All summer, the prolific traditionalist country star Charley Crockett has been embroiled in controversy stemming from his decision to drop the opening act from a pair of his shows. The band in question was Twin Temple, a Satanism-themed retro rock duo comprising married couple Alexandra and Zachary James, whose new album Doomed Lovers was produced by Crockett's close collaborator Shooter Jennings.
Twin Temple were scheduled to open two Crockett shows in July, but a few days before the first of those, the band announced that Crockett had booted them from the bill due to their Satanic imagery. Explaining his decision to Rolling Stone, Crockett wrote, "I thought they were like Black Sabbath, but they ain’t. Not today, Satan." Jack White jumped into the fray, offering to let Twin Temple open his Los Angeles show this September. Crockett responded with some more vague Instagram posts, some longer than others. The story died down, but a month later, Crockett revived it.
A week ago, Crockett posted a statement to Instagram further explaining his decision to drop Twin Temple: "Their production requests raised eyebrows simply because we couldn’t accommodate them physically. Then I noticed some of the things they’d been doing on stage and after thinking about it for a couple days I decided to cut em loose." In the post, he said he lost respect for White, who "used it to sell tickets," and falsely accused the White Stripes of avoiding political issues. When White responded by calling Crockett a "young buck" and quoting from an old rap song about fake cowboys, Crockett doubled down, affirming his country bona fides, asserting that he's been more politically outspoken than White, and concluding that even if White has revolutionary literature on his shelf, "at the end of the day you get in the Lamborghini and put your kids in private school."
Now, Crockett has given an in-depth interview to the great Craig Jenkins at Vulture. In the Q&A, Crockett says before adding Twin Temple to his shows, he had been casually aware of them and kept running into them due to their shared association with Jennings. He says the booking happened because Twin Temple's camp pursued it, and he elaborated on the apprehensions that developed as he learned more about their stage show.
About a month before their shows, I had production people on my team concerned because they were making a lot of requests that we couldn’t accommodate physically. That was how it came to me. The first thing I saw was the pretty big, eight-by-four or six-by-three upside down crosses on floor mounts that they wanted to bring out. You have to remember, this is not a co-bill. It’s a Charley Crockett show with great openers. Openers don’t get that level of production. Our setup is pretty big, and we don’t accommodate extra-large format production. They were asking for a lot of stuff like that. My guys didn’t come to me until it became a whole deal. We don’t espouse or represent any religious imagery or any of that kind of stuff on our stages. I’m not selling physical representations of belief systems. My crowds are diverse: all ages, all political, economic, religious backgrounds, ethnic background. Lot of kids.
When asked if the all-ages audience factored into his decision, he continued:
Big time. If it were just the upside down crosses, I might’ve let it ride. I looked closer at what they were doing onstage, and I’ve never been around any of that in my life, the extreme metal stuff. I’ve got fans in that world. It’s not like I’m afraid of that stuff. I don’t have a ton of boundaries. But these guys were doing plastic-baby sacrifices, fake blood onstage. They’ve got naked people and goat heads with blood dripping down and the whole nine1. I don’t mean to sound like a dick, but at first glance, it looked like something between Nazis and fucking Handmaid’s Tale.
I spent a few very difficult days thinking. Me, my band, and road crew were off in Wyoming, up in the mountains. I thought I’d gotten past so much drama in my career. It was hard. I have kids in the front row a lot of nights, full families, grandmothers to 5-year-olds. I just felt that it was too much. I’ll fight for your right to practice and worship anything you believe in. Even if I don’t agree, I’ll fight because I think that’s what makes us Americans. This is not what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to have to deal with it.
We should’ve caught it beforehand, and I take responsibility for that. It wasn’t an easy decision, because I was worried there’d be trouble in either direction, a tough place to be. But the email when we decided to drop them said, Hey, Charley has decided that the vibe is not right for his all-ages audience. And good luck and sorry or whatever. They were paid. They took the money. If it were the religious, creative freedom thing they say it is, I don’t think they would. Suddenly, I was couched as a bigot, MAGA everything. I watched people I thought were my friends do it, who knew I backed Bad Bunny and called out the administration disrespecting an American citizen. What did he do to deserve that? Nothing except be brown. I met him once. Introduced myself in Spanish. I’m from South Texas, where it’s predominately Latino. He had a bulletproof vest on.
Crockett also addressed his beef with White, who he says is exploiting the situation for publicity and ticket sales and, in the process, creating unnecessary divisions among people who should be allies: "What’s weird is I’ve agreed with him on so many things over the years, and this happens and puts people at odds that have so much in common."
It's good to hear further reasoning from Crockett, which feels reasonable even if it doesn't totally square with his initial posts about the matter. But there may not be anything else left to say here. At this point these guys need to work it out on the remix, yeah?
