Alleged Assault by Head and the Heart Frontman Raises the Question: Do Seattle Clubs Have One Set of Rules for "Bad Boy" Rappers and Another for "Sensitive" Folkies?

just wanna be slaves to an age-old trade, y'all

NOTICE OF CAUTION TO SOUND ENGINEERS OF THE BAND THE HEAD AND THE HEART

Last Tuesday night I was violently attacked by the lead singer of this band, Jon Russell. ...This attack was without any provocation and specifically directed at sound technicians. After approaching me at my work station and rudely accusing me of not being attentive or qualified for my job (which everyone in attendance refutes completely) I calmly asked him to leave. He angrily demanded to know what my name was. I told him I was not going to talk with him and asked him to leave once more. Thinking it was over, I went back to resetting the board. Out of nowhere he attacked me and began to choke me, pulling me out of the sound booth and digging his fingernails into the back of my neck while pushing his thumbs into the front of my throat. After his friends noticed he was attacking me, they grabbed him and removed him from the club kicking and screaming. All of his friends apologized profusely saying he has a bad temper and was intoxicated. He is now banned from entering my workplace for any reason indefinitely.

More here. Sub Pop has issued the following statement from Russell apologizing for the incident:

I deeply regret and am ashamed of my uncharacteristic behavior last week. I have expressed as much to the owner of the establishment and attempted to apologize to the person who I hurt, face-to-face. And while my apology can't erase my actions or make up for anything, really, it is sincere. I am truly sorry.

All of which might bring to mind another case of alleged drunken assault from a couple years ago by a little rap act known as Mad Rad--only there are some telling differences.

For one thing, the Mad Rad incident at Neumos involved the cops being called and charges being filed. Those charges were eventually dropped and the members of Mad Rad exonerated, but not before the band was summarily banned from not only Neumos but several other Seattle venues, including the Showbox, Chop Suey, the War Room (now the HG Lodge), Havana, the Saint, and the former King Cobra.

Per Krebs' statement above, Russell is "now banned from entering [the Tractor] for any reason indefinitely," but what of Seattle's other upstanding venues? Will they once again show their solidarity for one of their own by joining the ban? And if not, why not?

One possible explanation is that there are simply different standards in Seattle clubland for brash rappers than for nominally sensitive, God-fearing folkies (especially ones backed by Sub Pop?). Maybe the city's security personnel are just more intimidated by party rappers than they are by folk singers?

But I like to think it's something else: I like to think that these clubs realized what an overreaction their response to the Mad Rad incident was--how embarrassing it looks in hindsight, following their exoneration, now that Mayor McGinn has palled around with the boys at the War Room and Mad Rad's Terry Radjaw even bartends at Neumos' Moe Bar. Just like Neumos and Mad Rad probably could've worked things out without blacklisting the band, perhaps too Russell and Krebs and the Tractor can patch this up without resorting to raising an angry mob. I may think The Head and the Heart's music is watered-down folk treacle, but I don't have any personal enmity for their members, and I don't think they deserve to be blacklisted any more than Mad Rad did (I think they deserve to be individually boycotted for crimes against taste--there's an important difference).

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