Three Doors Down - two thumbs up

There's not many occasions Three Doors Down deserve a standing ovation, but this time they do:

Three Doors Down singer Brad Arnold kicked a fan out of a show in Colorado on Tuesday after he spotted him pushing a woman in the audience.

The frontman halted the gig in Broomfield and urged security to escort the rowdy fan out of the venue.

He raged, “Hang on, hang on, hang on. Hey, hey homie. You don’t hit a woman. You just pushed a woman out of the way to get in a fight, you d—!

“Get him the hell out of here.”

It's not cool to hit anyone making your way through a crowd, of course.

Up until today, I'd have argued that being ejected from a Three Doors Down gig would be a badge of honour. Not any more.

Planet Bluegrass will rise again

Amongst the thousands of properties hit by the horrific floods in Colorado was Planet Bluegrass in Lyons, home of the RockyGrass bluegrass festival.

They're pledging to rebuild:

Organizers hope the main festival stage will require refurbishing only, as will Ferguson's house, which is on the ranch property and was hit with 4 feet of water and mud. They plan to restore the bathhouses in the same location and having the offices rebuilt by Thanksgiving. The Wildflower Pavilion venue "took a big hit," Eyster said.

"But we're 100 percent committed that on July 25-27, we will be in Lyons and Rocky- Grass will happen that weekend," he said. "Just on the emotional power alone, it'll be the best RockyGrass ever. It has to be."

There's a lot of demand around for support following the floods, but if you'd like to help Planet Bluegrass get back on its feet, there's an online fundraiser and they'd be delighted with anything you could afford to chip in.

Muse help with the mopping out

Muse played Denver last night; they handed over the profits from merch sales to the Colorado Flood Relief effort.

Good work, Muse.

Dave Mustaine fingers Obama for mass shootings

Dave Mustaine might seem like a gun-cocked nutcase, but, hey, you wouldn't be accusing Obama of the Aurora shootings without evidence, would you?

“Back in my country, my president is trying to pass a gun ban, so he's staging all of these murders,” Mustaine told the crowd [at a Megadeath gig in Singapore]. “Like the 'Fast And Furious' thing down at the border and Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there and now the beautiful people at the Sikh temple."

"I don't know where I'm going to live if America keeps going the way it's going because it looks like it's turning into Nazi America."

See? He's got the evidence of, um, some sort of vague feeling, right, that's there's a Nazi-style conspiracy.

Before we even start, let's not forget that Dave Mustaine is, like Donald Trump and many other people who would object strongly to be called racists, is a birther. Although Mustaine claims that despite pushing the line that Obama isn't American, he isn't a birther any more than he's a racist:

Megadeth guitarist Dave Mustaine said in an interview with a Canadian television show “The Hour” that he “has a lot of questions about him [President Obama], but certainly not where he was born. I know he was born somewhere else than America.”

“Well, then you’re a birther,” said host George Stroumboulopoulos, who had asked Mustaine directly whether he was one.

“No I’m not calling a question to it, I just, you know, what’s the point?” Mustaine said, who then proceeded to say that Obama had been “invisible” until he became President.

Mustaine has such a lose grip on reality, it's possible when he says Obama was invisible before he became president, he might mean that literally. It's not known if Mustaine believes that Obama has magikal powers to make himself vanish, or is in possession of some sort advanced technology cloaking device.

Seriously, if Obama had been invisible, how would people have spotted him at Jeremiah Wright's church?

So, Mustaine is in Singapore telling his fans about how America is going all Nazi-like. Singapore. A country which, according to Amnesty, "continue[s] to threaten and punish government critics, using sweeping criminal and civil defamation laws." It's a bit like going to Wisconsin and trying to tell them that your home makes a lot of cheese.

But, despite the fact Mustaine's political worldview seems to be drawn entirely from Astons shown on Fox News, let's do him the honour of taking his central challenge seriously.

[M]y president is trying to pass a gun ban, so he's staging all of these murders

The logical conclusion of this claim would be that the NRA is a front for the Democratic party - pushing for lax gun law to create a climate in which it's easy for even people like Dave Mustaine to buy guns, making these staged murders seem plausible.

If Obama wanted to bring in draconian gun laws, why would he need to stage anything? In 2010, there were 8,775 firearm murders in the US. That'd be all you really need to stand up and say 'maybe we should take some guns out the equation', right?

Maybe Mustaine thinks that Obama spent the first year of his administration setting up all those killings, right, Dave?

Still, maybe these were staged murders. So in the wake of Aurora, Obama was sweeping around calling for the Nazi-style ripping of guns from the cold, dead hearts of NRA members, was he?

