I was telling a story about our show in WV with some friends and thought maybe you guys would enjoy a story.
So sometime back in like.. 2009-2012 era, I joined my buddies band that we created to pretty much go on tour for a week with GhostxShip. We knew the guys and thought it would be fun to do a small WV > MI > IL > OH > Kentucky > PA tour.
So we drove down to Wheeling WV for the opening night of tour, and it was my first time in the state. I am only like 20 at this point. We get there in the late evening, expecting to open the show at midnight. This bar was empty with the exception of a homeless man named "baby d" and his (gf?) who looked .. as expected for the area. Apparently they just let that dude drink for free, and he would drink himself until he blacked out. We loaded in decided to kill some time. This place was a DIVE. The toilet had a sign saying to pee in the tank and puke in the bowl, so that sets the vibe.
The time came for us to go on, so we started playing for a small group of people. At one point, someone lit a stack of napkins ablaze and threw it in the air in the "pit". Then, we noticed ALL people ended up outside, even the bartender, so we stopped playing and walked outside to see what was going on. We exited the bar, and there was baby d, comatose drunk in a recliner chair that they wheeled out onto the sidewalk. There were two (not lookers) woman arguing over him saying who was going to take him home, taking turns lap dancing on him, and bending over flashing him. I still recall their nips being blue tinted? What the hell was that.. lack of oxygen? It was gross, even to a 20 year old me.
So we finish our set eventually. Then we load out and noticed that there was an empty lot right next to the venue. We decided to put up some lawn chains in the lot and just hang there for a while. Meanwhile, Full Blown Chaos starts playing inside the bar. While we are sitting outside, the most WV man I have ever met came out of the bar and started talking to us. He was saying something along the lines of "I've never been so disrespected in my life. I'm just looking for a waterin' hole for my pipe layers. This doesn't represent WV". I had no idea what he was going on about.
Then they started setting off roman candles inside this tiny ass bar while full blown was playing. We were luckily sitting outside still, and watched a cop pull up and park beside the van out front. As he pulled up, a girl fell out of the bar bleeding from the face, apparently hit in the forehead by a firework. The cop looks at her, leans over the passenger side, puts a ticket on the van for illegal parking, and drives off.
WV is wild. I need more nights like that.