clown Posse just two days after the trek began?

Well, as usual, it depends on who you ask.

Speaking with MTV News on Wednesday, Coal Chamber frontman Dez Fafara and drummer Michael "Bugs" Cox painted a less than inviting picture of their brief time on the road with the Clowns.

[article id="1441579"]"We're on the tour co-headlining, and the first show there's no sound check, no nothing. No light show, no nothing,"[/article] Cox explained. [article id="1441579"]"We thought it was a first show thing. The second show, same thing. It turns out that a thousand kids were leaving after we were finished."[/article]

The band members say that they had high hopes going into the tour, both in terms of the stage show they wanted to mount and sharing the stage with ICP. However, the optimism didn't last long.

[article id="1441579"]"So

we go onto this tour,"[/article] Fafara added, [article id="1441579"]"and we're thinking, 'We want to play with everybody cool. We have a co-headlining thing. We'll go on before you, because there's no way you can follow Faygo [the soda ICP sprays during performances]. You can't get that on the equipment. We're bringing our own lights and everything for the first time, huge pyro and explosions, a huge rock show. No sound check the first night, and no light check. Next night, no light check, no sound check, and all these kids were leaving. And we were outdoing them in merch[andise]. They were selling 40 [different] merch items, and we were selling eight, and we were outdoing them in merch."[/article]

[article id="1441579"]"They offered us a ridiculous amount where we wouldn't even have been able to survive on the road,"[/article] Cox said. [article id="1441579"]"They said, 'You can't have your lights, you can't have this, you can't

have that.'"[/article]

"The second night we got off stage and went back to the bus, and then the Biohazard guys woke us up the next morning and said, 'Did you guys see what happened last night?' and we said, 'What?' and they said, 'Man, half that audience left.' There were probably like 3,800 kids, so you can imagine that emptying out. It makes you feel proud as a band, but we wish the tour would have kept going." [RealAudio]

Fafara and Cox say that their decision to leave the tour and mount their own headlining outing on their own terms was an easy one at that point. Coal Chamber managed to nab Slipknot and Machine Head for a tour that kicks off Thursday night in Dallas.

ICP had their say on the matter the following morning, when Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J turned up on Howard Stern's syndicated show (which originates from New York's KROQ). The Clowns countered that Coal Chamber

was booted

from the tour because the amount of money Coal Chamber was being paid did not seem to be in proportion to the amount of fans the band was drawing to each show. While noting that Coal Chamber would likely be a big draw on its own tour, ICP claimed that the band's fans couldn't be persuaded to come out for an ICP show.

Cox and guitarist Meegs Rascon actually popped in to Stern's studio while he was on live with the Clowns, and the two acts talked civilly about the split. However, things proved to be somewhat less smooth when a representative of Coal Chamber's record label, Roadrunner Records, turned up to echo the statements that Fafara and Cox made to MTV News the day before.

If you want to see the show that Coal Chamber had hoped to stage in support of its upcoming album "Chamber Music," here's where you can catch them with Slipknot and Machine Head: