“A guy on a dirtbike was firing a semi-automatic gun outside a show”: 13 Questions with Municipal Waste’s Tony Foresta

Municipal Waste are returning to the UK this weekend for a long-overdue headline tour. Bonus points: they're bringing rising death metal heroes Undeath and killer hardcore mob GEL with them. Craziness, doubtless, awaits. Which we knew anyway, but we're even more certain of now that we've presented singer Tony Foresta with our fiendish 13 Questions…

“Rotten shark. This was in Reykjavik, Iceland. They sell these little cubes of rotten shark, and it's supposed to be a delicacy. And it tasted like a cube of earwax, and the aftertaste lasted, like, an hour. It was fucking disgusting. I also had monkey brains one time. Where was that? In Eastern Europe somewhere. We didn’t know until after we ate it. Again, disgusting. Gamey.”

“Oh yeah. I’ve actually been arrested on tour – although I won’t say where. It was on Warped Tour and we stopped in Denver, where weed was legal before everywhere else. They were telling everyone to get rid of their fucking weed before we left Colorado, because the cops in the next place are probably gonna stop buses and vans coming through. A friend of mine gave me basically a pillowcase full of weed. We left the state lines and sure as shit, there were cops literally on the side of the road, waiting for tour buses, and illegally search it.

“I got locked up, and then I was able to get bailed out and I played the show. And then Kevin Lyman, who's the founder of Warped Tour, comes up to me. He's like, ‘What the fuck did I tell you? Why the fuck did you have weed? I told everyone in a mass email.’ He gave me a card for some baller-ass lawyer, and I ended up just paying a bunch of fines. It’s not on my record, probably because someone else challenged the whole thing and revealed they illegally searched us.”

“Some festival that we'd never fucking heard of in the middle of America. We're from Virginia, and it was west of Chicago. It couldn't be further away. We weren’t doing much at the time, they offered us an incredible amount of money, and we were like, ‘Yeah, let's drive there, it’ll be fun.’ We drove across America, then it's like, take the dirt road for 10 miles, take a right at the mailbox. It was the middle of nowhere. It was a fun show, old punks, very DIY, they’d hand-built the stage and all that shit. We ended up playing at 1am, and then the dude who was supposed to pay us disappeared. Everybody was super-upset about it. The people that worked there were like, ‘That's fucked up,’ because it was a group of friends that were putting it together. It was a bummer, man.”

“Everybody always asks me about John Travolta – we stayed at his house, me and my girlfriend, and we partied with him and my buddy Jimmy, who works with him. I showed him YouTube bloopers of newscaster fails and stuff, and we were crying laughing. I've seen him a few times since, which is weird, being on a first-name basis with a person who's a legit Hollywood icon. I also went on his boat one time, and we watched the Super Bowl together!”

“This sounds like bullshit, but I work for WWE, the wrestling company. I was working at WrestleMania and I blew my knee out, moving shit around. When I tell people I work for WWE and that I blew my knee out, they’re like, ‘Dude, did you get body slammed?’ No, I was fucking working. I was stocking the dressing rooms and fucked my knee up. It progressively got worse, and I couldn't even stand. I was in bed for two months and had to have some pretty serious surgery.”

“In Philadelphia, at the anniversary show for an American magazine. I was out front meeting one of my friends that I had on the guestlist. There were, like, 400 people in line to get into the show, and suddenly we see these two dudes up the street just start fucking open fire on each other. One of these dudes has a fucking semi-automatic, and he jumps on a fucking dirt bike in the middle of Philadelphia, driving away shooting at this other guy – pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. It was fucking crazy, man, everyone was just fucking running the fuck outta there.”

“I kind of regret not being more into it at the time, but I took a video editing class. By video, I mean working on VHS tapes and shit. They actually give me access to an editing machine, one of those big, old ones. I was really into skate videos at the time, and I was surfing a lot, so I would take, like, a Primus song, and have my friends doing surf tricks to it. Now you can do that shit on your phone like it's nothing, but at the time I was actually doing it on tape. When I moved up to Virginia I got a job as a projectionist – I was the guy in the booth that was putting the tape together and showing movies.”

“Paintings. I've bought a ton of paintings, and they're all over the place in my house, but those are the good ones. When I was younger I did not have an eye for that sort of thing. I have some real shitty paintings that I paid $1,000 for when I didn't have that kind of money. The crappy ones have sentimental value, I guess. But, yeah, what a waste.”

“We played a festival in Vegas, right? They fucked up the room and it didn’t have enough beds. So the lady on the desk, she makes a call, and they gave us the baller-ass suite. It had two bedrooms and a fucking pimp couch, a huge mirror, like, the cocaine hotel room, man. I was bragging to a friend about it, and her hotel upgraded her, too. She had two stories and a fucking piano that Frank Sinatra played in her fucking room.”

“I was a shoe salesman at Sears in Long Beach, California for about seven hours. I was starving, I had no money, I’d moved across the country and that was the only place that hired me. I walked in and they were so shitty to me. I was like, ‘I gotta get the fuck out of here’ and just walked out. I never got my paycheck, but it probably would have been for $3.”

“About 12 years ago, I broke my hand on a guy's face at a NOFX show – I asked him to leave and he kept taunting me. It probably wasn't the most responsible thing I did at the time, but it felt good. I heard that he went to a wedding a couple of days later with two swollen eyes. But yeah, fighting is stupid. I’m definitely old enough now to know that that was a stupid thing to do.”

“Beastie Boys, on the opening night of the Check Your Head tour, with Rollins Band opening. I actually have an autographed record from that show. I met them but I didn't get that autograph, I actually found it at a record store. Somebody was at that show and got it signed. When I found it, I was like, ‘Holy fucking shit. That was the first show of I’d ever been to!’ I bought that fucking record the second I had eyes on it.”

“When I told you I ate monkey brains!”

Waste ’Em All is released September 29 via Nuclear Blast. Municipal Waste tour the UK from October 1.

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