This Week in Metal News History: 2001
Tired of “so-and-so’s album turned 30 today” articles? Yeah, me too. Let’s get into some of the grittier pieces of news from the olden days of 2001. Thanks to the Blabbermouth news archive, we can go back and see what all the hot topics were 15 years ago and laugh, cry, or vomit from the findings.
On November 5th, an article came out reporting that Lars Ulrich was hanging out with Sean Penn and allegedly flirting with supermodel Naomi Campbell. The Danish magazine reported that he “is now more interested in ‘using his ‘stick’, and not his drum sticks” which couldn’t be more true considering their next album was St. Anger. The Danish were probably very upset that he wasn’t trying harder to support their economy. Here is a not-at-all photoshopped picture of that unfortunate meetup.
On November 9th, they reported:
“On the Watchtower front, the legendary quartet have finished writing all of the music for Mathematics, the long-dormant follow-up to the band’s 1989 classic, Control & Resistance.”
Mathematics would never see the light of day, but you might remember that they released Concepts of Math: Book One in October of this year. Fascinating that they reportedly had so much complete before falling out and re-emerging 15 years later.
In a post about a canceled Guns N’ Roses tour, the author jokingly said:
“it appears that Mr. Rose’s greatest fear is actually not being able to complete work on the group’s perennially-delayed new CD, entitled Chinese Democracy, which is currently scheduled to be released in…like 2005?!?!? Well, not quite, but you get the picture.”
Chinese Democracy ended up being released in late 2008. Even his joke date was off by 3 years.
This isn’t really metal news, but it’s so terrible I feel like it needs to be known. On November 8th:
“Limp Bizket frontman Fred Durst will perform Led Zeppelin‘s ‘Thank You’ with Puddle of Mudd singer/guitarist Wes Scantlin at MTV’s European Video Music Awards”
In case you want to torture yourself, here you go:
Here are some select album sale statistics from the week (number of weeks on the chart in parenthesis):
- Nickelback – Silver Side Up: 1,004,928 (8)
- Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory: 3,914,977 (54)
- Incubus – Morning View: 376,887 (2)
- System of a Down – Toxicity: 817,286 (9)
- Slipknot – Iowa: 553,043 (10)
- Metallica – Metallica: 12,890,072 (484) [Why was this still even being tracked?!]
- Mudvayne – L.D. 50: 451,899 (44)
- Slayer– God Hates Us All: 121,179 (8)
Some additional quicky news-bites:
- Don Dokken had to respond to a bunch of rumors about Jeff Pilsen leaving Dokken (he wasn’t even sure), which ended up being true.
- Dream Theater set a release date for Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence.
- Yngwie Malmsteen released a live DVD that included a coupon for a Yngwie calendar. I fucking need to see one of these. Now.
- Symphony X opted out of a rescheduled tour (due to 9/11) to instead finish writing their next album, which ended up being The Odyssey. Good call boys.
- Opeth had to cancel a few shows because Martin Lopez had severe lung issues and needed to have surgery.
Did anyone care about this news at the time? I was 10, so some of this is cool in hindsight since I was probably getting all my music news from VH1 morning music video countdowns.
