Metal-Rules.com has issued an interview with drummer Jimmy DeGrasso (ALICE COOPER, F5, ex-MEGADETH. The following is an excerpt from the interview, conducted by Marko Syrjala:

Q: What is the status of the band F5?

A: "The F5 is a thing I did with David Ellefsson. We did a record a couple of years ago called The Reckoning. It’s a great record. It’s me and Dave with a bunch of our friends down in Arizona. It’s a great record and it got pretty good response. Unfortunately, in America and abroad, it‘s hard to break new acts or new music because the whole media, the way of things, have changed. Record labels are pretty much irrelevant for the most part now. You don’t really have that machine. Unfortunately when you try to break a new act it takes millions and millions of dollars for promotion and since the labels, a lot of them, are defunct or going out of business there is not that sort of revenue to take say this record and dump two, three, four million dollars for press and promo, videos and so and so forth. So you have the internet outlets and that’s really about it. And if you know you can go tour clubs and things like that. So it’s really difficult. Unfortunately we really couldn’t do much with it because we had the label which had no money. The Reckoning is a great record and we also did few gigs and the response was really great. Maybe at some point we’ll do another record or something? We have talked about it but like I said in America it’s really hard to break anything new right now. We’ll see. You never know what the future will hold."

Q: Well, only future will show how that thing will go on. How about HAIL!? Tell something about that interesting project as well?

A: "Hail! is a fun thing. That’s the thing we started here again with me and David. It was some of our friends who said, 'You should hook up with Andreas and do some gigs.' I’ve always been SEPULTURA fan. I like Andreas, I like his playing and he’s a really, really good guy and an amazing character. And then we were thinking of someone to sing and we thought, 'How about Tim Ripper Owens? That guy can sing anything.' Then we literally started to get offers when someone put it out there and we got offers to do South America and we said 'yeah, sure', and soon we were off do South America. We met at the airport, had one rehearsal and started the tour. It was really a fun gig. We do some things from all bands we’ve been in and then we do some songs from the bands that we all like and stuff from other metal genres and just have fun with it.

Read the full interview at this location.