Ongoing History Daily: You call this “tour support?”

This isn’t exactly the best kind of tour support.

When Depeche Mode went on tour in 1993, the band was a mess. Part of the entourage included both a drug dealer and a drug counsellor. Even then, Martin Gore partied so much he ended up suffering seizures. Dave Gahan was deep in the throes of heroin addiction. Andy Fletcher needed to be checked in to an institution to recover. Alan Wilder quit the band entirely.

And then there was the time Slayer went on tour with both an evangelical preacher and exorcist named Bob Larson who believed that metal was the work of Satan. He was assigned to the tour by Spin magazine to write an article based on what he saw in an effort to prove that Slayer consisted of Satanists. Spoiler: They weren’t. All Larson could write about is how he thought Slayer was using satanism is a gimmick to make money.