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Rockers 3 Doors Down back touring after calamities
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By Alan Sculley : Special to The Herald-Sun
Jul 13, 2006 :
9:35 pm ET
RALEIGH -- After taking most of 2006 off, 3 Doors Down are returning to action with a short tour this summer with Lynyrd Skynyrd.
While lead singer Brad Arnold noted the time off was welcome after some five years of nonstop recording and touring, the past several months had its share of calamities and heartache.
First came the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina, which severely damaged coastal communities in the band's home state of Mississippi and prompted the band to use concert revenue to help raise money for victims.
The group had already been donating a dollar from each ticket sold at concerts to its The Better Life Foundation. Following the hurricane, the band decided to direct that money -- at the time more than $300,000 -- to hurricane relief.
The hurricane hit home, according to Arnold, in more ways than one.
"It was horrible," Arnold said. "I personally didn't have any damage from it. But Chris' house [guitarist Chris Henderson] had about five feet of water. Just the whole bottom of the Mississippi Gulf Coast from state line to state line and overlapping into Alabama and Louisiana as well, the whole place just got leveled. It got destroyed. It's coming back, but it's coming back slow."
Then on Feb. 1 came a second incident that nearly had tragic consequences for the band when Arnold was involved in a one-car accident with his wife, Terika.
"We were coming home from a restaurant up in Philadelphia, Miss., just a little rural road," Arnold said.
"It was raining so hard that night. And we hydroplaned and went down the side of an embankment. I was asleep in the passenger seat with my head against the door and the oak tree hit right against the door where my head was laying. It busted the glass, of course, and gave me a nice little knock and then the glass cut my face all up. I had about 45 stitches. But God bless the [plastic] surgeon."
The injuries weren't pretty, Arnold said, but he felt lucky the damage wasn't far more severe.
Arnold is feeling much better these days -- enough so that he and his bandmates, Henderson, guitarist Matt Roberts, bassist Todd Harrell and drummer Greg Upchurch -- are doing a series of dates this summer with Lynyrd Skynyrd, a tour being touted as bringing together two generations of Southern rock.
This run of dates is part of a final leg of touring behind the 2005 CD, "Seventeen Days," which saw the band take its music in a bit harder rocking and more energetic direction.
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