That Time “Sh*tty Local Band” King 810 Started Fires and Ruined a Show for The Contortionist and Jeff Loomis

Super-duper tough guys King 810 have a long history of violence and playing shitty music. I’d completely forgotten about the 2012 incident in which the band, still local and unsigned at the time, opened for the Lansing, MI stop of The Contortionist’s headlining tour with Jeff Loomis, Chimp Spanner and 7 Horns 7 Eyes and all hell broke loose. Thanks to MS commenter Fuzzy Dunlop for the reminder.

Basically what happened is this: King 810 showed up with “pyro” (actually just lighter fluid), they went over their allotted set time, their tuff-guy fans got extremely violent, they threatened the sound guy with a baseball bat and shit got out of control, resulting in the cancelation of the show before the three main acts had played. Based on the personal accounts of the show posted at Heavy Blog is Heavy, I can’t blame the tour manager for deciding to pack it up. Here are some of those accounts, which were culled from Facebook at the time:

“So, these are the ASSUMPTIONS I’ve gathered from tonight’s show and what went down. There was an adjoining room where local bands were playing in between the nationals, and one of the bands who I won’t name was breathing fire, and pouring fuel on the floor and lighting shit on fire, so the smell got in the air ducts and the entire place reeked of lighter fluid. During the band’s set, people in the pit were getting unnecessarily violent and a few people ended up bloody. Even the owner of the venue was attacked. So, the tour manager felt it was no longer safe for the bands to be there so they packed up their shit. This is all word of mouth. The only thing I saw was bloody and angry people and all I could smell was lighter fluid so I walked outside. Now said band and the promo company is telling everyone on the event page that they are all faggots and pussies. Real nice. Don’t think I’ll ever go to a show there again…”

“Some band from Flint somehow ended up playing in between 7H7E. They over-ran by like 30 minutes, and when the sound guy tried to unplug them, a bunch of dudes threatened to kick the shit out of him. Some guys got beaten up, there were baseball bats (apparently) and barbed wire. Some kind of “gang” thing. Fuckin sketchy as hell.”

“So thanks to King for beating the shit out if everybody and making the contortionist and everybody leave. Go sell crack in flint and stay out of Lansing. You ruined a night that was supposed to top them all…”

“Thanks a lot, king; you and your douchebag fans used pyrotechnics (the smell of kerosene was overwhelming) and your lust of fighting, which led to Loomis not being able to play.”

“very unfortuante what went down in lansing tonight, it was suppsoed to be a great show and a party to celebrate the new The Contortionist album release, instead we get a shitty local band named “KING” ruining it for everyone by doing pyros and starting bloody fights, the tour manager decided to cancel the whole show for security reasons :(“