Smash Mouth, who headlined this year’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, have received backlash following a rise in COVID-19 cases which are linked to the festival.
Posting a photo of the hate mail to Instagram Smash Mouth said, “recent fan mail.” The image showed a pretty angry letter, some of the words on the letter are: “Fuckers, kills, and selfish”. The letter can’t be read as it’s covered in a shattered Smash Mouth CD, but you can fill in the blanks.
The rally, which ran for nine days, had no social distancing and no masks. It also saw Smash Mouth frontman, Steve Harwell shout, “We’re all here together tonight! Fuck that COVID shit!”
Which, is reflecting pretty poorly now.
Smash Mouth had already tried to distance themselves from the rally. They posted on Instagram stating, “Science is real.” While their manager, Robert Hayes spoke with Billboard, defending the rally’s pandemic protocols.
He said, “The promoter did a fantastic job with their Covid protocol. They had a very strict social distancing and mask policy in place for all workers.”
“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.”
Consequence of Sound reports that there has been more than 100 cases linked to the event across eight states.
