Somebody get Ja Rule so I can make sense of all this!

I was familiar with the festival from the second video posted last year, but the two new documentaries obviously go more in depth. What were your thoughts on the festival and it’s aftermath?

If only they had waited they could have capitalised on the Battle Royale craze and have people enjoying a free for all for Resources 😒.


(Girl dies in Limp Bizkit moshpit)
This is probably the most infamous event I know of when it comes to music festivals in Australia, but this festival still went on a few years after this.

I’d be curious to see a similar documentary about Soundwave, another Australian music festival that went away also due to a variety of failures
www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/why-soundwave-collapsed-and-what-it-means-for-future-festivals/7042852

Have you ever attended or organised a disaster of an event?

I haven't been to a disaster of a festival , all of them have been legit and tons of fun. I did watch this documentary the other day though and thought it was interesting. Brian and Ja Rule came off as such fucking sleezballs though that it made your skin crawl.

A few things that really stuck out to me:

- I was 100% sure that Billy McFarland was Seth McFarlane's brother. They look like they could easily be related and just changed the last letter of the name.

- I really can't believe Billy was brazen enough to commit more fraud when he was out on bail. What a fucking idiot.

You guys should check out the doc Hulu put out on this. I found it to be better than the Netflix one. The Netflix documentary was produced by FuckJerry media who had a hand in marketing the festival so they had an agenda. The Hulu doc also interviews Billy and gives you more of an insight into his life and way of thinking. He’s still by all accounts a massive idiot.

I don't think you can have this conversation without discussing Woodstock 99.

Never been to a disaster show but I've seen some minor disasters happen to bands.

Strangely enough, the two disasters that immediately pop into my head both happened to bands that opened for Green Day:

My Chemical Romance: Gerard Way couldn't sing worth a damn and the band was playing like they didn't want to be there. Worst performance I've ever seen live to this day, and I've seen some bad bands over my years. The only way that band ever got popular was because of their mass following of teenage emo girls and the emo boys that wanted to fuck them. Absolute garbage of a band, I was offended that they made me stand there and watch that shit. And they were the only other act at that show so they played for like 90 minutes, but it felt like 12 hours.

The Bravery: the lead guitarist snapped a string on almost every song and the crowd kept laughing at him. He didn't take it well because after about the fifth or sixth song, he smashed his guitar, then walked off stage. He screamed at the roadie that kept coming out to fix his guitar and the crowd booed him. He didn't come back and the band played a couple more songs without him then called it. Their set was like 20 minutes long so they definitely cut it short because of his bitch fest.

I also saw Breaking Benjamin at a show with Bullet For My Valentine and Avenged Sevenfold, and while it wasn't a disaster per se and nobody's fault, the lead singer for Breaking Benjamin was suuuper sick. They played their first song and you could tell something was wrong with him, and when it was over he said he had the flu but didn't want to cancel their set so he was toughing it out. After about the third song his voice gave out and he just shook his head to signal he couldn't sing, then when the song was over he threw up on the stage and the band played a couple songs with one guitarist and the drummer taking turns singing the lyrics. Then he came back and the set ended up being pretty interesting, because they did a bunch of weird instrumental stuff, like turning the lights off and the drummer's sticks becoming red light sabers, and all the mircophone stands glowing red, and they played the Imperial March. Then they did a bunch of instrumental covers to fill time, then they played a few more original songs and left.

They aren't a band I like but their set ended up being pretty interesting and it was fun how they managed to pull off a good set with their lead singer trying not to die on stage.

Oh I thought of another one that pissed me right the fuck off. When I lived in Toronto there was a radio show that was really popular on a rock radio station, and every year they had a big party down by the lake front called Sausage Fest. Tickets were free but limited, and all you had to do was email them to get in. The catch was that you didn't know what band or artist was playing until after the tickets were given out, but it was always someone good.

My wife and I got tickets and we were stoked, then even more stoked when they announced the guest: PUBLIC ENEMY. I couldn't fucking wait.

So the way it works is you show up early and drink beer, eat barbecued sausages, and play games. They had like a carnival set up and stuff, a dunk tank, climbing walls, all kinds of shit. It was super fun and we got wasted and even saw Flava Flav at one point when he walked through the crowd with his security and posse.

Then it got close to the show starting so we got ready to go into the venue. There was a line but nothing crazy, and lots of people were ignoring it and just continuing to have fun until the doors opened.

Then the doors opened, they let in about 200 people, then locked the doors and told everyone else to go home. My wife and I were like 10 people away from getting inside and this was a total shock. NOBODY knew that seating was limited and that not everyone was getting inside. Absolutely nobody. The tickets were very limited (there was maybe 500 people total there) and there was no indication from anyone running the festival that not everyone would be getting in.

The people left outside lost their fucking minds. They got about 300 people drunk, then told them they weren't getting into the show they had been waiting weeks to see. So naturally people started throwing garbage cans, beer cans, food, whatever, and security had to take out about a dozen people that rushed the door and tried to break it open. They all started brawling and the cops were called, but my wife and I fucked off and went to a bar.

