After clashes between fans and security at an all-ages show at Chop Shop, the venue owner said he will implement new measures, including a barrier to prevent crowd surfing.
The pledge comes after a sold-out emo show on April 26 at the Wicker Park venue ended with several attendees being expelled by security for crowd surfing. The event was shut down early and led to ardent pushback from performers and fans on social media.
The concert attracted more than 500 attendees and was headlined by the Chicago screamo band Your Arms Are My Cocoon. While the venue’s ownership said that crowd surfing is forbidden, fans and performers said the venue was unprepared, and security behaved overly aggressively.
The situation comes at a trying moment for local independent venues. Earlier this year, a report found that nearly three out of four indie venues in the city are currently not profitable, as they navigate rising artist fees, higher taxes and soaring labor and production costs.
The event also unfolds in a city where all-ages shows are increasingly rare. With seemingly fewer venues holding events open to all, younger music fans don’t have as many options.
During the headlining set, the band’s lead singer, Tyler Odom, stopped the show to address security directly as they were removing a crowd member. In a tense exchange, captured in a video posted to social media, Odom says, “Listen, I’m not trying to start a fight with you.”
“This is how we dance to this music,” an audience member can be heard saying. “This is how we dance to this music, they’re right,” Odom responds from the stage.
“People are getting hurt,” a security guard says from in front of the stage, as captured in the video.
From there, the situation between the fans and security intensified, according to Chop Shop owner Nick Moretti, who was not on site during the show. Around 9 p.m., the venue turned on the house lights and canceled the rest of the show.
After the show shut down, some of the fans and performers spilled out to the neighborhood’s namesake park, where Odom performed an acoustic set from inside the park’s empty fountain.
In the days after, the bands on the bill — which include Porcelain Stars, Dead Butterflies and STOMACH BOOK — and the local DIY record label Black Dice, which helped promote the show, have taken to social media to criticize what they call the “horrendous behavior of the venue’s security.”
After Sunday’s show, an Instagram commenter said they saw people being “groped and man handled for crowd surfing.” Another wrote that, “security yelled at the band and all the attendees.” Yet another Instagram user, who said they were there with their 17-year-old daughter, commented that “it was very clear that venue security had NO IDEA how to handle a punk/metal crowd.”
According to Moretti, Chop Shop has a zero-tolerance policy for crowd surfing. Fans who do it are removed on the first offense. But Moretti concedes that Chop Shop could have done more to communicate this policy and will do so going forward.
Crowd surfing can cause injury. In 2017, a fan sued Riot Fest after alleging she was crushed when a crowd-surfer fell on her during a set by local band, Knuckle Puck. In the suit, the injured party said security should have stepped in to stop the crowd surfing.
During Sunday’s show, Chop Shop did not have a metal barricade between the fans and the stage, said Moretti, adding that the venue typically did not use such a barricade. Rather, at the front, there were security guards and a retractable belt barricade.
Sam Taffet, of Black Dice, said in an interview that the barricade was insufficient in holding fans back and preventing stage diving and crowd surfing. Taffet, who uses they/them pronouns, said while they don’t think people should have continued to crowd surf after security began removing people, they viewed security’s tenor as aggressive toward both the performers and attendees.
“From my standpoint, the venue had a lack of preparation for the show, and then didn’t really handle it adequately there and turned it into aggression, instead of trying to deal with it in a calm manner,” said Taffet, who is a junior at DePaul University. “Security should be able to de-escalate situations, and to me, they were just escalating it even more.”
Venue owner Moretti said that going forward, it will be standard practice for the venue to have a barricade set up, unless both the venue and performer agree not to use it. “At the end of the day, we didn’t have a barricade for the show,” Moretti said. “And I think that kind of set us up to fail.”
Vivian Weeks is the singer of STOMACH BOOK, which performed ahead of the night’s headliner. She said she didn’t notice any issues during her set. However, Weeks said it felt like Chop Shop was unprepared overall for a crowd at an emo show.
“We mosh, we crowd surf,” Weeks said. “This is what we do.”
Moretti said that Chop Shop’s security team is employed directly by the venue, as contract employees, and, like many night-time security guards around town, some are off-duty police officers and firefighters. On Sunday, Moretti said the venue had about seven security personnel on site, which he said is standard for a show of this size.
In a note sent to staff this week, Moretti said the allegations of wrongdoing by security personnel were unfounded. “If there were any truth to the allegations we would investigate and suspend or terminate any staff members who didn’t follow our policy,” Moretti wrote. “After reviewing the footage there is no evidence to support these allegations.”
Moretti told staff in the note that Chop Shop will increase communication to ticket holders, both at the time of purchase and on site, regarding venue policies and will implement the use of a barricade.
Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.