Here he is using Aurora as a pretext for a house-to-house search of every building in America, removing all firearms and disarming the US populace forever:

"I, like most Americans, believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms," Obama told the National Urban League convention in New Orleans. "I think we recognize the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation. That hunting and shooting are part of a cherished national heritage."

Obama continued: "But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals. That they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities. I believe the majority of gun owners would agree we should do everything possible to prevent criminals and fugitives from purchasing weapons, and we should check someone's criminal record before they can check out a gun seller."

Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't sound especially Nazi-like.

In effect, then, Dave Mustaine believes that Obama has staged at least three mass-killings in order to enforce a draconian vague sense that perhaps background checks could be a little tighter and, you know, that perhaps it's not a good idea to let criminals own guns.

That would be on a par with staging a car crash outside a Tony Carvery so that you can surreptitiously take an extra Yorkshire Pudding from the buffet without anyone noticing.

It's not even as if you need to make shit up about Obama being involved in extrajudicial killings - he's got a list he uses for that.

Perhaps the last word, though, belongs to Carli Richards. She was in the cinema the night of the shooting, and has the wounds to prove it. What does she make of Mustaine's views?

“Everybody is emotional at this time and needs to blame somebody, I guess,” Richards told the gossip website. “I don't think they realize the consequences of not being responsible for your own actions and James Holmes needs to be held accountable for his, to whatever way the justice system deems fit."

Wyclef Jean: What if you threw a gig for stoners and they were, like, whatever or whatever?

4/20 is, according to Wikipedia, a secular holiday in America - it's not, it's just a day when people who haven't quite got over being pleased with themselves at smoking dope gather to be pleased with themselves in public. It's pretending to be part of a counterculture from firmly within mainstream culture.

To mark the day, Colorado University in Boulder booked Wyclef Jean to do a gig. Although the stressed that he wasn't to mark the day:

From item twelve in the contract ("The Agency Shall" section):

"The Agency shall ensure that Attraction avoids making direct referrences to marijuana and other illegal drugs or make 4/20 related remarks as this is a University sponsored event."

It's like booking Perry Como to do a Christmas Eve set and making him sign a waiver barring him from mentioning Holidays, Jesus or gifts.

So, how did it go, then? Not well, as Jean played to a mostly empty room.

Westword was speculating there were 400 people in the 11,000-capacity venue; even if that number doubled as the evening went on, with Jean getting a flat-fee of $80,000 for the event, that'd make it a $100-a-head event.

Moral: probably don't bother holding a big event on a day when everyone is getting out their faces. They should probably have spent the fee they gave Jean on Curly-Wurlys and crisps.

Summit up: Bacon on the peak

You climb 14,110 feet for charity. And when you reach the very top of Pikes Peak, the highest mountain in Colorado, what is your reward?

Kevin Bacon's band playing a gig.

The cog railway couldn't carry you back down fast enough.

Venuewatch: Fort Collins freezes new venues

More recession-fun-wrecking: Plans to open two music venues in Fort Collins, Colorado have been put on hold. Good news for the neighbours of the proposed performance centers, though: they were planning to campaign against them anyway.

More Colorado rodeo woes

At the start of the month, the Greeley Stampede was the focus of a ultimately pointless Poison spat when Rikki Rocket issued a statement about how terrible it was that the band were playing a rodeo, but played anyway because, erm, a gig is a gig.

Now, the Cheyenne Frontier Days has suffered a high-profile pull-out, as Matchbox Twenty suddenly realised that being lined up to play a rodeo meant they were going to have a play a rodeo, and bailed. Although, apparently, it's only cruel sometimes:

Matchbox Twenty, which said it cancelled because of animal rights concerns, will be playing at three state fairs that also feature rodeos in the coming months.

The band could not be reached for comment Friday about why it considered the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo, touted as the "Daddy of 'em All," different from the other rodeos it has agreed to play.

The group is scheduled to perform at the North Dakota State fair, the Orange County State Fair and the California Mid- State Fair.

Perhaps Californian bulls deserve to be badly treated.

Poison at war over animal cruelty

First, take some time to absorb the news that Poison are going to be playing a rodeo. In Greeley, Colorado, tonight, in fact. It's the Greeley Stampede.

It's become something of a problem within the band, though. Rikki Rockett issued a statement through Showing Animals Respect and Kindness:

"I had no idea that this gig included a rodeo. I have a huge problem with animal cruelty at rodeos. Greeley is a huge rodeo, which means an enormous amount of animal abuse. I am blown away that I missed the description of this show on our touring schedule printout."

