By Aris Hunter Wales
When one leaps into the fray that is a heavy metal tour, the odds of danger and mayhem go up exponentially. You have to be adaptable, and ready for anything and everything. Bewitcher prides ourselves on staying professional, while being prepared for adventure and willing to take it wherever it leads us.
In Orland Park, Illinois, on a lovely Monday early afternoon, we headed to a Bank of America to take care of some business. We had a couple killer shows over the weekend and needed to deposit our loot. Little did we know such a simple and benign errand would turn into our absolute craziest tour adventure to date because someone thought we looked like we were making a withdrawal by force. That’s right, Bewitcher was mistaken for bank robbers and we were suddenly staring down the barrels of multiple guns.
For the sake of being honest, I’ve been arrested before. When you’re a teenager in this country, a good run-in with the cops is a rite of passage. Whether you were actually doing something nefarious or something just plain stupid, everyone has a cop story from their salad days. I won’t bore you with the details of the “Boys In Blue” pushing up against me over the years, but I can tell you this: Of all the encounters I’ve had with the law, I’ve never had a gun pulled on me. Let alone multiple guns. To put it plainly, it’s not an experience I would recommend.
As a heavy touring band, Bewitcher sees just about every corner of the U.S. multiple times a year. We interact with people of all walks of life, economic standing, and political and religious ideologies. You don’t have to be a traveler to know that there are several parts of this country where a gang of tattooed heavy metal longhairs would get a lot of half-turns and crook-eyed looks. We carry ourselves in a polite and courteous manner wherever we are, but we do wave our freak flags high (denim and leather, evil, sacrilegious, and/or offensive band shirts, etc.) So, every once in a while, there is a palpable fear of “others” pointed in our direction. Unfortunately, there is a large cross-section of individuals in this country who live like skittish house cats. Their worlds are small, and when someone or something they don’t understand walks into their bubble it can seem scary. Especially during an election year as incendiary as the one we’re experiencing. The alarmist rhetoric most of our politicians use these days stokes that fear. To quote Jack Nicholson’s iconic character George Hanson from Easy Rider, “People will talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom, but when they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em.”
The tale I’m about to regale you with was quite jarring in the moment, but frankly the implications of what happened and why it happened are not completely lost on us. In the end, Bewitcher escaped with both our dignity and the tour story to end all tour stories.
For those unfamiliar with Orland Park, I’ll paint you a quick picture. You’ve all been there—it’s your typical, spotless, perfect, strip mall-dotted suburb in northeast Illinois. A van full of gruff individuals dressed in black is likely not a regular sight there. We may have looked a little haggard and rough around the edges because touring will do that to a person, but we are certainly not a gang of bloodthirsty criminals. Besides, a big black van with three massive, winged, ejaculating cocks scrawled into the road grime on the back windows is not a very inconspicuous getaway vehicle (Thank you very much, Skeletal Remains).
So, there we were. Our bass player and band businessman A. Magus strolled into the bank and left me, our guitarist and vocalist Mateo Von Bewitcher, and our merch gal and tour manager Jessyca Rose chilling in our dick-detailed van to make our grocery lists for our next stop. Thanks to the Tetris-stacked gear and merch bins, we couldn’t see most of the bank building or anything behind us through the rear windows and most of the side windows. All I could see from the back seat was the entrance to the bank over my right shoulder. Less than a minute or two after we parked, a well-dressed man approached the front of our van. He was wearing a nice shirt, suit jacket, and a baseball hat with big, bold letters that read “POLICE” across the front. The dude was eyeballing us HARD. He was looking directly at each one of us and peering past us into our van. I gave him an incredulous look, put my hands up in the air and exclaimed, “What?!”
Jessyca chimed in, “What the fuck is this guy looking at?”
Ever the stable-minded one, Mateo said, “Alright, everyone. Calm down. It’s not the first time a cop has looked at me weird.”
We all agreed we were doing nothing wrong and continued making our lists for the grocery store. Less than a minute or so later, Jessyca looked out her window and noticed several police vehicles pulling into the area. “Uh, guys, there’s a lot of cops pulling in.” Still confident the commotion couldn’t be for us, we were blissfully unaware the cops were boxing us in and setting up a perimeter around the van. Roughly 30 seconds later is when I saw the first gun. A police officer was creeping around the bank sign to our left with his gun out and held low.
“Holy fuck, that cop has his gun drawn. What the FUCK is happening?” I nervously bellowed.
At that point I turned and looked at the bank door just as Magus obliviously sauntered out. Before I could start signaling to him I heard yelling and his hands went into the air. At that moment we all realized we were the target of this display of force.
