As you can read in the Houston Chronicle and various places online, a show here on Friday night at Walter’s On Washington ended up in an insane scene of violence after a lone Houston Police Department officer, according to reports, advised the bar to reduce the volume of Two Gallants’ music after a noise complaint from a nearby resident.
As you can see here on YouTube, the place got crazy after–at least what I can tell from the videos–the police officer panicked and used excessive violence with the crowd. Judge for yourself, and anyone who attended the show (I did not) please feel free to post comments or start something in the Houston Calling message board.
Here’s some account of the incident I found on MySpace:
so two gallants were on their 4th song i believe and a cop shows up for a noise complaint. he did not go to the soundboard but immediately heads to the stage. he has some words with the singer adam and then the cop grabs his guitar. adam pulls it back and then the cop grabs him around the head and slams him down on the stage. tyson (teh drummer) jumps up from the drums and jumps into the mix. some other dudes get on stage and a bunch of others swarm up and start taking pictures. someone gets between adam and the cop and is calming things down. it could’ve ended here as everyone is calming down. then the cop turns on my friend greg who is taking pics and says ‘stop touching me’ or something like that and knocks greg’s camera out of his hand. great is all like what the fuck? and then the cop jumps off stage and starts pushing greg in the chest across the room while greg is just backing away. the cop also is waving his tazer around at this point. he eventually backs greg into that corner where everybody puts their instruments (to the right of the stage) and pushes him down into a pile of drums and the standup bass the opening band was playing. people freak out and about 20 people rush over there including the dudes from the opening band and adam and tyson. i thought at this point the cop was going to get the shit kicked out of him. but i guess everyone was just standing around yelling or something so anyway the cop manages his way out of that pack and then starts chasing adam. adam runs across the stage and around the back of the bar with the cop right after him. he runs behind the bar and jumps over the front of the bar and runs out the door and down the street. later that evening my friend jennifer was riding her bike home and saw adam walking in the neighborhood. she took him back to her house until around 2 when he got ahold of his manager who had a hotel room already. she took him to his hotel room. meanwhile, the cop comes back around the door and is yelling at everyone to leave. he then walks outside and grabs tyson and cuffs him. he tells tyson something like he is being arrasted for what his buddy did. meanwhile some other people are yelling at the cop and he is walking around with his handcuffs out threatening to arrest everyone. he then grabs another dude and arrests him. then about 9 other cop cars showed up and those cops all jump out of their cars. we walked across the street so as not to get arrested or anything. i see them then arrest my friend greg as well as 4 or so other people. i hear they were arresting the opening band folks but that pam (the club owner) got them out. that is all i know. except that the first cop that came was a fukcin lunatic. you do not walk into a show and do what he did. he seemed way more interested in fuckin shit up then he did in calmly difusing anything. that guy had a real chip on his shoulder… i have just never seen anything like that… i guess they are never coming back to houston again.
Another account on MySpace is here.
What puzzles me is if this was some sort of sting around town — I was at another show near Midtown and was leaving to see Veruca Salt at Engine Room around 11pm or so when about half a dozen HPD officers were entering The Roof telling the doormen that the band had to be shut down due to noise complaints.
The local ABC affiliate has this short story about the Walter’s incident and the related photo is all about how the police officer received injuries so I assume this will be spun into some crazed music fan thing — hopefully not.
Can’t we all just get along?