Saturday, October 01, 2008
by Ahrue Luster
I have been moving around since I was a small child. I’ve lived in many places, including Chicago, St. Louis, Honolulu, Las Vegas, New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco Bay Area, and the island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain. I know Ibiza sounds kind of random but as a four year old child, my father and I traveled bohemian style through Europe, Canada, Iceland and Greenland. Hitchhiking, staying in hostels, sleeping in train stations, vans, abandoned buildings, and on boats. During that trip, we ended up staying on Ibiza, at a friend’s house for about 3 months.
I started touring in metal bands about a decade ago and as a result of my semi-chaotic upbringing, it was not very hard for me to get used to the touring lifestyle. I have spent a little less than half of my career touring with Machine Head, and a little more than half of my career touring with Ill Nino. Both bands are touring machines that are still able to tour in most parts of the world extensively to this date.
I have been fortunate enough to travel to many countries on five of the seven continents of the Earth. During my travels, I’ve had a lot of great experiences, met a lot of people, learned a great deal from visiting other cultures and seeing how other people live…and trying their alcoholic beverages.
Actually, I’m not quite the same guy I was when I first started touring. I was young, dumb and full of…well, you get the picture. I have seen and done a lot of crazy (and stupid) things on tour. I used to drink so much vodka that blacking out was something that I did a few times a week. I remember going into a bar on a day off from touring in Tucson Arizona. As I took a sip of my first vodka drink of the evening, I tried to remember the last day that I didn’t get drunk, and I couldn’t remember. I knew that that wasn’t a good thing, but it didn’t stop me from getting drunk again and again, and again.
It wasn’t that crazy all of the time. I would say the first touring cycle that I did with Machine head (The Burning Red tour) and the first touring cycle that I did with Ill Nino (Confession tour) were the craziest.
After one of the last tours of the Confession touring cycle, I just decided that I was getting too old for the crazy lifestyle that I was
living and that I wanted to change. I was basically just tired of it. Two weeks after I made the decision to change my life, we were playing a show at Denver’s Ogden Theater. That’s where I met Xylia who is the love of my life and the woman I married and have a family with. I actually had already known her for over 10 years from the SF bay area but we had fallen out of contact when I started touring with Machine Head.
When I joined Ill Nino I had given up my home in California since Ill Nino was based out of Jersey. But I didn’t want to live in Jersey so I didn’t have a home for a while but we toured so much that I really didn’t need one. I was actually kind of a nomad, vagabond, call it what you will. Eventually I settled down in Denver for obvious reasons. I’m now a Colorado resident and when I’m not on tour with Ill Nino I produce bands here in Denver. I really get a lot of fulfillment out of producing and I hope that the work that I do with the bands in Colorado will help to elevate the scene here. There is the potential for a great metal scene here in Denver. Recently I was asked write a column in the Colorado Music Buzz Magazine. I was very honored to be asked and gladly accepted. So I will be writing a lot from touring experiences both past and present as well as anything else that may be interesting from my world.
I would love to hear your comments and questions so that I can get a good idea of what readers would be interested in reading about and maybe I will post some Q and A too. Take care and HORNS UP! X Read Full Post
