On Tour with Chevelle: Fistfights and Guns, No Bodyguards

Today Rolling Stone released an article on one of my favorite bands of all time, Chevelle.

Just last year I got the opportunity to meet the band and they are some of the coolest guys you could ever meet. So why would they have haters?

Chevelle is the type of band that doesn’t mind having haters, in fact they will call you out if you are one.

At KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Xmas last month leader singer Pete Loeffler noticed a few fans that weren’t digging them. “There were two guys that didn’t like us, on the left side of the stage. And I called them out,” Pete told Rolling Stone.

“Any time you can call somebody out for being an asshole is a good show,” Pete’s brother and Chevelle drummer Sam Loeffler adds.

Chevelle is now touring on their sixth studio album Hats Off To The Bull, released on Dec. 6t, and have pretty much seen everything there is to see on the road.

There was the time in Jacksonville, FL when a stranger approached the group asking to bum a few dollars. “He’s like, ‘Hey, can I get five bucks?’ I gave him five bucks, no big deal. Then he goes to Pete, and Pete’s like, ‘He just gave you money,'” Sam recalls. “The kid takes this haymaker swing at him, and Pete just backs off. I just ran in and shoved the kid and he goes running out the door.”

A few years later the group was approached by a man with a gun in Charlotte, NC. “He lifted up his shirt, and there’s a gun there. He said, ‘I just got out of prison. You don’t like this, you don’t want to meet any of these people,'” Sam says. “He was all aggro and methed-out.”

So after these encounters why does Chevelle not have any security?

It all goes back to a lesson the group learned from Dave Grohl while Chevelle was on tour with the Foo Fighters.
“We were playing shows with the Foo Fighters, and Dave Grohl walks us across the street. I said, ‘Dave, no security, no lines?'” Pete says. “He said, ‘Yeah, security makes more problems than they fix.’ We always felt like if Dave Grohl doesn’t need security, what do we need security for?”

Check out BackstageOL’s tour bus interview with Chevelle: