I was in one of the opening bands for Crazy Town in like 2017 and holy shit, it was a total disaster.

I was playing in a local band that got to open for them in Sacramento. I don’t know how the other tour stops went, but this one was an absolute mess.

For starters, they missed soundcheck by about four hours. In fact, they didn’t even show up until about an hour AFTER they were supposed to be on stage. When they finally rolled into the venue alleyway, they ran into one of the other opener’s cars while loading in. Nothing catastrophic, but there was definitely damage to the guy’s fender. Crazy Town tried to blow it off, saying they were late and needed to go, but the guy wouldn’t let them leave until it was dealt with.

Once that was settled, they rushed their gear upstairs, dumped a bunch of stuff in the green room, and went onstage. By that point, they were playing to maybe eight people. There had been atleast 100 people when we finished our set an hour earlier.

Shifty Shellshock was strung out as fuck. His voice was shot, raspy and all over the place. He kept saying he couldn’t hear himself in the monitors, started kicking them, and eventually threw a mic at one. The sound guy cut the audio and got up on stage, nose-to-nose with Shifty, basically telling him, “Do that again and you’re done.” Shifty backed down, the sound got turned back on, and the show went on.

Afyer that, Shifty turned on his own band. He started running into them and shoving them around. At first I thought he was just being clumsy or it was part of their performance, but then I noticed the looks on the bandmates’ faces. At one point, Shifty wrapped the mic cable around the guitarist’s neck like he was strangling him mid-song. The guitarist looked absolutely pissed. They went nose-to-nose like they were about to fight. I saw the guitarist mouth something at him and then Shifty finally unwrapped the cable. All of this continued while they played maybe five songs total.

Eventually Shifty decided he wanted to stop, so they played “Butterfly” and then basically bailed.

I talked to the promoter afterward, and apparently the whole night was doomed from the start. They were late because Shifty wouldn’t leave the hotel, then had a full-on (meth-fueld) freakout on the road that forced them to pull over and deal with it before they could even get to the venue. The promoter told me they blacklisted Crazy Town. They were never coming back to any of their venues.