Phantom Atlantic – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the alternative rock band, Phantom Atlantic, shares one of their stories from being on the road. You can check out the story, after the break.

The first crazy tour moment that happened to us took place back in 2017 at our second show ever. We were slotted in to play the late slot on a weeknight bill in the town where we all went to school, so even though the crowd was somewhat sparse, the vibe was great. There were a ton of familiar faces in the room and we were aware that the venue had hosted early career shows from a ton of legends like Radiohead, The Ramones, and The Tragically Hip (if you’re not from Canada, Google that last one).

We’re not even halfway through our first song when a stumbling middle-aged woman that we don’t recognize pushes a few people out of her way to stake out a spot at the front of the stage. She’s clearly lost count of her drinks, but she was loving the band so we were totally about it.

This is where it started to get a little weird. Soon, she’s in our faces trying to ask us our names between songs. Next, she’s acting like our hype woman by yelling at specific people in the crowd for not being into it enough. Things grow more tense and uncomfortable when she starts scream-complaining that they don’t have enough music like this in the city we’re in – right in front of a couple bands from the city we’re in… But we laugh it off and plow through.

Right as we launch into the last song of the set, we hear this insane shrieking sound. I look up and she’s on the ground in full plank – we’re talking catatonic, stiff as a board – with security on top of her. As we’re trying not to fuck up, she’s literally getting dragged out of the venue by her feet while clawing at the floor. (Crazy to see, but pretty uncool on the security’s part to be honest.) We wrap things up and hurry to ask the owner what was going on. Turns out this isn’t the first time this has happened. This woman has been banned from the venue multiple times but just keeps coming back. To top it all off, he told us that as she was being handed over to the cops, this woman we’ve never seen before in our lives was screaming that it was her son’s band on stage, so we had to deal with people in the crowd asking which of our moms that was for the rest of the night. So if our surrogate mom happens to be reading this somewhere, thanks for the memory even though you probably don’t remember it yourself.

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(photo credit: Kelsi Gayda)