By most anyone’s standards, beloved Millennial pop-rock band the All-American Rejects are pretty wholesome and nonthreatening. However, someone clutched their pearls while hearing their upbeat electric guitar riffs and sanitized emo crooning and called the cops.
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It’s all true.
While performing in the backyard of a house near the University of Missouri on May 18, the “Swing, Swing” band’s show was shut down by the police.
The alt-rock band shared footage on their YouTube channel, featuring a performance of their 2005 hit, “Move Along.” However, near the end of the poppy tune that dropped before most of the college kids in attendance were born, bandleader Tyson Ritter blurts out, “Alright, guys. Whoa, whoa whoa. We’ve gotta stop it.”
“The cops just shut us down,” he added, perhaps marveling at the first remotely controversial thing to ever happen to the squeaky clean band.
“Sorry, y’all. We just got kicked off campus,” he added, as the crowd politely booed.
Meanwhile, the crowd, energized by perhaps the most interesting thing to happen at the concert all night, began to chant “F— the police.”
Police Allow the “Very Cooperative” Rock Band to Play One More Song
After disappearing from the band’s lawn stage, the 41-year-old singer returned to announce to fans, “They said we can play one more f—ing song!”
“I haven’t done this in a long time, but I’d really like to thank the local police for letting us f—ing keep carrying on. Holy s—. How often do you get a blessing from an officer? Well, I guess we’ve got one more song for you, and I’ll give you 1 million guesses to guess which one. You might recognize it,” Ritter declared.
The poppy band then tore into a rendition of their whiny 2008 tune “Gives You Hell.”
After the song wrapped, Ritter told the crowd: “Get home safely because the man [old timey slang for police] let us keep playing.”
Mark Fitzgerald, assistant chief of police for the Columbia Police Department, told CNN that the band, their security, and the audience were unsurprisingly “very cooperative” with law enforcement. However, the show got the boot due to multiple local ordinance violations.
Meanwhile, it seems the responding officers were fans of the aging rockers.
Fitzgerald explained that the officers who arrived at the scene listened to a few songs before informing the band’s team that the show would need to stop.
“The Sergeant told me that he knew exactly who the band was and listened to them a lot while he was in college,” Fitzgerald recalled.
“The Police Department would be happy to have the All-American Rejects return and play in Columbia,” the top-cop said, adding: “Hopefully with the proper permits and approval.”
Permits aside, don’t let the All-American Rejects playing backyard college shows fool you; they’re not that down and out. The band has been playing a series of small, informal shows recently to promote their upcoming album, their first in over ten years.