Eagles of Death Metal photo by Philip Cosores
At a Warped Tour stop in Denver on June 25th, Dickies frontman Leonard Grave Phillips verbally accosted a female crew member. According to Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman, the crew member had taken offense to a lot of what Phillips had said from stage during the tour, and held up a sign during the Denver show, which both parties knew to be Dickies’ final stop. In response, Phillips called the woman a “cunt,” said he’d “fucked farm animals that were prettier than you,” and encouraged the audience to chant “Blow me!”, after which the protestor threw her sign at the stage.
Responding to the controversy that followed, Phillips issued a non-apology via social media, stating in part, “I understand the word ‘cunt’ is inflammatory and that many women have been abused by this word. I should have called her an ‘asshole.'” Read the full statement here.
Speaking up in defense of Phillips, outspoken Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes and Offspring guitarist Noodles invoked freedom of speech and defending the name of rock and roll while mocking the notion of safe spaces. In an Instagram post, Hughes called out “enemies of free speech” while adhering to the idea of rock and roll being “about saying whatever the fuck you want!” He went on to define a safe zone as “a place that exists in your home not at the place you voluntarily drive to and walk into and sit in an audience of that exists in a public place.”
For his part, Noodles chimed in with similar thoughts, stating, “It takes some real guts (or is it idiocy?) to demand a ‘safe space’ where nobody really wants or expects one to be, even though it really is a pretty goddamn safe place to begin with.” To top it off, he closed his statement with “fuck you, kiss my ass, blow me, blow me, blow me, you fat fucking cunts and assholes.” Oddly enough, Noodles recently tweeted against misogyny, but I guess that all goes out the window in defending one of punk rock’s own.
Watch the incident in question below, followed by Hughes and Noodles’ full statements.
