BraveWords caught up with legendary Armored Saint singer John Bush recently while they were on the road with Queensrÿche and he talked about the brotherhood of the band and trying to hold it all together for over 40 years. How does that ring stay on?
“You know, we’re pretty good actually, especially out on the road, ironically enough,” Bush says in an excerpt from our conversation. “We get along really well. We’re just veterans and we know when to give each other space, and we don’t have too much drama. Sometimes that stuff is more of a problem prior to tours when it comes to dealing with business decisions and emails going back and forth. Those are the things that sometimes get kind of misinterpreted. But that’s a lot of people in life.”
BraveWords: Some say that the biggest asset to getting through this thing called the music business, is a sense of humour.
Bush: “Armored Saint actually has a really good sense of humour. It doesn’t really come out in or music so much, although it does, try to write lyrically with a sense of humour a lot of the time. You know, sometimes it’s in between the lines, not exactly right out there, you have to read into it and kind of decipher the lyrics and look a little deeper, but I am always looking at life with a sense of humour because I have to. As we joked earlier, everybody thought they were going to be Metallica, but the reality is that there is only one Metallica and that’s it. We got dropped after making three records on Chrysalis and everybody thought, ‘You guys are over!’, and we were like 24 years old. We were like, ‘Oh man, we’re done! We’re over!’, but it’s like, ‘What? Most bands haven’t even started’. We already did three records and a bunch of touring, and yet that was terrifying time. We always tell the story, we had a sound man at the time who was kind of a dick, and one day I guess we got under his skin and he got really pissed and people were getting dropped, and we were already dropped, and he was like, ‘You guys are done, you’re over, your band is over!’, and we were like, ‘Oh my god, he’s right!’, and it was this feeling. But now when I look back, if somebody says that now it might be legit, I’m 60, but when I was 24 thinking ‘I’m over’, again most bands haven’t even started.”
BraveWords: That must have been really emotionally painful, but when you finally made the decision, you looked in the mirror and said, “I want to do this for my life”, what did you tell you parents?
Bush: “My parents were always supportive, everybody’s parents were - Gonzo’s parents, Phil’s parents, everyone was super supportive. You know, they were like, ‘Ok, whatever’. I wasn’t flourishing in school and getting great grades, which is interesting because I’m having those same conversations with my son, because he loves hockey and he says, “I don’t care about school’, and he’s super smart. So, yeah, but you can’t flounder. Because I regret, kind of, not getting the best of grades in high school, and people are like, ‘Who cares now?’, but I do, a little bit. But like I said, all our parents were super supportive, they loved us, they followed us, they went to our shows, they let us practice in our garages, and they spent money on us, for equipment and you name it. We were young. We had big aspirations and we were passionate, and I think as long as you see that as a parent, that’s all that matters.”
BraveWords: And travelling is a really great teacher and whenever you leave your four walls, your minds starts to open.
Bush: “I always say that my college education was heavy metal. We went on our first tour opening for Quiet Riot and Whitesnake when March Of The Saint came out in 1984, and we were playing arenas! We were playing Cobo Hall and Market Square Arena, and all these places. We were like, ‘What the hell?!’, but we were travelling, and that’s how you learn. That’s how you learn about life, and you learn real fast.”
Stay tuned for the entire BraveWords chat in the coming days!
