10 Years Ago The Pirate Ship Was Under Siege From All Fronts In A Media Shit Storm. But When The Dust Settled, We Were Still There.
This blog is not to be confused with the one I wrote a few weeks ago where I took a stroll down memory lane, cursing the old gods and the new for speeding time up on us all as we get older.
But I can't help the fact that Stoolie Mario has been on a warpath digging up videos and articles I thought the Devnest ̶c̶o̶n̶v̶e̶n̶i̶e̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶e̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶e̶r̶n̶i̶n̶ ̶s̶a̶l̶e̶ fucked up and lost into the WWW abyss.
I mean just last week he dug up this gem from an NYC local news station (there were several) filming live outside the Roseland Ballroom (which we sold out in like 13 seconds, nbd) before our show.
I remember doing load in that day early in the afternoon. We were coming hot off a streak of DISASTROUS shows so the venue, and Live Nation (shout out Steve Gaber for having our back) were super nervous about all the scrutiny.
So nervous that they told us they decided they wouldn't be selling alcohol at the event.
What lead to this?
Let's look at the tape shall we?
We did a party at the Westmont Theatre in Montclaire, NJ less than a week prior.
We knew from the get-go of that show that we were in trouble. And from the get-go I mean when we pulled into the venue loading dock area.
Zollo parked our trusty steed, the Chevy Avalanche with 150,000 miles on it and bald tires, and approached the SINGLE entrance, which was two double glass doors and asked the staff where the other entrances were.
They pointed to the load in dock and we said, "no we mean the entrance for guests."
They basically told us to get fucked when we mentioned being concerned about egress, and said they were up to fire code, and had emergency doors and what not.
(Sidebar- much like the Gronk Cruise, which I was also faithfully apart of, time and time again we would run into heads of security or general managers who knew everything and would scoff at our concerns ahead of time of being undermanned and unprepared security wise. And time and time again we wound up being right in the worst ways possible.)
To give you an idea of the crowds this place was expecting, I took a picture of their lineup while I was there.
I remember their head of security vividly telling Zollo and I that "they had Marilyn Manson play there, they weren't worried about some college blacklight party".
Ok bro.
Sure enough, an hour before doors opened there was a line down the street of a few hundred inebriated and barely clothed attendees. When the opener went on and doors opened, it was a stampede for the doors. Security was overwhelmed (duh) and it turned into a melee.
The owners, (up until that point, a very pleasant Italian American husband and wife couple, came into the green room in a frenzy, and told us the show was canceled and they were shutting the venue down because it was too crazy. Again, this was when doors opened. We weren’t even close to starting the show.
Needless to say, not a great night.
What made it even worse was we then had to break down all the trusses, lighting, and equipment, load it back into the trailer, and pile back into the Avalanche.
As we pulled down the street a wheel came off the trailer and we screeched to a halt as sparks flew everywhere.
We didn’t know if we could take the trailer anywhere or call triple AAA or what to do so Feitelberg called Dave to ask if we had insurance (because his family's in the insurance business) and Dave laughed out loud at the question, told us to figure it out, and hung up.
(Sidebar- for the entirety of the tour Dave had this WILD unfounded jealousy of us all, like we were living the fucking high life or something. He genuinely believed that each night we all just showed up, drank our dicks off, partied our balls off, took girls home, then woke up and did it again. When in reality we showed up to a venue on about 3 hours sleep, unpacked the vehicles ourselves, setup everything ourselves, sound checked, ran to hopefully get a bite a to eat at a shitty fast food restaurant before doors opened, went over run of show, got dressed and the costumes prepared, did the show, then had to break down everything ourselves after the show, (usually still drunk), which took hours, then piled back into the vehicles, texted any girls we'd got the numbers of, who were all passed out or getting smashed by somebody else by that time, drove to the motel to catch a few more hours of sleep, woke up hungover, got back on the road to drive 5 hours to the next city. Rinse and repeat over and over.)
And the guys bearing the real brunt of all that work and getting next to zero if any shine whatsoever were Devlin, Gaz, Hank, Gaz's boys Walsh and Bob, Delo for a while, and even Feitelberg.
