Randy Blythe on Mark Morton: family first

Posted by on January 8, 2014

paulwaggonerNot that you’d want to, but you can’t keep Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe away from Instagram even if you did. In addition to spotlighting his excellent photography, Blythe essentially uses the social media service as his diary, essentially keeping a tour diary, or in last year’s case, a check-in throughout his trial and imprisonment. With Mark Morton sitting out the band’s European tour due to a family emergency and Between the Buried and Me’s Paul Waggoner filling in, it was a matter of time before Blythe weighed in on the temporary personnel change, which he did yesterday:

“Ciao Bella from Milan, Italy! This is our friend Paul “The Wiz” Waggoner, who plays guitar in the amazing Between The Buried And Me, and he will be fulfilling stage left guitar duty this tour. Regrettably Mark Morton has to stay at home this run due to a family emergency- lamb of god has had a pretty rough time with this lately, as both John and one of our crew members (who might as well be band members) had to unexpectedly leave our last tour for the same exact reason.

Mark is doing just fine, he’s ok, but when these things arise, we have no choice but to cancel tour or get a fill in. Life happens, as regrettably a lot of my friends have found out recently- 2014 has started out pretty stressfully for a lot of people I know, but you soldier on and get through it. As I stated when John had to split last tour, family absolutely comes first with the members of this band, so when one of us needs to stay at home to be with his family, that’s what happens- no questions asked, we just say “Ok bro, stay home and handle your business”, and we don’t answer questions by ANYONE about personal family business, so don’t bother asking me why Mark isn’t here- just know that he is ok and needs to be with his family right now.

No one in this band would cancel a tour if it wasn’t absolutely necessary, and we certainly don’t like touring without all our members, but we are actual human beings with families, not heavy metal robots, so we have real life families with real life problems. I hope y’all here in Europe, the UK, & South Africa can understand- we are still coming, we are still going to kick ass and take names- Paul totally rips, he’s filled in for Mark before when Mark‘s wife was having their kid so he knew the tunes already- and last night’s show RULED in Austria, despite the fact that I threw so much water all over the place that Paul slipped on the slick stage, did a full-on David Lee Roth split onstage, and BUSTED HIS ASS (it was totally my fault, but DAMN that shit was funny). So thank you in advance for coming to see us- we are gonna kill it tonight in Milano!”

It’s really refreshing to have Blythe directly address his fans to talk about the goings-on. Obviously, he doesn’t really go into too much detail about Morton’s family, but talking about it instead of taking a vow of silence or putting out a thinly veiled statement via their publicist, Blythe relates his thoughts to his 41,000 Instagram followers like he’s having a beer with them at a bar (even though he’s not drinking these days). Morton can deal with what’s going on at home knowing that the tour is going on fine without him, and fans can know that they’re going to see a guitarist at the top of his game filling in.

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