By Tim Henderson
"At Wacken, I'm like, 'Ah, no problem.' I got kinda cocky before I went on - 'This'll be a piece of cake, just like the other gigs.' So I walk up and everything technical that could possibly go wrong did - my wireless didn't work so I switched to a cable. I put the cable in the guitar, the guitar tech puts it in but he doesn't wrap it around the guitar strap and your supposed to do that in case somebody steps on your cable. Well, somebody stepped on my cable and snapped the cable in half, in my guitar so I couldn't use the guitar. Then I get another guitar, another cable, and it got caught under the stage. It fell under the stage and got caught, it was just everything wrong. From a personal standpoint it was a nightmare but after all the problems got solved and I looked out at the people and I was like, 'Wow, these guys love this band!' and what a blast."
Now the burning question - is there a possibility of any future work with Savatage? "We'll see," Waters responds vaguely. "Al Pitrelli (Savatage's "current" guitar player who was forced to bow out of the European dates) is a fantastic guitar player and I'm not sure what he's going to do or what Savatage is going to do but ya never know!"
As for Annihilator, the workaholic Waters reports that he's "just working right now on mixing a live record. We recorded 4.5 shows on our summer headline tour. The .5 is when we were figuring out how the computer stuff works and getting it set up and it only taped half the show. Myself and my engineer Paul Blake have pretty well finished the mixing for the CD. I think the Annihilator fans are gonna really love this; there are songs from the beginning and songs from every CD up to present. Basically I am getting some studio gear up-graded and doing some more writing for the next, tenth, Annihilator studio CD!"