Yes - to be fair to Greeley Stampede, they do describe themselves as "the World's largest 4th of July Rodeo" (we're not sure how many places beyond the US would be holding rodeos to mark American Independence Day, mind.) So it is a little surprising that when they said to Rockett "you're playing a famous rodeo", he didn't notice he was going to be playing a rodeo.

Now, though, Bret Michaels has also issued a statement:

he was "shocked" to hear drummer Rikki Rockett's comments about animal cruelty at the Greeley Stampede and promised to "put on one hell of a big rock show" there despite Rockett's concerns.

And, yes, despite Rockett's apparent disgust, he does still intend to turn up and drum for the audience at the cattle-bothering event. After all, cruelty might be unacceptable, but a payday is a payday, right. Rockett doesn't expect to explain why he believes others should abandon their rodeo when he won't even cancel a gig.

Rockies settle ticket claim

The Colorado Rockies had a few problems with their ticketing for their World Series run when they put them on sale last week - in a disaster that recalled the worst days of Glastonbury, the server fell over (or, if you believe the baseball team, "fell victim to a malicious DOS attack") and there was great upsetment.

Jeff Sobieck was one who was upset; he'd got a confirmation that his purchase of 12 tickets had been successful before the system went down and he launched a lawsuit. The Rockies have settled this out-of-court. The size of the pay-off hasn't been revealed, but Sobieck had been seeking money to cover the amount he could have sold the tickets on for as damages.

In other words: despite the resale of tickets for higher-than-face-value being illegal in Denver, the club has paid off a scalper for loss of earnings on tickets he never received.

Even more curiously, the team has done this despite a 1917 law in the city which would have made it illegal for them to grant entry to anyone who they knew had bought Sobieck's tickets from him:

Denver's ordinance also has prohibited the operator of a ticketed event from selling tickets to anyone who would resell them at a premium, and has made it operators' responsibility to refuse to honor tickets purchased from scalpers, brokers or speculators if the operator "has knowledge of the unlawful purchase of such ticket."

And Harvey Goldsmith thinks the UK ticketing system is unworkable. Surely by revealing that he intended to resell them, Sobieck had effectively made the tickets he hadn't bought in the first place totally valueless?

Lennox gig interrupted by Grumbleweeds

Talking of eye-catching walk-offs, Annie Lennox fled from the stage during her Boulder gig after spotting a bloke wearing a gas mask and a cape in the crowd.

It's not known if other Grumbleweeds characters, like the poor impression of Jimmy Saville, were also in the audience with Wilf 'Gasmask' Grimshaw.

Lennox is pretty pissed by it all:

"In the 30 years I've been performing, I'm not that easily shaken," she wrote. "The security at the hall were extremely lax, and Mr "Nightmare on Elm Street "( or whatever weird thing was going on in his head) should never have been allowed to get anywhere near. Trust me...it wasn't nice.?I'm usually very patient and easy going with most kinds of behaviour in an audience...but that was really freakish and disturbing, whatever the hell it was. He owes me and my band a fucking apology".

Oooh! A fucking apology, mark you.

This was Boulder, of course, home to Mork and Mindy; you surely have to expect that sort of thing.

We now look forward to constitutional experts debating if the right to wear gas masks to theatres is on a par with bearing arms or shouting 'fire'.

Killers flee Colorado

Poor value for money from The Killers at their Red Rocks show: They managed one and a half shows before Brandon Flower's voice gave out.

They're going to try again in September, but even so, the haul out to Red Rocks isn't a simple one and the fans aren't happy, reports the Rocky Mountain News. The paper has been on the internets:

"I seriously can't believe he walked out on a sold out crowd at Red Rocks. He should have been honored to see all those people singing his lyrics!" one fan posted.

Another took umbrage with the fact the band was still scheduled to play in Los Angeles on Friday: "Wow so you guys are playing (Friday night)? What a miraculous recovery. Ya know, there's nothing like showing your fans you don't really give a (expletive) about them."

The paper also says the audience has "sat through Hot Hot Heat", suggesting this was the injury to which insult had been added.

Colorado now officially high

For years, there's been a push in Colorado to have John Denver's hymn to his adopted home, Rocky Mountain High, recognised as an official State song. Equally, there's been counter-campaigns designed to thwart the idea, because "high" means "out of his head on drugs." At long last, though, the legislature has finally granted it equal billing alongside Where The Columbines Grow (no, we've never heard of that, either).

He's seen it raining fire in the sky, you know.