IRON STEEL EXCLUSIVE BLOG ENTRY #5: MORGAN ROSE ON BEING THE TOUR MANAGER
Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 5:43pm by Vince Neilstein
[Welcome to the fifth installment of our exclusive blog series from the new thrash supergroup Iron Steel, featuring Morgan Rose (Sevendust) on drums; Jim LaMarca (Chimaira), Dave Ellefson (ex-Megadeth) and Rachel Bolan (Skid Row) all on bass; along with vocalist and guitarist Fran Strine and guitarist Tommy Redd. Each week a different member will be posting a blog entry at MetalSucks. This week Sevendust skinsman Morgan Rose talks about the trials and tribulations of being the band's de-facto tour manager. (Check out Fran Strine’s, Jim LaMarca’s, Tommy Redd’s and Dave Ellefson's previous entries.]
If you asked me a year ago if I would be the only island of sanity in an otherwise raucous, insane metal super-group, I would tell you that you were NUTS. The fact is, they need SOMEONE around here who is realistic, grounded and sensible, so here I am!
At NAMM Ellefson and Fran were having flashbacks, LaMarca got out of control at our release party and Tommy… well, Tommy is just a dangerous dude on the whole. Rachel Bolan only speaks to us via morse code transmissions and I recently heard that we were bringing even more people into this psychotic mess of a band – scary!
I’ve become the de-facto tour manager for the band lately because all our tour managers wind up either quitting, getting killed in one of Tommy’s ill-planned maneuvers or disappearing on their way to take the groupies home. The last one went to bring Tommy one of his bags and brought the wrong one up from under the bus – it was his stash of grenades – and it exploded as the tour manager swung it over his shoulder. We found the poor guy, headless, hanging from a tree on the outskirts of the parking lot we were in.
[Welcome to the fourth entry of our exclusive blog series from the new thrash supergroup 
[Welcome to the third entry of our exclusive blog series from the new thrash supergroup 
[Welcome to the second entry of our exclusive blog series from the new thrash supergroup 
As the wild NAMM weekend came to a close, Iron Steel almost broke up. Hung over from our release party, we had our first band meeting. Tommy was late, as usual, because he and Diggity Dave from Pimp My Ride closed down the party and moved it over to the custom shop, bringing the majority of the women in attendance with them. Fran had been barricaded in the bathroom of his hotel suite, hiding from Lacey from Rock of Love. She stalked him during the party and chased him all the way back to his hotel room. Morgan took his Sevendust bandmates, John Connolly and Sonny Mayo, left the party early and somehow wound up in jail for performing lewd acts at nearby Disneyland. Ellefson, in his usual ‘work mode’ did an impromptu ‘side-side project’ with some of the remaining musicians in attendance at the party – recruiting Mick Thomson (Slipknot), Josh Rand (Stone Sour), Marc Rizzo (Soulfly), Doc (God Forbid) – into a band that was all guitar players – and he was the only bassist (finally). I observed it all with Rob and Matt from my other band, Chimaira, sitting in the ultra-ultra-VIP section where nobody could see or speak to us – it was an invisibility chamber, actually – created just for Iron Steel.
