[youtube]https://youtu.be/HWc49YmCMmc[/youtube]
Every time we hear about a band’s trailer or van getting broken into, the next part of the sentence generally is “while the band was in St. Louis for a show.” It’s like the Show Me state is actually the “show me where your van was parked before it was stolen” state. But just to prove that St. Louis doesn’t have the market cornered on despicable people preying on touring bands, Iwrestledabearonce announced that last week while in Denton TX, their trailer and all the gear and merch in it was stolen. The band have since launched a gofundme campaign to help. Here’s what the band said about it on the page:
On the night of Sept 20th, 2015 our trailer was stolen in Denton, TX. Inside that trailer, we had a lot of our touring gear (Mikey’s drum set, speaker cabinets, road cases) and all of our merchandise.. The total amount of everything stolen is over $20,000 not including the trailer itself. Our bass player Ricky was moving the van and trailer from one safe storage space, to another and parked the van overnight across the street from his house in a church parking lot. The same place we’re used to parking every time we have a stop in his town. This was discovered the next day on the 21st, and police reports were filed. The police have informed us that recovering any of this is extremely unlikely, even though we have no idea what use someone would have with a whacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man with our band’s name on it, plus all of our merchandise that we were going to sell on this next tour.
Any touring musician can tell you that a band’s entire LIVELIHOOD is in their trailer… And when you walk outside your home to see everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish, GONE… There is no feeling like it. The merchandise is also a major set back, as we now have a merch bill, but no merch to sell in order to pay the bill. We are now going to have to do a new order of merch, and we’ll have to sell every single piece of it just to break even. This means we will be making very little money off the merch we sell on this upcoming tour (which we usually rely on for gas money on tour.)
The band was set to tour in a few weeks, and now they’ll have to do it without a wacky waving inflatable flailing arm tube man. The humanity! But also a lot of gear and merch. It’s definitely one of the most despicable things anyone can do, and it’s a bummer for any band to suffer this. Then again, if someone tries to pawn off an inflatable tube guy or 200 IWABO shirts in Texas anytime soon, you should probably alert an authority or two.
