Video of Chad Gray's complete September 11 concert at Big Night Live in Boston, Massachusetts has been posted by the Steve's Concert Corner channel on YouTube.
The MUDVAYNE and HELLYEAH frontman is out on "30 Years Of Madnesss" (sic), a run marking three decades of his career by pulling material from both bands into a single set. He is backed by Marcus Rafferty — MUDVAYNE's touring guitarist — along with Joe Bonasorte on guitar, Nick Villarreal on bass and Devin Attard on drums. BUTCHER BABIES and DEVIL'S CUT are supporting.
The Boston set ran fourteen songs and split almost evenly between the two catalogues: "Hellyeah!", "Moth", "Happy?", "Demons In The Dirt", "Sangre Por Sangre (Blood For Blood)", "Death Blooms", "Hush", "Nothing To Gein", "Dull Boy", "Say When", "World So Cold", "Not Falling", "Love Falls" and "Dig". Gray launched the series on April 24 at the Fremont Country Club in Las Vegas.
Speaking to Jesea Lee, he addressed the obvious question about MUDVAYNE's absence this year — and ruled out the explanation most people had assumed. The band released two new songs in 2025, "Hurt People Hurt People" and "Sticks And Stones", and the second underperformed. "I thought for sure 'Sticks And Stones' would be a Top 10 single, and it topped out at [Top] 20," he said. "It was weird, because everybody at radio fucking loved that track."
Asked directly whether that disappointment triggered the break, he was blunt. "No. Not at all. It was just merely, like, boom, boom, boom, boom. Four years in a row of just hitting it. Like, let's chill. Let's put it on ice for a minute and see what kind of opportunities come, having put it on ice for a year... 'Cause we just headlined [a tour]. So who knows? [We weren't interested in] headlining again within such a short amount of time. We want things that we do to be successful, and we want people to be excited to see us, and sometimes when you kind of know you're gonna be able to see them next year, you kind of pass."
The more revealing part of the conversation was about HELLYEAH, and the wall fans built around it. "[Late HELLYEAH and PANTERA drummer] Vinnie [Paul Abbott] used to say, like, 'Man, it's frustrating to me because people look at our band like a wall between me and PANTERA and you and MUDVAYNE.' And that's not what it is at all," Gray said. "It was just some dudes getting together in a room and going for it and just having some fun. But people did kind of look at it like, 'I'm not gonna like HELLYEAH because HELLYEAH is keeping Chad away from MUDVAYNE, or keeping Vinnie away from doing the PANTERA reunion.' And we always wanted HELLYEAH to kind of stand on its own. That's why we never played MUDVAYNE songs and we never played PANTERA songs in our sets."
Which is precisely what this tour undoes. For the first time the two catalogues share a stage, and Gray knows the crossover is not guaranteed. "You can't always guarantee that MUDVAYNE fans are gonna be HELLYEAH fans and that HELLYEAH fans are MUDVAYNE fans. They were two separate things. They were two completely kind of different things."