In late 2002 Onward completed a relatively successful U.S. tour with Angra but had to cancel the Canadian dates because Michael Grant's girlfriend "misplaced" his passport AFTER he had already packed it into his bag. I issued a warning to Grant; "Dump her now or Onward will not exist in a year from now". Mike put his head down and whispered "I know". We did some more shows in Vegas, Los Angeles and Colorado with bands such as Dreams of Damnation, New Eden, Cage, Prototype and many others.
I got back to Wyoming with my 4 track recorder and quickly wrote all the music for "The Neverending Sun". This music was a complete contrast to the decidedly mellow and shelved project "New Fathoms Down". I think if "Neverending Sun" would have made it into a proper studio (as Century Media had promised) it would have been great.
On "Reawaken" Century Media had given us a recording budget of 4 or 5k. Our engineer and co producer, Brett Hansen, was our friend and worked constantly on Reawaken off the clock out of labor of love. He invested at least another 5k of his personal time and studio usage. Century Media wanted him to do it again; "See if your studio buddy can do the next album for 2 or 3k". They wanted me to exploit his kindness and devotion to Onward's music. I couldn't. I replied via email "go fuck yourselves" to the utter horror of my bandmates. Thus, the Century vs.Toby standoff had begun.
On the Blind Guardian/Symphony X tour front, things were looking bleak with Onward only booked on two gigs of a full U.S. tour. The problem stemmed from two fold rock star arrogance; Blind Guardian would not move one piece of gear to make room for Symphony X (assholes) and Symphony X followed suit when dealing with Onward. We played The Roxy in LA and it was a shit show. Drummer Jon Pereau had to set his kit up sideways, similar to the Stryper drummer, and we were one wrong move from actually falling into the audience. The crowd went wild nonetheless. Backstage, Blind Guardian vocalist, Hansi, congratulated me on the show. I told him it would have been better if Blind Guardian weren't such dicks about stage room. He walked away from me looking puzzled and my band looked at me in horror. Sorry guys, I thought I was talking to a roadie- not Hansi. We ended up only doing that one gig and little did we know, it was our last.
Back in Montana, Michael Grant joined us for a week of rehearsals and photo shoots for our planned third Century Media album "The Neverending Sun". Although the band sounded pretty tight, the negativity between Michael and I was developing into a constant passive aggressive hate fest. The cold war with Century Media over the album budget was also still in effect. We drove Michael to the airport so he could return to his home in LA.
We still believed in our music, things HAD to get better, right??!
Wrong. Stay tuned.
