Exodus: Tchotchke Sellers Now
“I’m a t-shirt salesman. I’m not a musician. I’m literally a traveling tchotchke seller,” Exodus bassist Jack Gibson (pictured above) stated in a recent interview. “That’s what we do. We play music to try to get people to the store and sell them our fuckin’ stuff with stuff printed on it. That’s the business.”
After a stint with Exodus from ’97–’98, Gibson signed on for a run that began in ’01 and continues to the present.
The problem is that record royalties, streaming and even touring hasn’t made mid-level band’s life profitable.
“There’s no business,” Gibson added. “Once they started giving the music away, there’s no business.”
Don’t ask Gibson about A.I. “Once the A.I. figures out how to actually make music that people enjoy, they’re not gonna pay us to do shit.”
Exodus has been a band on the cusp. It has been debated whether or not they belong in the “Big Five” of Thrash Metal with Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax, due to their involvement with the early ’80s Thrash Metal scene.
Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian thinks Exodus should have been included, “People talk about the ‘Big Four’ all the time, but back then it was really the ‘Big Five’ because Exodus were just as important and just as influential as everybody else.”
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