Skid Row’s guitarist explains the band’s breakup with singer Erik Grönwall

Skid Row guitarist Dave “Snake” Sabo talked about the events that led to the band’s breakup with Swedish singer Erik Grönwall earlier this year in a recent interview with Rockin’ 101’s “The Johnny Rock Show.”

Erik did ‘The Gang’s All Here’ record, and then Erik was able to spend almost three years in the band. But whether you know or not, Erik’s a cancer survivor, and he had a bone marrow transplant in order to put him in remission. And he immediately, once he was in remission and started getting some energy back, he immediately wanted to get back out and start singing again. And so we called him up and said, ‘Hey, man, we just recorded a record and we’d love for you to sing on it.’ And we sent him the music, and he did. Then all of a sudden we started touring. We could see early on that his health was still not there yet, and he knew it too. And so we did the best that we could with his situation, and he gave us all that he could, but it got to a point where it just was too much for his body at that particular point. And the way we tour, it’s tough, it’s a grind, and we attempted to compromise and come up with a situation where it would benefit his health. But after speaking with his doctors and him and his family and stuff, it turned out to be that we just wouldn’t be able to work it out from a health perspective for him and from a sort of an economic standpoint for the band. We didn’t wanna go and go in and have to go postpone more shows and things like that and then have to make them up later on down the road. It wasn’t good for him and it wasn’t good for the band and stuff. But we’re thankful for the time that we got to spend with them. He’s a great singer. And we were able to do two records that we’re really, really proud of — ‘The Gang’s All Here’, which we’re extremely proud of, we all are. And then the live record. We had been toying with the idea forever of doing a live record, but it never felt right. And then this situation, with going to London to play at the Forum, which is one of our favorite venues, and the way the band was hitting on all cylinders at that particular time and it just felt like, ‘Yeah, let’s capture this, ’cause we never know when we’ll have an opportunity to do this again.’ And it turns out that I’m so thankful that we did, because of Erik’s health situation and where we are now. But it’s a great representation of our time with him and the band and also a celebration of the music that we’ve created over the past 35 years.