And Hell Followed With were in a crazy brawl last weekend in Spokane, WA — apparently some drunk dude was stirring up a bunch of ruckus with fans, and the club owner clearly didn’t give a shit.
Guitarist Kyle McIlmurray recalls the scene:
“There was some drunk guy pushing kids around. The guy was clearly belligerent and getting really dangerous so one of the bands went to inform the club owner of what was going on with this dude. Instead of immediate action against the drunk guy, the band gets an earful about how unprofessional they’re being and find out that the guy is a friend of the owner. Of course our pals in the band aren’t going to sit down and take this so during one of their song breaks, the singer went on a long rant about the owner and his own unprofessionalism. Finally, after the band finished, the owner came up on stage and announced that if anyone wants to buy the band’s mercy, they had better do it right then, because they were being kicked out of the club in 15 minutes. In fact there was a crew of gutter punks that the owner called whom were stirring up shit outside while waiting to go and kick out the band.
So while these crustys are causing a ruckus outside, one of the guys in the last band gave me a call and said “hey, we’ve got spray paint all over the side of our trailer.” It sucks for them because their van is white and that’s going to take a lot of work to get out. Of course these idiots had to tag it up with the name of their crew, so it made them pretty easy to ID once we found one of them tagging a wall with the same thing around the corner.
Once we find the guy, we make him lead us to his equally dirty crewmates who start talking shit to our faces. At this point, we were joined by some of our friends in the other bands who were really getting tired of these assholes running their mouths. When they finally took it a step too far and started to threaten and spit at us, that’s when our singer Ryan stepped in. He walked right up to the lead guy and punched him in the face. From there, it was on! It looked like some sort of wrestling brawl only it was real and we had the upper hand. These gutter punks decided to runtier mouths at the wrong group of pissed off metal dudes. None of us on the tour are really violent bands, but if you’re going to keep spitting in our face and talking shit, you have to be dealt with somehow and that’s exactly what we did.
In the end, we put a beatdown on the crustys and taught them not to screw with us. None of us suffered much major damage except for Ryan, who busted up one of his knuckles on that one guy’s face. We also made sure to tell our manager, our booking agent and the show’s promoter (who was real cool about everything and had nothing to do with what happened that night) that we will never play that venue again.”