AVENGED SEVENFOLD guitarist Zacky Vengeance was asked by Goetia Media whether he thinks his band will ever be able to take the spot of such all-time greats of metal as METALLICA or BLACK SABBATH, to which he replied:
“It’s hard to say. We’re very, very fortunate to be able to play these shows that we are playing.
“But it’s important for a band like us to go out there and put on the best show that we can. That means blow stuff up and play loud and give the fans their money’s worth.
“It really needs to be a show. It’s taken a lot of these bands their careers to get to the level that they’re at.
“Iron Maiden and Metallica are bigger now than they ever were. They’re playing stadiums across the entire planet.
“Even though it seems like their heyday was back when MTV and the radio played their songs all the time, the truth is that they’ve gotten bigger now because they play all the time and people know they’re going to get a great show.
“You get different generations. You have dads bringing their dads and people bringing their own sons and entire families coming to the concerts. That’s why there’s so many people.
“For us, we’re still young. We need to go out there and give it everything we have and play the best we can.
“I believe that if we’re able to persevere and have the longevity of some of these classic bands, then hopefully someday we’ll have the same sort of legacy that they do.”
Asked if he pays attention to “haters” criticizing A7X, Zacky replied:
“To be honest, none of it has ever bothered me. We’ve been getting it since day one.
“The first review our band ever got when I was 17 years old and we had just released our first EP, and this tiny little magazine wrote a review on it and for that month, we were the best album of the month and we were also the worst album of the month.
“We won best and worst album of the month in the same magazine. Right then and there, I was so happy and thrilled because if people hate what you’re doing, it means you’re doing it right. It means you’re in front of them, it means they have an opinion.
“Not everyone is going to love you. Not everyone is going to like what you do and you see a lot of people don’t want to let go of the bands that they love. They don’t want to move forward.
“They don’t want to let new things come in; they’re scared of change. They’re scared of new bands taking over their genre. They’re just scared of change. Those are the people that are the most vocal online and they bitch the most: ‘Oh, this band sucks. They’ll never be as good as so-and-so.’
“But the reality is we’re headlining a lot of these festivals around the entire world and we’re selling out concerts everywhere we go.
“We put out a surprise-release album [2016’s ‘The Stage‘] that was considered one of our worst-selling albums and it was still one of the biggest rock albums of the entire year in the entire world and that was our worst album.
“I think as long as people have a strong opinion, whether they love or hate us, I think we’re doing something right.”
