Vancouver may be seeing a lot more of legendary L.A. punk rock band NOFX. After comments/jokes the band made on stage last month in Las Vegas, NOFX has, according to the band members, “effectively been banned” in their own country. But is that level of consequence deserved?
If you didn’t hear about the incident, this is what happened:
At the annual Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival in Vegas, NOFX guitarist Eric Melvin said into a microphone on stage in front of thousands of fans, “I guess you only get shot in Vegas if you’re in a country band.” NOFX bassist “Fat” Mike Burkett responded by saying, “You know, I mean, that sucked, but at least they were country fans and not punk rock fans.”
The Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017 left an unimaginable 58 people dead and 851 people injured. In what seems like a never-ending string of mass shootings in the U.S., the Vegas massacre was America’s worst-ever. Twenty-three-year-old Jordan McIldoon from Maple Ridge was among those tragically killed. Twenty-one-year-old Sheldon Mack from Victoria was shot and survived.
Reaction to NOFX’s onstage comments was swift and damning.
Their beer sponsor severed ties, and NOFX was kicked off their own Camp Punk In Drublic Festival. NOFX issued what appeared to be a sincere apology, but it didn’t do any good. Last week, NOFX wrote on Instagram that, against their wishes, all of their shows in the U.S. had been cancelled, and they’ll only be playing in Europe, Mexico and Canada for the foreseeable future.
NOFX has a long history with Vancouver, which I’m weirdly entwined with. In the early 1990s, I was a young show promoter, foolishly willing to put on a gig for just about any grunge, garage or punk band touring through town. Many times it would be the band’s first-ever show in Vancouver, and NOFX was one of those bands. I remember thinking they had the worst band name ever, and I didn’t really like their music, but they came highly recommended from Bad Religion, another band whose first Vancouver concert I booked.
NOFX’s Vancouver debut was Friday April 5, 1991, at the Cruel Elephant, at 1176 Granville St. About 40 people showed up to the 200 capacity club. I paid NOFX $200. After that Vancouver gig, NOFX struck up a long professional relationship with Cruel Elephant club owner Paul Moes, and NOFX scooped half of his production staff to work in sound and management.
Over the course of NOFX’s 35-year-career, the ethnically diverse band (as illustrated in the title of their 1992 album White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean) made a name for themselves by essentially never having a filter, whether it be in their lyrics, album titles, artwork, onstage banter, or within the pages their New York Times-bestselling biography NOFX: the Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories, by Jeff Alulis, who did a deep dive into the often very damaged backstory of each member. The book’s opening line is a quote from Fat Mike: “The first time I drank piss was on a fire escape overlooking downtown Los Angeles.”
Despite the band’s taste or lack thereof, they’ve never been signed to a major label, and yet have sold more than eight million records worldwide, making them one of the most successful independent bands of all time. Fat Mike has proven himself an excellent businessperson as owner of the Fat Wreck Chords label, which has withstood the ebbs and flows of the ever-changing music industry for decades. He’s politically motivated, having founded punkvoter.com, actively encouraging often-apathetic American punks to register to vote. He’s also a proud cross-dresser, wearing dresses and slips everywhere, including on stage, essentially telling his fans, and the world, to wear whatever clothes you want, as long as it feels good.
Former Cruel Elephant club owner Paul Moes now works in the film industry, and heard about the recent Vegas incident. “A punk rocker known for saying stupid shit just said something stupid and people get offended? Punk rock was always meant to offend, that was the point. I read about them getting banned and I was shocked.”
Yep, stupid shit. Artists like NOFX performing at major downtown music festivals may look cavalier and relaxed, but you can imagine that playing outdoors in Las Vegas so soon after the October attack could be particularly nerve wracking.
Could it be possible NOFX were scared shitless and tried to break tension, albeit disastrously? Is it possible to translate their callous remarks as a political statement on U.S. gun control, in keeping with the band’s left wing politics? Or is there simply no justification for a string of onstage dialogue delivered that badly?
Vancouver’s Charles Demers is an author, comedian, playwright, actor and, in his youth, a NOFX fan. Whenever I find myself crafting material to present in front of a live audience, I often run it by Charlie, because, unlike NOFX, he has a very good filter. I asked him what he thought of the NOFX story.
“NOFX absolutely made a tasteless joke — but it was also a joke meant for an audience that understood that tastelessness as part of an ironic-nihilistic punk sensibility,” Demers explained to me.
“Properly situated, it becomes gallows humour, albeit in poor form, about living in a chaotic and desperately violent country. But social media has flattened our performances — no one is ever just speaking to ‘their’ crowd anymore. No context can be taken for granted — and, what’s worse, no proportionality attends to the response or consequences.”
In other words, in this era of viral outrage, the danger is that the punishment may eclipse the crime (or, in this case, the mistake in judgment). Because of a very bad joke, NOFX has — at present — lost a large piece of their livelihood in their own country.
The Las Vegas massacre was an unspeakable tragedy that NOFX chose to speak about. In the band’s own words, “We made a mistake, we apologized, and we gotta suffer the consequences. Maybe it ain’t fair, but whoever said life was fair. #whendidpunkrockbecomesosafe.”
