From Jeff Waye Sent Wed, Apr 8th 1998, 01:04
>>I heard a rumors that Baltimore police were successful in canceling the >>Ninja Tune event on 4-18-98. Can anybody confirm or deny that? If not, >>I'm gonna have to catch them in DC the night before. If you have any >>information, please let me know b/c I'm gonna have to drive quite a long >>way to get there and need to make arrangements. I hope Vadim is on that >>night. >unfortunately. this is true. Baltimore PD seems to think we are all about >promoting drug use...supposedly based on one quick trip to our Web site, >and the mention of the infamous Ninja skins was all it took to be branded >drug-pushin' rave promtin' generally society threatenin' no good British >Hooligans ;). Woohoo Land of the Free. I must express my apologies and >sympathies to all those good folks who live in Baltimore who seem to have >their musical experience controlled by cops. We hope that things change >in the future and we can come back. >hope you can make it to the show > > >stealthy not wealthy just to expand on this a bit... basically our show being cancelled is a direct result of the absurd bullshit that has gone down between Ultraworld Productions and the Baltimore Police (if you don't know about this, I highly suggest you look into it. I believe Paper & Urb printed some things about it a while back or you can contact L.G at xxxxxxxx@xxxxx.xxx for more info. It basically amounts to the 90's version of Footloose and/or 1984 except about a million times more scary when you consider what could have happened to the Ultraworld promoters had all the bogus charges stuck). It would seem that at this time the Baltimore Police are on a mission to shut down anything that remotly resembles someplace where someone might have a good time. The police got wind of our show, immediatly set about seeing what this whole Ninja Tune thing was about, subsequently decided that we were not welcome in their city and suggested to John Hopkins that they might not want to continue with the show. John Hopkins University, not willing to be involved in police politics (which we completly respect by the way, and hold no ill feelings towards them) decided to cancel. Funnily enough one of the alleged reasons cited was that they went to our web page and discovered that (god forbid) we make Ninja Tune rolling papers for promotional use, therefor we must be a bunch of evil drug lords. Doesn't this rational mean that every corner store in America is guilty of this also. Of course they didn't take the time to actually obtain a pack of Skinz (I would have been quite happy to send them a pack) and read what's on the package. Aside from label/artist info it contains the following slogan 'Don't be a dope-head. Have you ever seen a Blunt needle? Stay sharp suckas!' Hardly a big pro-drug stance is it? The main point here however is that we are a legitimate business, and all our artists are in the country working with all the proper legal papers, meaning they all had to be checked out by American customs beforehand (ie. if anyone had a criminal record they wouldn't be allowed in the country in the first place). Anyway, that's where it's at. Hopefully in the future this will all blow over and we can return to Baltimore. It's a shame, as I know we sell a lot of records there and any party I've been to there has always been awesome. All we ever wanted to do was have fun and sell a few records. Take Care (and beware) Jeff