Smash Mouth seems to have alienated or infected the few fans they had left. The band shared some of the hate mail they’ve received after performing at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota on August 9—an event that has since been linked to 103 new coronavirus cases.
The band posted a photo on Instagram on Monday showing a letter in which the words “kills,” “motherfuckers,” and “selfish” can be read through the artfully arranged pieces of a broken Fush Yu Mang CD, the band’s debut 1997 album. “Recent fan mail,” the band captioned the shot.
This angry letter and broken album come as a response to the band’s performance at the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally which drew hundreds of thousands of fans in the midst of the pandemic without so much as a mask or hint of social distance in sight. While on stage, Smash Mouth’s frontman Steve Harwell shouted to the cheering crowd, “We’re all here together tonight! Fuck that COVID shit!”
In an email to Billboard, however, the band’s manager Robert Hayes insisted that Smash Mouth does, in fact, give a fuck about that COVID shit, telling the outlet, “Everything backstage was sanitized, etc. The band has their own COVID addendum to their rider as well and the promoter and venue adhered to all of our requests. We spent endless hours advancing this event to make sure that it was pulled off as safely as possible and we are very happy with the outcome.”
Unfortunately, the band’s fans may not have been quite as cautious with their own health and safety. According to the Associated Press, state health departments have reported 103 cases from people in South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin Nebraska, Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and Washington linked to the 10-day event. Contact tracing amongst the huge crowds of people at the rally becomes more complicated still given that most attendees traveled from all over America to be there and then returned home, all without quarantining. The AP adds, “analysis of anonymous cell phone data from Camber Systems, a firm that aggregates cell phone activity for health researchers, found that 61% of all the counties in the U.S. have been visited by someone who attended Sturgis, creating a travel hub that was comparable to a major U.S. city.”
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