Maynard James Keenan Recounts Finding Out Puscifer’s Bassist Was Trapped in Le Bataclan
One by one, everyone’s story surrounding the horrific ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris are coming forward. We’re learning more and more about the many poor souls trapped in Le Bataclan.
Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan (as well as some other band, probably a Puscifer side project) and guitarist Mat Mitchell recently talked to SiriusXM, and discussed the moment when they found out that their bassist, Matt McJunkins, who was performing with Eagles of Death Metal at Le Bataclan, was involved in the attacks:
“It was an awful, an awful 24 hours, just trying to figure out where he was… I guess Junk had gotten a hold of somebody’s cell phone in the venue and texted or called his significant other to say that he was pinned down.
“The rest of the band got out, but he did not. And then that’s all we heard. We were simply in the dark for the next 12 hours waiting to hear anything. And we finally saw that like the authorities were in the building now, we still didn’t hear from him. So we had no idea if he was a casualty or not.
“Of course we were up all night and so the show the next day was understandably – we were just exhausted, so it was of course hard to hold back the emotions a little bit, so it wasn’t, this was not our favorite show.”
Sweet Jesus. The not knowing has got to be awful.
Maynard went on to say that he hasn’t directly discussed the experience with Matt–a smart move, I think, given how traumatic it must have been:
“We weren’t in it, but just the thoughts of our friend going through it, and we don’t even know what he saw yet. We have no idea if he saw all this, or if he was hiding under a rock—I have no idea, I don’t know that he wants to talk about it.”
McJunkins himself issued a statement earlier on Facebook, which appears to have been taken down or made private. Which makes total sense. Given how much coverage there’s been on this tragedy (fuck, on our site alone!), one can forget that it hasn’t even been a week since it happened. So I’m sure McJunkins is still dealing with some raw emotions over this event. Good that his friends are giving him some space.
You can hear the interview below. Puscifer’s Money Shot is out now on the band’s own label.
https://soundcloud.com/siriusxmmusic/maynard-james-keenan-mat-mitchell-comment-on-bandmate-affected-by-the-paris-attack
[via The PRP]
