Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
As has been the talk of the Internet since last Saturday morning, Houston club Walter’s on Washington was the setting for a bizarre and seemingly unprovoked bit of wanton police brutality at a Two Gallants/Langhorne Slim/Trainwreck Riders show Friday night. Since all three bands have been kind enough to have visited the Daytrotter studio over the past few months, we made some calls to see how everyone was in the aftermath, but first, the details as they were originally reported. Much of the altercation can be seen at the MySpace pages linked at the bottom of this story and more information about the craziness can be found in reporting done at Pitchfork
. As reports detail, a noise complaint was made (for the output of a two-piece folk-rock band!!) and officer G.M. Rodriguez came to the club on the call. He approached the Two Gallants’ tour manager and the Houston Chronicle reported that “the volume was turned down—but that as the officer was leaving, the volume went back up.” At this point Rodriguez went onto the stage as Adam Stephens was singing the band’s fourth song and told him to turn the music off. Stephens asked, “Why?” didn’t get a response and then turned his back on the officer, accidentally bumping him in the process. Rodriguez then flew into a rage, putting Stephens in a headlock – according to Trainwreck Riders bassist Sean Kohler – and then taking him to the ground, holding him down with a knee to his chest. Kohler, Gallants drummer Tyson Vogel and Trainwreck Riders guitarist Andrew Kerwin were arrested and spent 17 hours in jail before the bands pooled $4,200 together to post bail, a hard hit to the pockets for three indie rock bands. In the melee, Rodriguez was said to have used his Taser gun on everyone within arm’s length, even tasering a 14-year-old boy in the audience who went into a seizure and began foaming at the mouth. Langhorne Slim bassist Paul Defiglia’s 90-year-old upright bass was snapped in two at the neck when Rodriguez was tasering people and throwing them into the instruments, also landing them on Malachi DeLorenzo’s drum kit.

Stephens was telling his tourmates, as he was being manhandled, “Grab my guitar, grab my guitar. Get it out of here.”

“Normally, you wouldn’t even touch a cop. You don’t do that in most situations, but we were just trying to get him off of Adam. We were trying to help him. It just seemed so dangerous so fast,” DeLorenzo said Monday evening. “He just seemed more like a thug than a cop. It was unfathomable to anybody that this could happen.”

Kohler read the newspaper reports of the incident which said that officer Rodriguez alleged that he was attacked. He said it was nothing like that and he took the opportunity to give Rodriguez all of his mind.

“It said that he got attacked. Who’s going to be the guy at the Two Gallants show to do that?” he said with a laugh. “Everybody was running outside. There were people crying outside.”

Kohler was arrested when he spoke up to the officer’s face.

“The guy was looking to start a fight. I’d had a few beers and was getting really angry about the situation. I knew I was going to get arrested. I’ve been arrested before and the last thing I like to see is my friends get arrested by themselves. The worst thing that can happen is that I can keep them company in jail. I went up to him and I said, ‘You’re fucking weak. You just picked a fight with two guys half your size and you pulled out a Taser gun on a kid. You’re fucking weak.’ He just turned me around and slapped handcuffs on me. I got a huge kick out of the whole situation. I happened to get to ride to the police station in his car and I was just laying into him. I wouldn’t shut up.”

Langhorne was able to joke about the whole thing saying, “Paul’s bass got broken, but it’s fixed now. We all lived to see another day.” And as DeLorenzo was using his phone, he spoke up saying, “Tell Sean how I was unjustly detained in the police car…for 25 minutes…and raped with anal beads, but that’s neither here nor there.” And later, remarking, “Tell him about when the undead arrived.”

Stephens avoided an arrest, running from Rodriguez and leaping over an island bar, out a back door and booking through a neighborhood to a nearby house.

“He was running, like scared though, not eluding,” Kohler remembered.

DeLorenzo, whose father Victor is the drummer for the Violent Femmes, said that there were close to 10 police cars out in front of the club and even a helicopter hovering overhead.

“We’ve never, ever seen or heard of anything like this before, not even at punk shows. This was a legitimate club. It’s been there for years,” he said. “Not even my dad’s had anything like this happen before in his years and years of playing in shitty clubs.”

Two Gallants video/photos No. 1
Two Gallants video/photos No. 2
Two Gallants Daytrotter Session
Langhorne Slim Daytrotter Session