Jukebox – Music News Cuts – 2/23

Jukebox.

Dave Mustaine

Megadeth’s latest album, “The Sick, the Dying, and the Dead!” has been it’s highest charting album from a worldwide perspective, and has brought it a Grammy nomination for “Best Metal Performance.” Singer Dave Mustaine, in discussing the relative successes of the band’s repertoire with music site Blabbermouth, noted that global success is never uniform.

“Well, it’s been very well received,” Mustaine said. “It was successful for us. We have had some really high-charting records before, but this was the highest-charting record of all when it comes down to around the world. In the past, we’d have a record that was good in one place, but it wasn’t good everywhere, and this record has been really good in a lot of places. There’s been a couple places where they just don’t like metal. But for the most part, I’ve been very, very, very, very happy with the outcome of this record.”

Mustaine also had some poignant words with respect to success and what it can do to musicians. He eschewed the attitude that some might associate with certain successful bands, in essence, fame going to their heads. He noted that, no matter what a band thinks of itself, music is music and every band is out there doing the same thing.

Another notable for Megadeth was the 2023 introduction of Teemu Mäntysaari of Finland on guitar, replacing Kiko Loureiro, also from Finland.

Mick Jones

Mick Jones of the band Foreigner recently opened up about his being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects the body’s ability to control its nerves. Among other symptoms, Parkinsons causes tremors that are difficult to control.

Jones revealed this diagnosis to explain why he had not been performing with the band onstage. He said that he didn’t want to get up on stage if he couldn’t give a great performance, which would be difficult with Parkinson’s. He did say that he is more than involved with the band behind the scene, that he has a presence and is active in the making of Foreigner’s new music.

Foreigner was a huge band, having a number of songs you’d have to live under a cave not to know by heart. These songs include the hits “Cold As Ice”, “Feels Like The First Time”, “Long, Long Way From Home”, “Juke Box Hero”, “Hot Blooded”, “Waiting For A Girl Like You”, “Head Games”, “Say You Will” and the global No. 1 hit “I Want To Know What Love Is”.

Al Jourgensen

Al Jourgensen of the band Ministry is talking quits, in a way. He wants to put out Ministry’s final album, which isn’t the first time he mentioned a final album. Jourgensen believes that the music has gotten everywhere it can go over the 40 years of the band’s existence, and he is looking forward to doing film scores and unpaid activism.

Jourgensen expressed a tiredness over performing live, explaining that, as they play bigger and bigger places, the fans and attendees start to become a blur, and Jourgensen, instead of enjoying himself, ends up focusing on minutiae such as monitor volume levels and stray sounds.

There is a remake completed of their first album, “With Sympathy,” which Jourgensen hated when the original was produced, which he said the record label had far too much control over its direction.

According to Blabbermouth, Jourgensen had an interesting renewal of feeling for that first album. “I hated that record for 40 years, but with this band, the way that we’re approaching it, it makes these songs almost relevant 40 years later, whereas I used to hate them,” he said. “The whole thing was I went and saw a MINISTRY cover band about two years ago here in L.A. And in in a sense, for the first time ever, I kind of got what some of the fans of that early stuff, what they got out of it. I started to understand. And then one night, when we were on tour with Numan last year, the band sneaks up on me. I mean, we play stuff after a show and listen to it while we’re driving. And all of a sudden, they started playing this early stuff that they had done behind my back. They’d been working on it for four months. ‘Cause they knew how to hate it. So they waited until I was completely ‘shroomed out of my mind and wasted, and they started playing this stuff. And after seeing this cover band, I’m going, ‘Okay. All right. Why not? Let’s try it.’ And so, yeah, I’m really happy with these new versions. So that that’s actually gonna come out before the last album I do with Barker. So we’ll have two albums out next year and a bunch of tours.”