Photo: Alexia Arizzabalaga
The B street band, a popular Brice Springsteen cover band who've played 200 gigs a year since 1980 have pulled out of Trump's inauguration leaving the President-electwith an even thinner line-up than before.
According to Rolling Stone, the band's manger and keyboardist Will Forte addressed the band in the dressing room: "We're standing out in the storm right here," he said "We gotta get out of the storm."
The storm comes after "thousands" of emails he had received after news broke that the group would be playing the Garden State Presidential Inaugural Gala on 19 January as part of Donald Trump's inauguration.
"As time went by, the complexity of the situation became real immense and intense," Forte told Rolling Stone. "The band was caught in a hurricane. We didn't see this coming, of course." In the past few days, they had started to feel isolated because, as Forte says, "the story was so distorted." "There were misleading headlines like, 'Trump Hires B-Street Band,'" he says. "We felt like we were out on our own on an island."
The B Street band's allegiance to Springsteen - a vocal anti-Trump person - is sincere: "We felt that we had to make it known that we didn't want to seem disrespectful, in any way, shape or form, to Bruce and his music and his band," Forte says. "I don't want to upset them. We owe everything to him and our gratitude and respect to the band is imperative above all else. It became clear to us that this wasn't working and we just had to do what we thought was the right thing to do and that was to pull out," he added.
Springsteen never publicly said anything about the B-street band planning to play the inauguration. But their bassist, Gary Tallent, tweeted: "please tell me this is more fake news. Or at least a joke." Steven Van Zandt, the group's outspoken guitarist, tweeted of the B-Street Band, "Nice guys. Met them. I wouldn't say right or wrong. Up to them. But it's naive to think one can separate Art and Politics. Art IS Politics."
All this stuff made it clear to us that this event is not worth it," he says. "It's just a job to us. We're just trying to hold up a contract. We're not trying to prove anything. We're just a fun band!
When I started this band 37 years ago, it was only about performing and making people happy," he adds. "I never thought the distortion of what we do as a band would've been so intense. I wish it never would've happened. We would've never got involved in this if I knew how this would turn out.
"Even with all the support and publicity, I would trade that all in just to go back to where we were four months ago. I don't think they'll ever be a cover band of our size in the history of music that has gotten the attention of something this big."
That above statement should come as warning to anyone else even considering joining the inauguration as a musician.
