ty vole... Toxic Holocaust a jejich fiasko v jižní americe... lidi jsou zrmdi...
I've been seeing a lot of speculating on what happened to our South American tour, I thought our last post made it clear but I will explain again from the very beginning. This will no doubt be confusing to you because we are involved and still confused! I'm going to be 100% honest here.
Months and months before we went to South America our U.S. booking agent Ron Martinez was contacted by a guy named Javi who runs Freak Producciones who lives in Santiago, Chile offering us a tour in South America. We get these offers all the time and usually it's people who don't follow through hence why it took us 8 long years to come back down there. After Ron was dealing with this guy for a bit working out planning etc he told me that Javi seemed legit. Ron has an acute "bullshit detector" so I'm sure Javi was talking a big game. The problems started to arise closer and closer to the beginning of the tour. First there was no itinerary or tour book, then no plane tickets to or from the USA. Then out of the blue we started getting emails from a guy named Hamilcar. At the time, we didn’t know this but it turns out that no promoter would work with Javi in Brazil because they never heard of him so Hamilcar had to step in and book all of the Brazilian shows in South America. As time got closer and closer to the beginning of the tour there was still no plane tickets until the day before...literally the day before we were supposed to go! Toxic Holocaust still did not have any info on how we would be getting to shows, internal South American flight info (we did have the info on flights to and from the USA but not how we would be getting to the shows), no info on promoter names, hotels but we weren't too worried because Javi promised us that he would be traveling with us to all of the gigs translating and tour managing. It still seemed sketchy and my spidey senses we're tingling that something was off but I saw the South American backlash when Municipal Waste canceled and wanted to risk it even without the crucial info we need.
So we get to Brazil, and are met at the airport by Hamilcar and is roadie/assistant Augusto. These guys were a pleasure to work with, their English was solid and they were organized. Hamilcar even had a tour book for us with all the information we needed.....just for the 9 Brazilian shows though. (Remember like I said above Hamilicar was doing the Brazilian shows because no one would work with Javi there.) So we were stoked and our mind was at ease a little knowing that these two would be traveling with us to all the gigs in Brazil. Truth be told even if they didn't come with us we were supplied with enough information in Hamilcar's tour book that we could have figured it out, we are no strangers to traveling alone. We tour all over the world with out a tour manager. The shows in Brazil we're great but there was a lot of arguing via email with Hamilcar and Javi about who owes what. It was over a sum of $6099 USD regarding purchase of plane tickets. Apparently Hamilcar and Javi we're supposed to split the cost of our plane tickets to and from the USA and Javi never paid Hamilcar for them. Hamilicar still owed us all of the money from the Brazilian shows but said he would fly his assistant to Colombia the day of our show after Javi gave him his money he was owed. Confused yet?
The entire time we were in Brazil we were asking Javi to send us updates, show info, flight info, etc and we would get back one or two word responses always followed by “cheers”. Super frustrating!
Ok, so we leave Brazil and fly to Chile to meet Javi. We get to the airport, meet him and all seems good. We had 4 days off in Chile so we took that opportunity to sight-see and hang out. Javi hired a guy named Freddy to show us around, take us for food and beers and on top of that we were staying at a really nice place. We all thought “wow” this is going to be a really awesome tour...until shit started to go wrong. First the emails between Javi and Hamilcar over the $6099 started to become more frequent. Javi had an idea to pay Toxic directly $6099 instead of sending it to Hamilcar and then Hamilcar's assistant would just pay us the difference in Colombia. Javi said he would pay us Friday (same day as the show) as well as $2000 USD for our guarantee for the show in Santiago that night. So Toxic was supposed to get $8099 total on Friday. So we play the show that night, with Ratos de Porão and Nuclear. 1300 people...crazy crowd one of the best shows we ever headlined. We get off stage and hang out back there with Freddy having some beers talking about the gig, all was good. Javi never showed up to pay us but we didn’t think anything of it because we heard he would meet us at our hotel. Again, he was a no show but we still weren’t worried, it was getting late and we had to be up at 6am to catch a flight to Argentina. We woke up in the morning to this email:
“sorry but im out of this.i cant do it anymore no worth for me, bad feelings/no earn money too frustrated. cheers"
Keep in mind, this guy had all of the info for our upcoming gigs and wasn't returning emails or calls. Him saying he didn't make enough money is ridiculous pre-sale tickets in Chile were $15 and there was 700 pre-sale. That alone says a lot. We made the decision as a band to fly home. The details we're non existent and we were out of money. Even the tour laminate that Javi gave us was out of date with shows on it that we already knew weren't happening still like Quito which was canceled long ago. A lot of armchair touring musicians can say easily from the comfort of their homes and behind a computer screen that we "wimped out" or "should have figured it out" but I wanna drop one of you pussies in a country you’ve never been with a language you don’t speak with no info and see what you do.
It really seems like our biggest crime in all this was even going at all, we would have gotten off the hook easier if we would have just bailed on the whole tour instead of trying to make it work. It's a shame because the fans in South America are the best in the world and they are the ones who have to suffer because of all these shady people looking for a cash grab.
Like us or hate us, that’s the truth. Sites like Metal Sucks speculating what happened without even attempting to contact me about it is just TMZ-style gossip and exactly whats wrong with the music scene.