Opening for a band as iconic as Iron Maiden can be either a dream come true — or a complete nightmare, depending on the night. Just ask Dan Jacobs.
Speaking in a recent interview with Devious Dayna of This Day In Metal, the Atreyu guitarist looked back on two very different experiences touring alongside the legendary metal act — one that left him inspired, and another that nearly pushed the band out of their slot altogether.
Jacobs first pointed to a more recent run of Canadian dates, where Atreyu found themselves in a unique and almost surreal situation: sharing the bill exclusively with Maiden in massive arenas.
“We’ve done multiple kind of little mini tours with Iron Maiden, which was a pretty trippy thing to do. The most recent one was a couple years ago. It was three shows in Canada, all in hockey arenas,” he said. “And it was just us and them. We thought it would be this tour. When they asked us to do it, we’re, like, ‘Yeah, Iron Maiden. Yeah, let’s go. Whatever you guys want.’ And we’re, like, ‘Who else is on this tour?’ And they’re, like, ‘No one. Just you.’ Like, ‘What? Just us and Iron Maiden?’ We’re, like, ‘What is this? What weird pipedream is this? Okay, let’s go.’ But we went to do these shows, and it’s just us and Iron Maiden.
“And their whole thing, like day one, they bring us up on stage — not while they’re playing, but they bring us up before when we’re setting up and soundchecking and stuff. And they’re, like, ‘All right, so this is all of our stuff. [You] just can’t move any of it. Just work around it.’ We’re, like, ‘Okay. We’re just gonna play on Iron Maiden’s stage with all their stuff.’ Like, ‘This is awesome.’ I just felt like, ‘This is such a weird, trippy experience.’ Especially because we couldn’t move their stuff; we had to leave it there. And you can tell this equipment’s old, and they’ve been using this stuff since the ’90s or the ’80s maybe — for a long time, which is really neat, that they are doing exactly what they’ve been doing for so long. And I thought that’s really cool, and it was really inspiring and just a neat experience… I mean, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? I mean, the only reason to wanna move away from that kind of stuff nowadays is ’cause it’s heavy and trying to lug heavy stuff everywhere, and gas is expensive. It’s a lot to try to travel that way. And there are more economically friendly ways to be in a band these days. But those dudes, money is probably not much of an issue to them. They own their own jet, and not even just a jet — it’s a full-on like 737 or whatever. It’s a massive airliner. They’re on a whole another level.”
But rewind to 2009, and the story takes a much darker turn. During a pair of shows in Mexico — including a massive stop in Monterrey — Atreyu quickly realized they weren’t exactly the crowd’s preferred choice.
“The first time was in Mexico City and Monterrey back in, like, [February] 2009 or something like that. And that was not so awesome. That was scary as hell,” Dan said. “And people were throwing s**t at us. And it was horrifying. I mean, long story short, but it was two shows, Monterrey and then Mexico City. Monterrey was in a football stadium. I think it held 30,000 people. Sold-out show. We go there. We’d never been there before. And at the time we’re off the back of our album Lead Sails Paper Anchor, and we were pretty successful at the time and figured, like, we’re direct support to Iron Maiden. It was them, us and then Carcass, Morbid Angel, and then Lauren Harris, which is the bass player of IRON MAIDEN’s daughter’s band; she’s the singer of the band. They were opening. So we get there, and all these bands go on. The show is going great.
“And it gets to our turn, and we’re standing on the side of the stage and our backdrop drops down. And usually the crowd’s, like, ‘Yay.’ And they cheer when that happens. And it was just kind of quiet. And we’re, like, ‘That’s weird. Okay, but whatever. Okay.’ And also when our backdrop came down, they didn’t hook it up right. So it was clipped weird in the middle. So instead of saying ‘Atreyu’, you just said ‘Trey’. We’re, like, ‘Okay, well, that’s not a good look, but whatever. Here we go. This is ‘Spinal Tap’ as hell.’ So our intro starts playing. We start walking out on stage, and we start hearing like ‘tink, tink, tink’. And we’re, like, ‘What the hell is that?’ Those people were throwing pesos up on stage or smashed cups and just flicking ’em up on stage or just any random s**t. ‘Cause opening up for Iron Maiden in certain countries is — they do not wanna see anybody else other than Iron Maiden or other very, very metal bands. And our band teeters being emo band in Mexico. And especially at that time, and that did not go over very well.
“So people were throwing stuff at us the entire set, and it was horrifying,” he continued. “Our bass player got hit in the face with this bullet that was like a keychain that somebody hooked up, hit him on the side of the head, split him open. He was on the cover of the newspaper the next day. It was a whole thing. And then we got off stage, and our tour manager’s, like, freaking out. And we’re, like., ‘Dude, what are you so freaked out about?’ And he’s, like., ‘I don’t know how tell you guys this, but the show tomorrow is twice as big.’ We’re, like., ‘Oh my God.’ We’re, like., ‘We don’t wanna be direct support to Iron Maiden anymore. This is terrifying.’ But we had ’em switch us with Carcass. We’re, like., ‘Put us a little bit earlier. There’s too much pressure. We’re not the right band for this spot.’ And we went and did it. We made our set a little bit heavier, played a little bit earlier, and it went over a lot better. And the crowd was not as throwing stuff at us. But, yeah, two very different Iron Maiden experiences, both very interesting and wild. One being positive, the Canadians being very nice, and down in Mexico, at an Iron Maiden show they’re very aggressive and scary.”
The guitarist also reflected on the broader reality of opening for massive legacy acts, noting that crowd reactions can vary wildly depending on location and expectations — particularly with bands known for fiercely loyal fanbases, such as Slayer.
After Devious Dayna noted that it’s “actually insane to hear” that fans would throw metal coins on stage just because they weren’t fans of the band that was performing at the time, Dan concurred. “Yeah, it’s wild because you think if you talked face to face with any one of these people, it’s, like, we’re all just a bunch of human beings standing up there,” he said. “Guys, why are you throwing things at us? If you don’t like the music, just don’t listen to it. Just talk to your friend next to you or something. You don’t need to throw s**t at us. It’s horrifying.
“Iron Maiden and Slayer, in particular, are two of the most known bands in the world for having fans that are very aggressive,” Jacobs continued. “I’ve seen many a band open for either of those bands and get bad responses, similar to ours, where the whole crowd turns their back to them. If you’re not the right type of band… Certain countries just have different ways of digesting music and the way that they act at concerts culturally, so things are just different — not for better, for worse; sometimes for better, for worse — but it’s just different everywhere. So some places we can comfortably go and open for a band like Iron Maiden. There’s certain countries, it’s not really safe for us to go open for Iron Maiden, ’cause we’re not the right type of metal, which is weird.”
