06/05/2025
Since there seem to be rumors already flying around about our situation with Mango's Bar & Grill, we’ll go ahead and set the record straight.
For context, we’ve been playing at mangos twice a year since 2019, every year for Memorial Day weekend and July 4th weekend. From the start, they had several rules: no swearing, no one other than the band on stage, and no taking off shirts.
Besides these rules, they also required us to provide our own sound equipment for our shows there, on top of not providing the band with a band tab. Add to that a security guard, who from our first interaction with him, was a hateful, rude, obnoxious person who thought he was in charge of everything and anyone at that bar (if you’ve ever been to mangos, you probably know who I’m talking about). Despite all this, we still played shows at the venue because it was an in between space that both our Lynchburg crowd and Roanoke crowd could make.
This past Memorial Day weekend, we played a show there on Friday May 23rd. Normal show. We played from 7:30pm-11:30pm. The crowd that was still there was chanting for an encore, so we decided to play one more song for them. We played until about 11:34pm. I took off my shirt during this last extra song. Keep in mind that even though I’ve been told not to take my shirt off, I’ve also been told by management before that I’m welcome to take it off when it’s being asked for but to put it back on after a song or two, so I’ve always considered this rule as a “soft rule” from mangos. On top of that, we’ve almost always done an encore at mangos, since our crowd is not lame. Add to that, no one from staff or management, came to me during the last song to tell us to stop playing or to put my shirt back on so we took it as no problem.
What I did find strange is that after we finished the show, the manager didn’t come and give me a check for payment, which he’s always done every time we’ve played there. But I honestly thought it was just oversight and contacted the booking contact for mangos the next day and he confirmed we would be getting paid. A few days later, I get a text from our agent saying that Mangos wanted to cancel our upcoming show with them on July 4th and had also been trying to deny payment for our show on May 23rd due to me taking my shirt off and going over the timeframe by 4 mins. I was told by the booking agent for mangos that I should contact the owner of mangos, a guy called Tim Reith, to see if we could clear the air. Keep in mind, I’ve never to my knowledge had a conversation with this person, but I figured I’d call him to see if we could work things out. He immediately came out saying how he’s sick and tired of our band, how we always give him issues, and how angry he was on the night of our most recent gig that he was about drive up to mangos and fire us. He mentioned that a few years ago, I was so pi**ed off about him getting on to me about taking my shirt off that we walked out on the spot and canceled the rest of the show. Lie. For one, I’ve never had a conversation with this person but on top of that our band has NEVER walked off mid performance during any show ever. I shot back at him with how our treatment at mangos has never been satisfactory especially for how much they pay us and then he hung up on me. I then contacted our agent and informed him to go ahead and issue an official cancellation to Mangos for our upcoming July 4th show with them and that we would no longer be playing any future shows at their venue.
Mangos may be saying that we’ve been banned there, which in a way is partially true, but we were the ones who requested to communicate through our agency that we would no longer be playing there.
With that, we would like to thank all our people who made the trip every year to go see us at the lake. You guys came out even when the weather was stating that it would rain and even stayed dancing with us when it did. Thank you all for the memories and the good times. These are moments that will stay with us and we are so very appreciative of you guys for them. We are still playing a show on 07/05 at the Riverfront Park in Lynchburg and we promise we’ll still find a cool spot to come check us out on upcoming memorial day and July 4th dates. Thanks again to anyone who was there on 05/23 of this year for our last ever show at mangos. As Michael Scott so eloquently put it, “this is a day that will live in infamy.”
Much love,
-Danny
