DJ Equipment Reviews

DJ AM and other electronic DJs didn’t play at the HARD concert in LA

If you’ve been keeping up with my DJ posts, either bios, news or just heads up on different things here on WorkingDJ.com, you’ll know one of the more curious cases of a DJ personality is Adam Goldstein, better known to electronic music fans as DJ AM. It’s curious because he had his life threatened to end on a couple of different occasions and he generally has had some rough patches to go through. While what happened earlier at the HARD summer concert in Los Angeles hardly even compares with any of DJ AM’s "main events" in his lifetime, it’s still worth mentioning.

For the music fans and guys keeping up with the LA parties nowadays, the HARD summer concert shouldn’t be a surprise anymore. Well, maybe the way it turned out could turn a few heads, but the HARD concert was expected, even more so since some pretty high level DJs were going to be present, among them DJ AM as well. To name a few of the others, Underworld and Chromeo, alongside Adam Goldstein and a dozen more electronic artists had their gigs shut out at the HARD concert.

While it was supposed to hold for an all-nighter, the HARD concert came to an abrupt end with the above mentioned DJs getting cut from their acts and the whole show generally getting suspended. And apparently it was for good reason, as the LA County Fire Department doesn’t just show up at your door to say hi. The clear reasons have yet to be announced though, as the organizers kept a low profile as to why exactly were the acts  and the entire concert cut short.

There are a bunch of online reactions though, either on the LA Times website in the comments section or on Underworld’s tweets, for instance, which although unofficial by all standards, hint to a general problem of disorganized security, with accounts of audience members leaping from the first level down to the ground floor. This was caused, as far as anybody can tell, by the general admission policy applied by the organizers. The official reasons for this are unknown as of yet.

Here’s a little bit of the Tweeter reactions to the HARD summer concert premature ending with the fire team showing up to clear things up:

• "What happened there!? arrived into a vibe that just didn’t feel right reminded me of Athens like it could escalate badly but we waited…"
• "A block away we wrote the set list & waited for the callback when it came the police advised us the gig was shutdown & to turn back"
• "This isn’t the way we like to leave a night we come in peace to share joy & positive energy we r so sorry it had to be stopped r u all ok?"
• "Can’t sleep takin calls from concerned friends around the world & reading online accounts of last night this is no rice-dream"

These are gathered from the Underworld’s tweets on the topic, and as you can see, it was pretty scary in some parts, if it got looking like Athens. And we all know when a bunch of people are involved and some sort of mass hysteria or frenzy ensues, better grab on to whatever’s close and stable and pray you don’t get stomped on.

Furthermore, the venue for the show was over 18000 people in capacity, so there was more than enough potential for something bad happening, but as far as we can tell by now, people didn’t get hurt, the LA County Fire Dept. got there and cut the HARD summer concert show short in order to maintain order and safety for all involved. While these sort of unfortunate events are unhappy but also do happen once in a while, the best thing to do is stay on your toes and watch out if a large group of people gets panicky. It won’t matter if you’re Tiesto or a bedroom DJ…

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