Tower Records Isn't Big Enough For Candlebox

07/28/1998 8:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(7/29/98, 6 p.m. PDT) - An instore appearance by Maverick recording artists Candlebox, designed to promote the band's recently released Happy Pills, nearly got out-of-hand on Friday. The band was set to play inside the Tower Records store in Campbell, Calif., a suburb of San Jose. When the store manager Bret Mitchell feared the show would be shut down by the fire marshall, he shut the store's doors and wouldn't let any more fans in.

The instore performance drew "close to 1,000" fans, but those locked out of the free performance were not too pleased, Mitchell says. Several tried to overturn a van that belonged to rock radio station KSJO, which was promoting the appearance on the air. The angry horde couldn't lift the van, but they did slash the tires. Another angry fan climbed on the store's roof.

Despite those incidents, Mitchell reports the instore "went well," although the manager admits that, for a time, he was fearful the event would turn into a disaster.

Tower Records' Greenwich Village location suffered from such an incident last November during an instore performance by Green Day, when frontman Billie Joe Armstrong spray-painted the store's window with an expletive and the word "nimrod," the title of the band's latest album. In addition, some store fixtures were broken.

That, of course, pales to the mother of all instore disasters: Depeche Mode's 1990 appearance at the Wherehouse Entertainment store in Los Angeles, which drew thousands of fans and had to be broken up by police in riot gear.