Dino Cazares Shares Status of Divine Heresy and Why Tim Yeung Quit the Band (Hint: Money!)
Have you listened to the latest episode of the MealSucks Podcast yet with special guest Dino Cazares? I know it’s my site and all, so I’m super-biased, but Chuck and Godless knocked it out of the park. Given the, um, turbulent history between MetalSucks and Dino, the best is how skeptical he is to start, but once he realizes that Godless’ enthusiasm and fandom for Fear Factory are genuine he totally opens up and dives deep into the history of the band. It’s great stuff. Listen here or below.
Later on in the interview Dino gets into the current situation with his other band, Divine Heresy, and what led certain members to leave. And, shocker of all shockers, money and ego were the primary motivating factors. Here’s an excerpt:
What’s the status of Divine Heresey now?
At the moment there is no status because it’s just me. I’m doing Fear Factory until I get time.
Did you and Tim have a falling out? Or is it just that he isn’t coming back? What happened with Tim Yeung?
I don’t know. Because when I wanted to do Fear Factory a while ago he told me that Divine Heresy was not a lucrative enough business for him to be involved in. For me, when I started Divine Heresy, I started it with nothing, got in a van, toured America, sold my own merch and moved my own gear, just like everybody else. Doesn’t matter that I was in a big band called Fear Factory at at one point. I was like, “I wanna get back out there, I wanna build this band up big and do it from the ground up.” It was actually exciting to me. The thing is, once you love music and love what you do, you make the best of it.
There’s a lot of guys that feel they’re entitled to stuff. Tim Yeung would tell me all the time, “I’ve been playing death metal for 10 years, I shouldn’t have to move my own fucking drum set.” I’m like, “Well, we’re making the money that we’re making and it is what it is. Look at me, I’m out here moving all my own gear too. What makes you any better than me?” I was in a van and a trailer staying at shitty hotels, staying at friends’ places, putting that stuff on Facebook, “Hey, got a place for the band to crash?” We were doing it like every other band does. There’s no difference. We were out there doing it. I’d sit at the merch table every day selling my own merch.
We were actually doing good. Divine Heresy records sold over 46,000 copies [combined]. That’s a lot of records, a lot of records that bands can’t even achieve today. It was no joke. And we were coming home with money in our pockets. Tim and everyone else in the band were making a few thousand dollars after a month’s tour. Some people make $1,500/month and we were coming home with $3,000-$4,000 in our pocket for a month’s tour in a van, hiring no tech, doing it ourselves.
How can you complain about that? You got money. And dudes complained. They cried. They didn’t wanna do it. They thought that since they were in a band with Dino Cazares they were gonna be in a fucking bus eating at five star restaurants, staying at the best hotels and eating caviar. No.
Dino later elaborated:
When we got signed, we got signed for a decent amount of money because of me, a decent contract. We were able to make a record for not very much money, so I put [some of the rest of the] money in these guys pockets and they just blew it. I would tell them, “Save your money, hold onto it, don’t blow it.” A month or two later they’re asking for more money. “Well, what happened to the ten grand I gave you? How did you blow that in two months? What did you do?”
Stream the entire interview below. The interview segment with Dino starts at the 22:45 mark.
And don’t forge to check out some music from Fear Factory’s forthcoming album Genexus — “Soul Hacker,” “Protomech” and “Dialectric.”
