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 BLACK TIDE bassist ZAKK SANDLER can’t legally drink in his country of birth. TOM HERSEY commiserates as he hears about hanging out with celebrities, supporting Trivium and lifelong career choices.
“There’s all sorts of stuff that we do that just blows my mind. Man, meeting my heroes and playing on the same stage with them. I’ve been on tours with bands I’ve looked up to forever and I’m friends with a lot of those dudes now. Like Avenged Sevenfold, I’ve been listening to since I was like 12 and now when we’re in Orange County I call up Nat their singer and be like ‘Dude, what the fuck’s going on, let’s hang out’. It’s cool to be able to do shit like that. These are experiences that I’ll never lose and I love that.”
Who couldn’t be envious of Zakk Snyder? The dude is 20 and already living the heavy metal lifestyle on a worldwide stage. Since forming Black Tide in 2003 alongside vocalist/guitarist Gabriel Garcia and original guitarist Alex Nunez, Zakk and Black Tide have turned heads in a major way. The band has managed to score a record deal, play and subsequently get kicked off Ozzfest (they were playing on the Jägermeister stage despite all being under the legal drinking age), and travel the world on the strength of their speedy guitar riffs and retro thrash sound. Making their first trip to Australia, Zakk explains how fellow Floridians Trivium offered the band the tour.
“Trivium are great dudes. They’ve always asked us to go out with them but we’ve just never taken the offer. Then we saw them at the Kerrang awards in August last year and they were like ‘What the fuck man, we keep offering for you guys to come out on tour with us but you guys have to come out with us’ so we were like ‘ok, we will’.”
Known as much for their chops, as their age, Black Tide have had to tour with bands that in some cases are 10-15 years older than them. But according to Zakk, they’ve never been treated like kids. “There’s some bands that you kind of expect to act a little differently around you because they’re older. But they totally don’t, it’s awesome. We all just hang out and talk the same kind of shit. Because we have the same kind of lifestyle we can always relate to them. They don’t treat us like we’re child stars or anything like that.”
Talking to Zakk, it’s clear Black Tide have no intentions of pulling a Leif Garret and fading into obscurity. The band, whose second album is currently being written, are imprisoned by the majesty of metal and will rot in captivity.
“There’s a lot of kids who head off to college and keep switching majors and don’t know what they want to be when they grow up and they just don’t feel like a success in any way because they’re not doing what they want to do. And we didn’t want to be that. We wanted to do this, and we’re going to keep doing it. We’re married to it for life, we’re not going away. We want to play metal.”
BLACK TIDE play an all ages show at The Tivoli on Thursday May 14 in support of Trivium and Heaven Shall Burn. LIGHT FROM ABOVE is available through Interscope/Universal. www.myspace.com/blacktide
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