Earlier this month, it was announced that Dino Cazares would be joining Soulfly on their upcoming US tour, following the departure of longtime guitarist Marc Rizzo. And it seems the nu metal outfit has been hard at work in the rehearsal room, as evidenced by a new video posted to Twitter by the Fear Factory man.
In the clip, Cazares is seen alongside frontman Max Cavalera and his son, drummer Zyon Cavalera, as they rehearse Eye for an Eye, taken from the band's self-titled debut. The video's accompanying caption reads: “Max, Zyon and myself rehearsing Eye for an Eye in Phoenix, AZ. Mike Leon (bass) will join us today.”
“The first time I met Max [Cavalera] in 1991, I knew we were going to be longtime friends,” Cazares explained in a statement following his inclusion into Soulfly. “I was standing at the bar, he grabbed my arm and yelled, ‘Papa Capado.' I was like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ He said, ‘I'm Max,’ and from there we just hit it off.
“That same night I played him the Fear Factory demo tape on his cassette Walkman in his hotel room while we were attending a music convention in Los Angeles. He liked it so much that he wouldn't give it back, so I had to wrestle him and take it out of his Walkman! [laughs] It was my only copy.
“Max told Monte Conner, the A&R director from Roadrunner records, that we had a new demo that he needed to check out, so our manager at the time sent our demo to Monte after many labels turned us down. The rest is history.”
He continued: “Over the past 30 years, I've guested on a few of Max's projects and jumped on stage whenever and wherever I could. Now it's a great honor to be doing this tour alongside Max as the second guitarist. It's going to be amazing for all the fans to see the two of us playing a selection of Soulfly songs and a few familiar extras.”
“I couldn't think of a better person than Dino [to fill the position] – musically and as a friend,” Max Cavalera recently told Heavy New York. "Because we're still very hurt, mostly from the stuff that [Marc] Rizzo has been saying [in the press] – it hurts us a lot.”
Marc Rizzo recently told Pierre Gutiérrez of Rock Talks that he received “no support from Soulfly” throughout the pandemic.
“There was no, ‘Hey, let's do a live video to make money for the band members or maybe let's do a special merch deal,’” Rizzo said.
“A lot of my friends [were] there doing special merchandise deals. I mean, if you look online, Soulfly didn't do anything for the band members or the crew. It's just not right to do that to people during a time like this.”
Cavalera continues: “It's good to have a friend that you could talk about it [with]. And then musically I think [the inclusion of Cazares] is insane. To think of songs, especially the songs that have crunchy guitars, I close my eyes and I imagine Dino's sound on some of those songs, like Downstroy and Babylon... There's a lot of chugging – Soulfly always had chugging. But Dino is a whole other level of chugging!”
Soulfly's upcoming US tour is scheduled to commence August 20 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, running for 33 dates and concluding in Tempe, Arizona on September 25.