You think I'm joking. Look at these dates -
Back to the story…
Luckily Tom Zollo's family lived nearby. We unhitched the trailer and left it there, went to the hotel to crash, and Zollo's dad drove all the way out to us and repaired the wheel.
When people say Zollo was just the light guy I laugh at them. "Tommy Lights" as Dave called him, saved this company more times than anybody will ever know.
From there it was on to Long Island.
There we had a party at a brand new, sick, venue in a sleepy town in Long Island I can't remember the name of, that we did where we showed up and were blown away at the amenities. KFC came to hang out and dance in a mascot costume for it, and he couldn't get over how nice the green rooms were. (They had awesome showers in them).
This show was one of the biggest laughers of all time.
Again, we tried to warn the venue management and security about what they were in for and to be prepared and again they rolled their eyes.
Sure enough, about 20 minutes into our show, when they saw that the crowd wasn't settling down whatsoever, they were actually getting crazier, the venue management pulled the fire alarm on themselves.
Yes you read that correctly.
Rather than come to me and tell me to stop the music (which in their defense I never would have done unless somebody was hurt or dying), they yanked the fire alarm on themselves.
They played stupid for about half an hour as the crowd cleared out and the fire department showed up and inspected the place, and then admitted to us.
But the damage was done.
Like the scene in Ghostbusters where Peck opens up the containment unit against Dr. Peter Venkman's pleas not to-
the theatre had just unleashed 1,500 drunken, high, and horned up college kids onto the neighborhood at peak adrenaline rush.
The consequences were terrible.
They found people that climbed into dumpsters and passed out.
There were people that walked up and down the sidewalks, where there were some very quaint restaurants, who puked all over tables and into flower beds. Fights broke out. It was a nightmare.
And the news had a field day.
The insane part of all of this was it was before the cancel culture police peaked. If this shit happened today we'd probably all be deported from America and tried for war crimes. But back then, it only fueled our popularity. And ticket sales.
I mean this was the pinnacle of the EDM era. We were a rag tag group throwing these parties going up against the likes of Avicii and shit, sometimes in the same city on the same night, and we were selling out thousands of tickets in literal minutes. Live Nation told us countless times they'd never seen anything like it. (Can't even begin to fathom the killing they must have made off our uneducated and underrepresented asses).
So yah, we were coming into NYC blazing hot…
And the New York local news was waiting for us.
Today Barstool is what it is so this would be the least shocking thing to see on the news ever. You would yawn and change the channel.
But you gotta understand that back in the day this was bizarro world.
We had people coming to our show, calling it "barstools" like they were one of Eddie's friends from Edison Park who had zero clue a website even existed. Or any of the personalities involved.
Up until that show, all of our NYC shows had been at Irving Plaza. One of my favorite venues in the country. We always crushed there, sold out, and threw great shows. But Roseland was a monster, even more famous, and really announced “we’d arrived”. So we threw it in the mix.
The fact we sold it out as fast as we did amazed even us.
And despite the circus surrounding us coming into the show, we were all pumped for it.
Until management came to us that afternoon and told us there’d be no alcohol served at the event…
We decided not to tell our guests, the hundreds on our guestslists, or our friends that were coming. Because we didn’t want the show to flop.
Which turned out to be a pretty bad idea.
I think all of our phones died before we ever got on stage from all the texts asking how the hell the venue was only serving soda, water, and Redbull.
Other than that the show went off without a hitch. In fact it was one of our best.
From there it was on to the Jersey Shore and Atlantic City.
That’s a blog for another Stoolie Mario tweet.
Be sure to check out the doc that Gaz and Dana did on the Blackout Tour for Barstool Gold (rip)
There's also an "unofficial" tour doc that our intern at the time Dylan did that hardly anybody's seen here,
p.s. - back when Dave had his fastball there was nobody in his league
p.p.s. - remind me to tell you all the time we had a full group of Bible thumpers outside our show protesting us saying we were spreading the devil's message through our shows. good times
p.p.p.s. - shameless plug for the Blackout Mixtapes