“All of you in the van! Get your hands up, and step out slowly,” screamed the cop to our left. He was now pointing the gun right at us. Naturally, we were all shitting our pants with complete terror and confusion at this point. We slowly filed out to the back of the van with our hands held high —according to Magus—three sidearms locked right on us. I had to ask Magus later to tell me how many guns were out because I was blind with shock at that moment.
One officer started yelling questions with his gun still steadily trained on us: “How many people are in the van? What weapons do you have in the van?” We told him we were the only three people and the only weapons we had were pocket knives.
“I don’t care about pocket knives! WHAT OTHER WEAPONS DO YOU HAVE?!”
“Nothing, sir! Nothing!” I replied shakily.
They lowered their guns after seeing that we were fully cooperating, and took us one at a time to be searched. Jessyca was first. I looked at Mateo as we held our hands in the air and quietly whispered, “This is fucking insane. What is happening?”
We were each called over, patted down thoroughly, and asked to place our hands on a police car together. As Mateo was being frisked, one of the officers finally spoke, “Ok. We got a call that this bank was being robbed. That is why you’re seeing this display of force.”
“What?! We’re just a touring band, man” chortled Mateo as he put his hands on the car with the rest of us.
“Everyone stop talking,” I said quietly and calmly. “Don’t speak.”
As we all stood there wide-eyed and silent with our hands glued to the car, trying to understand why they were there, the cops buzzed all around us.
After a few minutes, an officer came over and instructed us that it was okay to take our hands off the vehicle and another one collected our IDs. The oxygen started flowing again and the cops began their long apology tour. They still wanted to take a look in the van, so I took one officer over and opened the back. He said, “Uh…OK. I see instruments. I’m not taking anything out. It looks like a process.” I told him he could take out or open anything he wanted. I took him to the other side of the van and he told me to return to my friends so he could conduct a search.
I returned to a much more jovial scene of cops and my tour mates. The cop then pointed to a gaggle of his cohorts who were questioning the man that had fingered us for bandits. Wouldn’t you know it, there was our well-dressed friend from before, but he wasn’t wearing his “POLICE” hat anymore.
I explained to the officer that he was wearing a hat that made him look like an authority figure, looking into our van and mean-mugging us before all this went down.
“Oh, we found the hat,” he said. Turns out our friend wasn’t wearing the hat when they found him, and it wasn’t in his car either. He ditched it and the cops found it. I guess our self-appointed hero lost his confidence when he realized his super powers may have failed him. From a distance he did not look like he was cooperating nicely while being grilled by our new cop friends either. Something tells me the rest of his day was not gonna be great, and the recourse from his false call could potentially come back to bite him.
We returned to the side of our van to give another officer our contact information and receive our pocket knives back. The mood was now all giggles from both sides and the cops wanted to know the name of our band and where they could listen to us. It was a funny notion thinking about half of the Orland Park Police force cranking our new record Spell Shock. I wish we could’ve seen their faces and raised eyebrows when they came to our fist-pumping, outlaw anthem “Out Against the Law”—It’s safe to say that that track may have a bit more prescience than we realized.
Just before they left, one of the cops asked us if we wanted a picture. You bet your ass we did! How else would anyone believe this yarn if we didn’t have some kind of proof?
If there’s a moral to this story, I’m not sure it’s meant for us. Nothing about what we were doing, who we are, or what we looked like should’ve pegged us as villainous. I feel sorry for the man that saw us and came to the conclusion that we were dangerous thugs up to no good.
Personally, I believe paranoia is a useless pursuit. Each millisecond all over the world, shit happens a million times over. One thing I hope people take away from this story is that living in fear of the unknown or unfamiliar is a waste of life. Let your neighbor—or your neighborhood metalheads—go about their business no matter how strange or distasteful it may look to you. Long live the weird!
Bewitcher’s new album, Spell Shock is out now on Century Media.
And catch the band on the road (before the cops do):
0/09: Ottawa, ON @ The Dom [TICKETS]
10/10: Toronto, ON @ Rockpile [TICKETS]
10/11: Albany, NY @ Empire Underground [TICKETS]
10/12: Baltimore, MD @ Metro Gallery [TICKETS]
10/13: Cincinnati, OH @ Madison Live [TICKETS]
10/15: Omaha, NE @ Reverb Lounge [TICKETS]
10/16: Denver, CO @ HQ [TICKETS]
10/17: Salt Lake City, UT @ Aces High Saloon [TICKETS]
10/18: Boise, ID @ The Shredder [TICKETS]
10/19: Seattle, WA @ El Corazon [TICKETS]
10/20: Portland, OR @ Dante’s [TICKETS]