Man I forgot all about that until now. Our daughter was still a baby and we had to get a sitter and everything. We were so mad. The radio hosts on Monday said that they didn't know the venue couldn't hold everyone and they were just as upset, but that was bullshit. I never listened to their show again.

So this event didn’t go ahead but the handling of it was a disaster.
(The wrestling event is held at the club I bartend at.)

So May 2016 we have a show coming up and the main event is advertised as a 3 round MMA fight to fit the gimmick of one of the two wrestlers, it’s still clear it’s a Pro Wrestling event. It’s the first main event we’ve had so far where our main heel isn’t in the main event, so I was interested to see it as something new.

I see on FB all week they are saying they are going to attack each other etc with increased aggression each time with me giving them the benefit of the doubt I think they are being smart and bullshitting the marks. Turns out it was for real and one of them threatened to bring a knife and assault one of them in the car park. As I’m sure is a surprise to no one wrestling is very clique orientated so it was about 6 guys in each group threatening each other, not just the two guys in main hence the match just not being changed.

In the afternoon Friday I get told the show is cancelled pretty nonchalantly like it’s going to be public news any moment now so I assumed as such.

Customers/staff naturally ask me about the show tomorrow and whether I’m wrestling etc. (I had to do a run-in so I was pretty annoyed I got the night off just for that to begin with).
I tell them it’s cancelled, give supervisor contact number so they can try and contact the promoter, as they have to sort it from the club side of things with the booking of the function. She tries to call him repeatedly with no answer, not seeming convinced it is cancelled and saying that the functions manager with be rightfully angry.

A regular asks me about it, I tell him the show is cancelled..turns out he’s shocked and upset as they had booked heaps of tickets for some end of year football team thing and I try to explain why as best I can without knowing the stuff mentioned above at the time. I tell him it should be posted on their FB page (I haven’t been online..I’m at work) but it is cancelled. He makes a point about how some people don’t have FB or would be in bed already (this is at 8pm).

He asks me why this show was cancelled almost every time he comes in (almost 3 years later now) and has had a few and gives me a sap story about how it demoralised the team etc, I was sympathetic the first 3 times we had this conversation,and it wasn’t my decision to cancel.+ i lost money as I could have just worked my shift that night and made more than my match fee/merch sales would have been as Saturday’s pay well. It was an Australian Indy show not the Super Bowl mate 😒.

Anyway staff are trying to get answers from me/I can’t get hold of promoter either.

Finally at about 12:30am Saturday (the day of!) he posts the status about the show

SPOILER: Click to show

Due to circumstances beyond our control it is our responsibility to inform everyone that the event at **** tomorrow night has officially been cancelled.

We will elaborate more on this over the next few days.

To fans that have already purchased tickets we will be offering the opportunity for refunds or for them to be redeemed at an upcoming show.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and we hope that everyone can understand.

(and this is part of the follow up posted days later)

SPOILER: Click to show

The most important thing in the Professional Wrestling business is TRUST. As a promoter I have to trust that the talent will show up and do what is asked of them in a professional matter. As fans you trust that we will not only deliver on what we were advertising but go above and beyond to entertain you. As a venue trusts that we will show up and perform our event with out any danger to anyone or damage to the club. And as wrestlers they trust that their oppenent will act professionally and ensure they remain safe at all times. Last week all of these levels of trust were possibly going to be broken.

Issues between talent escalated to a point that became potentially dangerous to the people involved and I was stuck with only 3 choices.
1. Ignore the issues and trust that everything would be alright.
2. Remove people in key spots from the show therefore changing the entire show at the last minute and risk delivering a show below the standard has previously set to its fans.
3. Cancel the show and focus on the re-launch of in July.

I finish after midnight and finally the post goes up. I go into work to show my supervisor that I’m not BS’ing and she was understandably pissed.

Needless to say people are FURIOUS. There is people that have booked hotels and some are even travelling interstate (That’s a huge distance in Australia our states aren’t small) and demanding refunds from HVW for their hotels. The hotels obviously aren’t going to refund anything as it isn’t their problem/too late for the hotels that do no cancellation fee bookings. Others are speculating that someone has died as that seemed like the only justifiable reason to pull this shit.

This is one of the comments so you get the idea

SPOILER: Click to show

Are you fucking kidding me? This has to be a fucking joke, mum already paid for $290 accommodation for 2 nights, 5 tickets and its fucking cancelled?! We've travelled 4 hours for just for this show like any HVW show and its cancelled the night before?! Awesome way to end my best friends birthday tonight cheers...

So I have the night off with every wrestler suddenly being my BFF messaging me wanting explanations as I was good friends with the promoter at the time as they are completely AWOL and no one can contact them.

So yeah not a well handled thing at all, surprisingly recovered with that next show but it definitely pissed a lot of people off including
me.

——

TL:DR

Wrestling show I was booked on got cancelled because the two guys in the main event and their cliques wanted to fight each other and no one was notified until midnight the day off the show when most are asleep/not on FB.

Also A few people turned up to the venue only to find out it was cancelled because a) they didn’t have/follow the FB page b) weren’t online at 12am unlike night owls like myself.