Shows get canceled for many reasons, diseases, weather,… but Cold Cave’s shows got canceled for the worst reason: the opening act is a nazi!
I explain a little bit, Cold Cave is a dark-goth-noise-synthpop kind of band – I saw them once – and the opener Boyd Rice is said to be a pioneer of noise music, and so much more. The guy has a very long entry on Wikipedia and the words nazi/nazism/fascism appear 6 times,… bad sign. He was a close friend of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, wrote songs with a clear Social Darwinism outlook, founded the Abraxas Foundation to promote authoritarianism, totalitarianism, misanthropism, and elitism, he was a contributing editor to the Manson File (after the writings of Charles Manson), and he got photographed with Bob Heick of the American Front (a white supremacist organization) wearing uniforms and brandishing knives,… I mean he said it was a prank, but who knows with such a background? He also appeared on a public-access television cable TV show, ‘Race and Reason’, hosted by white nationalist Tom Metzger.
Rice has claimed he is not a nazi, but I can understand why people are confused! If all this were pranks, he should have stopped a long time ago.
Embrace, the promoter of the show must have realized it since the show was canceled and rebooked elsewhere, then canceled again. This is what the booker of the show posted on Tumblr on Wednesday:
‘I regret to inform you that tonight’s Cold Cave show is cancelled. I’m sorry to do this on such short notice but I have just now come to realize the severity of the situation. I was the only person behind this show and I realized that the consequences of doing it were not worth it to me.
Realize that I was doing this show as a Cold Cave show, not a Boyd Rice show. Cold Cave is one of my favourite bands so I jumped at the opportunity to book them when Embrace pulled the show. I knew Boyd was the reason that the show had been pulled in the first place and that people held strong opinions about him. I have never met him so I can’t speak for his character, and am in no way defending him, but he seems as someone who has done all the things he’s done for shock value. As someone who identifies as Jewish, I would not be doing the show if I believed he was a nazi or was going to push some sort of agenda or hate speech.
People have every right to believe what they want and every right to express it, but the pressure that has been placed on me because of this is not worth the stress that I’ve endured. I tried to keep my cool but it has all caught up to me.
My sincere apologies to anyone who was offended by my picking up the show, know that I had no ill intent. To me, Boyd was merely someone who was going to perform for 40 minutes before Cold Cave played. I was excited at the opportunity to book Cold Cave and didn’t think about the people that felt so strongly about Boyd, and didn’t realize what would happen by booking him along with Cold Cave.
As for the people who were looking forward to the show, I thank you for all the support I received, I’m sorry I couldn’t follow through but I was made aware that I would be alienating myself and putting myself at risk but doing this show, and decided that it was not worth that. I’m sure Wes will be back, and I thank him as well for his understanding with this.
Know that in the end I was the only person involved in booking this show. Thank you to the one person who contacted me directly about the situation. If you would like to discuss things further you can reach me at xjasonwhitneyx@gmail.com
Thank you,
Jason Whitney’
And two other sold-out shows, scheduled in Montreal and Boston, were also canceled for the same reasons!!
I had no idea who that Rice guy was, but after reading a bit about him, he seems to be a huge step above your usual provocative individual who has an artistic flirtation with totalitarian aesthetics and philosophy, oh my god, he is a wife-beater-misogynistic-psychopath-pro-rape-moron? In the pictures he looks like American psycho meets the Third Reich, but who knows who is the real Boyd Rice?
According to Brooklyn Vegan, the other dates of the tour have also been in jeopardy as Philly ANTIFA have managed to cancel the show in Philadelphia, and a smoke bomb interrupted his set in Chicago at the Empty Bottle on June 24th.
Cold Cave posted this on his facebook:
‘I see sources saying I’m playing in philly tonite. Unfortunately not true. I love Philly, a home to me, and where Cold Cave began.. but the show was cancelled by the promoters without discussion because we are allegedly SATANIC NAZIS. See you in NY tonight. Sorry Philadelphia friends.’
Apparently the date in Brooklyn wasn’t canceled and the tour dates in August are with the much safer Gary Numan.