And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #208: Linkin Park v Sublime With Rome

By | Published on Friday 30 May 2014

Linkin Park

Any band will tell you that touring, rather than being a life of glamour, actually involves a lot of waiting around. And the question is, how do you fill all that empty time?

Some bands, I’m sure it will shock you to discover, use that time to take drugs. Other bands do other things, but what they definitely don’t do is call the police to report the drug taking. That’s like an unwritten rule.

But you know what they say about unwritten rules. Oh, come on, you must know the famous saying: Due to them not being be written down, some people might forget them and then accidentally break them.

Which brings us around to the KFMA Day festival, which took place in Tucson, Arizona last weekend. The members of Sublime With Rome – a collaboration between Sublime’s Eric Wilson and vocalist/guitarist Rome Ramirez – had been kicking back and relaxing over a few reefer-style doobie pipes before their set, but then when they were on stage the police, acting on a tip-off, came and confiscated all their drugs.

But who could have been responsible for dobbing them in? Not another band, surely. Not with that whole unwritten rule thing. Though I think we all know what they say about unwritten rules by now.

Rome Ramirez certainly had an idea what had happened, tweeting: “Linkin Park called the cops on us and said that they were allergic to pot. Cops came and took all our weed while we on stage. Bitch shit”.

“Linkin nark”, he added, ensuring that at least something fun came out of all of this.

Getting on the case, David Accomazzo of The Phoenix New Times asked Linkin Park’s people to respond to Ramirez’s claims. A statement came back: “Rome Ramirez’s allegations are 100% false. No one from Linkin Park’s camp said anything to the police or any other authorities regarding the activities taking place in Sublime’s dressing room”.

Well, that seems pretty unequivocal. Maybe none of this happened at all. Maybe Ramirez and co just misplaced their drugs, or someone else took them. We can only speculate. Or, at least we could only speculate if it wasn’t for the existence of THE POLICE REPORT.

As well as contacting reps for Linkin Park, Accomazzo also got in touch with Pima County Sheriff’s Department. And they confirmed the whole thing.

“At approximately 1850 hours, while working off-duty FKMA Day at Tuscon Electric Park, other deputies and I were approached by the security for the band Lincoln Park”, wrote the officer involved, Stephen McLeod. You can put a little [sic] next to the band name in your mind, if you like. “We were advised by one of the security guards that one of the band members was complaining about another band, known as Sublime, smoking marijuana next door. The smoke was irritating one of the band members and he is, indeed, allergic to the marijuana smoke. They were requesting for us to talk to the band to tell them to stop smoking the marijuana inside”.

He and three other officers wandered over to Sublime With Rome’s dressing room, following the “overwhelming odor of burnt marijuana”. Once their, they found the door unlocked and the dressing room empty, so just scooped up the “bags of marijuana, a glass pipe, Zigzags and several roaches that were used to smoke” and dropped them all off at the nearby police department.

So, there you go. Case closed! Nothing more to say. Unless a member of Linkin Park wants to chip in at this point. Mike? Oh, yeah, right of course Mike Shinoda has something to say about all this.

“LP didn’t ‘call the cops’ on [Sublime With Rome] smoking pot”, Shinoda tweeted on Tuesday. “Not sure where the rumor came from. Definitely not my style, bummer it happened”.

“We were at a meet and greet when Sublime was on stage, not [our] dressing room. Wouldn’t even know if there was smoke”, he wrote, providing a watertight alibi, before adding: “If someone was ‘representing the band’ to the cops in the venue about weed smoke, they were out of line”.

So who actually grassed about Sublime’s grass? We may never know. It was probably the same person who sent the One Direction weed smoking video to The Daily Mail. Some international vigilante trying to rid the music industry of drugs, one spliff at time. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. Well, I suppose you have to find some way to fill the time while you’re hanging around backstage at gigs.



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