Unearth’s Ken Susi in Altercation with Polish Bouncers
A recent trip to Poland didn't end up working out the way Daath, Chimaira, Throwdown and Unearth had planned. According to Daath guitarist Eyal Levi, Unearth's Ken Susi became involved in an altercation with venue personnel in Poland following a gig all of the aforementioned bands had played.
According to Levi, a monitor either fell off the stage or was kicked off, and the club where the tour had stopped said that, because of the fall, the monitor was damaged. Susi tried to prove to venue personnel that the monitor was broken not because it fell, but because one of the coils connected to the speaker had melted. "That doesn't happen from intense trauma," Levi explains. "That happens from driving it too hard with audio signal. So there's no way, whether Ken kicked the monitor off-stage or if it just fell off-stage, that hitting the ground was the cause of it not working anymore."
Well, the venue personnel were none too impressed with Susi's explanation, even after he'd taken it apart to show them the monitor's insides. He explained to them that nothing was sinking in, and "things were getting more and more heated. As the argument continued, more and more dudes kept on showing up that looked ready to fight us. I, once again, resumed loading. It was a pretty small loading party that night because most people were watching the argument."
While Daath was loading up its equipment, "the tour manager took all Unearth and Chimaira employees inside. So us in Daath were stuck outside with all the gear, unsure of what to do with it." Levi claims a car sped up, to block their tour bus from leaving, and "people in front of the bus started spitting on it. We decided that we would just load the trailer for everyone, and if they had an issue with how we packed it that they could cry about it on the ride out of town."
Inside, the situation kept getting worse, as one club employee went "from talking to Ken about the speaker to insulting Ken. At that point it was clear that they had to get out of the club. This was a fight that we as a tour wouldn't have won. There were too many reinforcements coming in."
After an hour of insults and yelling, Unearth and Chimaira split 100 Euros and gave it to the club for the damage to the monitor. The promoter also paid 100 Euros, and Unearth gave up three of their T-shirts and a bottle of Jagermeister. "These guys were looking to either fight some foreigners, or get some money towards a new monitor system because their shot ass system was out of gas. Well, they got some out of us," Levi writes. "Better to bribe them than get beaten by gangs of Polish skinheads."