Rascal Flatts recently joined Broadway in the studio and after talking about the obligatory talking points such as their recent plane trouble (FYI, they now call their plane Sticky Flap) and their upcoming album "Rewind"(out June 3) that they are still currently working on, the boys got into the juicier stuff such as when Eric Church got kicked off their tour. The subject came up because of Taylor Swift mentioning it recently.
After Broadway asked them if Eric being asked to leave the tour had to do with unions and fines and things like that, they agreed that that was all it was. They then went into the story a bit more.
We asked him (Eric) four times to stay to the allotted amount of time that he had to play. We sat him down in our dressing room and we're like, 'Look, we'll put you on early so you can play longer, but please just be off the stage because we still have to do our show.'
For every minute that you go over time, especially in New York City, you're charged thousands of dollars by the minute in labor fees. So the last time was Madison Square Garden, we said, 'It's really important tonight that you get off on time.'
That was our first time we played Madison Square Garden, 2006.
Instead of going 12 minutes over like you're doing, we'll put you on 12 minutes earlier but you have to finish on time.
And he played 20 minutes over.
And he started like 10 minutes late.
So we made that his last visit with us.
It was kind of like a middle finger really.
The thing is we don't really have anything against Eric Church at all. I like his music and every time we see him now and run into him, it's fine, but it was just a bit disrespectful. Because when you're an opening act, we did our best to abide by the rules that the headliner laid out for us and you just do that and there was no goodwill being sent back to us so we were like it's not worth the trouble, see ya.
Makes you wonder if Eric Church ever feels bad for being a dink on the tour or if he just feels it's part of his personality?
Yeah, I have a feeling he doesn't feel one bit sorry.
Take a listen to the entire interview below.
