Over the course of the year, there have been many bands who were banned from playing shows in specific non-U.S. cities, but it never seemed to happen on the homefront, until now. Recently, punk band NOFX made some ill-humored jokes during their Punk Rock Bowling & Music Festival set aimed at the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that, in turn, caused venues across the U.S. to block the band from playing any show across the entirety of the United States. Alongside this country-wide band, Stone Brewing Company, the brewers who sell NOFX’s Punk in Drublic beer, blacklisted the band from their company and even pulled them out of their own festival lineup according to Pitchfork. Following their own Vegas comments, the band wrote a public apology a few days after the initial remarks. They wrote: “there’s no place here to backpedal. What NOFX said in Vegas was shameful. We crossed the line of civility.”
It seems, though, that the apology was too late. According to frontman of NOFX Fat Mike, as noted on his Instagram, all shows the band was set to play in the United States have been canceled due to their comments revolving the Vegas mass shooting. He writes, “NOFX has effectively been banned in our own country. This is not our choice, but it is our reality. We are very sorry to our fans, especially the ones in Austin…it f-ing sucks! We made a mistake, we apologized, and we gotta suffer the consequences. Maybe it ain’t fair, but whoever said life was.”
For those unfamiliar, NOFX is an american punk band from sunny Los Angeles, California forming in 1983 by Fat Mike (vocals and bass) and Eric Melvin (guitar). After the formation of the band, Erik Sandin joined in on drums with El Hefe coming in on 1991 to play lead guitar as well as trumpet. NOFX’s popularity skyrocketed in the 1990’s due to the small resurgence of punk rock at the time. Unlike most of their musical counterparts, NOFX never signed to a major label, truly evoking the punk rock aesthetic. Over their almost forty year career, the band has released a whopping thirteen studio albums with their most popular being 1994’s Punk in Drublic. Currently, as above mentioned, the band’s U.S. shows have all been cancelled; however, all shows outside our homefront are still set to take place.
Photo credit: Raymond Flotat
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