It's the oldest story in rock'n'roll: Blog Beef turned Bad Blood turned Brooklyn Bar Fight. The blogosphere was abuzzin' over the weekend with the hot gossip that lo-fi hype-magnet Wavves (pictured, left) and Jared Swilley (right), the mustachioed bassist for Atlanta garage-rockers Black Lips, were involved in an actual, genuine, gloves-off fight Friday night at Williamsburg bar Daddy's (AKA: the one run by The Rogers Sisters).
Whilst the facts of the after-hours, drunken, multi-person brawl are predictably hazy, the upshot was: Swilley ended up covered in blood, police were called, and then, in the cold light of day, the name-calling started. And the blog realm went crazy. It was like when Jack White made the Von Bondies' Jason Stollsteimer look like this, but with more out-of-control comment threads.
The back-story goes: in May, at Primavera Festival in Barcelona, Wavves main-man Nathan Williams had an infamous onstage breakdown (the aftermath of which he talks about in my recent Wavves interview), that was caught on camera and seized upon by bloggers the world over.
Talking on Norwegian national radio shortly thereafter, Swilley, whose band also played at Primavera, called Williams a "dick" and a "baby," and offered this advice: "He needs to go back to school or move back in with his parents."
Williams took offense, and, on Friday night, apparently he and/or his posse had had enough. In an official Wavves statement issued the following day for the blog Brooklyn Vegan (AKA: the one that first leaked word of the Pavement reunion), Williams said, amongst other things: "talking s**t about me on the Internet is one thing, but when some dude is just looking for a fight at 4 in the morning talking s**t to my face and his girlfriend is spitting in the face of all my friends it's a whole different story."
In a riposte on the Buddyhead blog, Swilley countered, "I've never 'come after' that kid, it wasn't four a.m., that wasn't my girlfriend, no one was spitting, and I didn't attack him," before claiming it was Wavves' tour-manager who hit him. With a bottle.
And then Swilley, the son of a preacher, got his 'Macho Man' Randy Savage on, issuing these fighting words: "He's coming to Atlanta October 3rd [it's the 4th, actually] and we're gonna get ugly on him. We're gonna destroy their van, we're gonna destroy their faces, we're gonna get crazy on 'em. Nasty style."
Hipster garage-rockers of the indie world, can't we all just get along?
Comments