Queensryche Comes to San Diego
By Vince Meehan
The 80s band Queensryche is coming to San Diego at Sycuan Casino Resort on Friday July 18 for a show full of classic hits as well as some new tracks which from what singer Todd LaTorre tells me are not easy to produce.
“It’s very difficult to be honest, you know, back in the day when bands could earn a living with album sales, you could afford to take a year off touring and just focus on writing the next record,” LaTorre offered. “Those days are gone, so it pretty much all boils down to the live show and constantly being on the road and touring. So, finding those little pockets of time – it’s difficult – and also, you only have let’s say a week of down time you really want to be home with your family and do things around your house, decompress, and give your ears a break.”
According to LaTorre, the revenue stream for any band these days has completely flipped from the model that was around when MTV was king and people bought albums. Back then the money was in album sales, and live shows were considered promotion for those sales. But now with streaming, there are no album sales and any revenue from streaming is miniscule. Therefore, the live acts have to tour constantly to create revenue, and also compete for that revenue with every other live act out there. And that’s just the way it is today.
“Very few bands are able to play at the arena level without draping or sectioning it off,” LaTorre added. “Touring is insanely expensive. Tickets are expensive, and because the money from albums sales isn’t what it used to be – it’s a fraction, like a big fraction of what it used to be – I think you’ve got a surplus of bands constantly touring. And you can only expect people to go pay for concert tickets so much. So then, they’re going to pick and choose who do they really, really, really wanna because everything just costs a lot of money these days.”
Queensryche is a unique band in that it sprang from the 80s, but was never really considered Heavy Metal or a hair band. Well, when I would see them, there was plenty of big hair, scorching guitar solos and the singer yelling WAHHHHHHH!!!! But they did possess fairly deep and relevant lyrics, and the music was much more that the three-chord staple of typical hair-metal. This created a non-so-cult following of fans who gravitated to rock with substance, and those fans continue to attend their shows to this day.
LaTorre says that San Diego has always been a hotbed of Queensryche fans, so he’s excited to come back. But in the mean time, he’s trying to balance the demands of touring with the desire to create a new album with new material.
“So right now I’m here in Florida, and the whole band is here and we’re doing official songwriting sessions for the next album,” LaTorre said. “Producer Zeus is here in town, so we thought since we’re all going to be here together heading over to Europe next week – we’ll be touring there for a month – let’s all get together a week prior and start doing some songwriting sessions. So we’re deep into that right now, then we head to Europe for a month and we come back for not quite a week and then we’ll be on the Monsters of Rock Cruise. Then, we’ll be participating in the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp, we’ve got South American dates, some big festivals with Judas Priest and The Scorpions so yeah, it’s starting to ramp up. So, this is the last of my peace and quiet before I’m living on a tour bus with 10 other people!”
La Torre has a few connections with San Diego, one being that his mom was born in Coronado. The other is his friendship with Pat Georgopoulos who runs the Rustic Root Downtown. “They got a really cool roof-top dining area, and we always drop by anytime we’re in town,” LaTorre added.
Queensryche has a large catalog of songs to tap into from classic albums such as “Operation Mindcrime” and “Empire”. LaTorre says that fans can expect a great show and will not be disappointed. “So, I think for concert goers who are going to see us in San Diego, it’ll be some deep cuts, so really big popular songs like probably Jet City Woman, Silent Lucidity, Eyes of a Stranger, and Empire. Then we’ll play some older stuff mixed in with newer songs from our last couple of records.”
LaTorre hopes that the new album will come out by next year, but he’s cautious about committing to that because he’s also a very realistic man who knows what he’s up against. “You can’t force creativity all the time so it’s something that people who still tour and create new music have to deal with.”
For info and tix go to: https://www.sycuan.com/events/live-and-up-close-events/
