While performing at the Punk Rock Music & Bowling Festival in Las Vegas on May 27, 2018, NOFX members Fat Mike and Eric Melvin joked about the Route 91 Harvest mass shooting that left 58 people dead and hundreds more injured. After Melvin suggested you don’t get shot in Vegas unless you’re in a country band, Fat Mike responded, “That sucked, but at least they were country fans and not punk rock fans.”
Take a look at the footage for yourself right here:
Stone Brewing, which created NOFX’s official beer, Punk in Drublic, and sponsored its music festival of the same name, quickly cut ties with the band over the incident, and NOFX was even dropped from the lineup of their own festival. A little while later, the group issued an apology on social media, writing, “There’s no place here to backpedal. What NOFX said in Vegas was shameful.”
It went on to say, “We crossed the line of civility. We can’t write songs about how people in this world need to be more decent when we were clearly being indecent.”
A Las Vegas Shooting Joke Cost NOFX Their Beer Partnership and Festival Spot
By the end of June, Fat Mike took to Instagram to tell fans the ramifications of his joke were far worse than anyone expected. He said the controversy canceled all their upcoming U.S. shows. Furthermore, Fat Mike claimed he was told that NOFX wasn’t welcome at any major venue in the country. He closed his statement, which you can read below, by thanking his followers and saying the Punk in Drublic tour would still continue overseas.
Though things eventually cooled off, the wound was still too fresh for NOFX to perform at the Punk Rock Music & Bowling Festival in 2021. The band was scheduled to headline on September 24 that year but dropped out because of complaints.
“There has been a lot of hate messages and threats because we are on the bill,” their announcement read. “It just feels wrong. We know we said shi—y things that caused it, so we get it. Sorry to everyone that wanted to see us.”
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