Toxic Holocaust Blame Booking Agent for Stealing Money, Bail in the Middle of their South American Tour

Twitter user and MetalSucks reader @DrMorbid alerted us to a very shitty situation over the weekend: in the middle of an extensive tour of South America, Toxic Holocaust have been forced to bail and fly home, allegedly due to their South American booking agent taking off and leaving them stranded mid-tour with their money in his pocket.

There’s a lot of information (and presumably disinformation) flying around, and there are heated exchanges between the band, fans, and promoters who had their shows canceled on Toxic Holocaust’s Facebook page. It’s all quite difficult to parse through, and ultimately unreliable. But reading between the lines here, something smells fishy: I get the impression that we’re not getting the entire story from the band.

Let’s start with the post on the band’s official Facebook page that announced the rest of the tour would be canceled:

Last nights show in Chile was bitter sweet, it was one of the best shows we have ever played but this morning we woke up to an email from our South American booking agent that he would not be coming with us for the rest of the tour. That seems like no big deal right? We have done plenty of tours all over the world with out anyone with us….well here’s the problem: He never gave us ANY info on what flights we would be taking, how we would be getting to the airport, shows etc and zero info about the show dates. The deal was from the very beginning that he would be with us translating, and helping us along. With hardly any info and only learning about this a couple hours before we were supposed to fly to Argentina made it impossible for us to continue on.

This is difficult to say, but we have to fly home today from Chile and cancel the remaining shows. I want to apologize to all our fans that have been waiting to see us in Columbia, Peru, Uruguay and Argentina. We were excited to play as well as visit all of these countries.

I expect all the comments below to be negative, but please remember we are not the ones to blame in this situation. South American fans are the greatest and from the bottom of our hearts we are sorry.

We are still owed a lot of money, if we don’t get paid I will make it my personal mission to ruin everyone’s careers involved and name names.

The first thing that strikes me as odd is that Joel is claiming the band didn’t have any info about the shows on the rest of their tour? What? It’s right here!

Mr. Grind did later go on to name names in the comments underneath the above post, by the way, citing “Javi from Freak Productions” as the culprit.

But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that what he meant is that they didn’t have info about the logistics of how they’d get to and from those shows — flights (which he mentions), drivers, accommodations, etc. I have a hard time believing that not a single member of the band was left with ANY of this info whatsoever — they had no copies of the itinerary every band on every tour gets well in advance?

It’d take a lot of work, absolutely, but even if that were the case I’m sure they could’ve pieced together the tour with a bit of Internet sleuthing. The above Facebook post proved that such posts can be a very effective method of getting in touch with promoters, and it also proved an effective means of reaching fans, some of whom surely know said promoters. One thing leads to another — promoters surely know other promoters, one person contacts their friend who knows someone, etc — and you’re able to pick up the pieces as best you can. Surely those promoters, or surely SOMEONE other than the booking agent who bailed had information about the logistics involved in this tour. And if they didn’t speak English, surely they would be happy to ask their friend who does to help out, so as to protect their investment. It would be rough for TH at times, no doubt… but the metal spirit perseveres!

Case in point: one Facebook commenter even replied with exact flight numbers from Chile to Buenos Aires, saying everything was paid for! It’s not clear, but his comments insinuate that he works for the promoter of the Buenos Aires show. Of course we have no way of verifying whether all of that was actually the case, but that’s some very specific info to be dropping if it’s not backed up in reality.

Which is not to say that I’m insinuating Toxic Holocaust are a bunch of weenies that just gave up on this tour at the slightest hint of trouble (although, certainly, it’s possible). What I’m saying is that it seems like there’s some crucial piece of information that’s missing here. Why did the booking agent bail on the tour? Why would he steal money when he had more to gain if the tour would’ve been completed as planned? Is there something entirely unrelated to any of this that could’ve caused Toxic Holocaust to want to return home sooner? Etc. We’re not getting the full picture here.

We’ll probably never know, but man, this whole thing just feels weird. Chime in in the comments below or email us at news[at]metalsucks.net if you have any information that might shed some light on the situation.

And, well, if it does end up being the case that this shitbag booking agent truly left the band stranded, fucked, and with no money, and that there’s nothing else shady that happened — well, fuck that guy. Fuck him hard! His justice will come.