Luckily, It Was a Huge Bottle

“So, last night I got hit in the head by an empty glass Maker’s Mark bottle,” said As I Lay Dying guitarist Nick Hipa after a February 24 gig in Sydney, Australia. “While it did stun and disorient me,” he blogged on MySpace, “I am completely fine. Lucky for me the bottle was huge, so it didn’t break and I have no need for stitches.… I am happy to say that aside from having a bulbous lump and cut on top of my skull, I’m in good health and feeling like a gladiator.”

The bottle was hurled as the band played the third song of its set at the Soundwave Festival, where Unwritten Law and +44 also played. A video of the incident posted on YouTube shows the audience booing as the band leaves the stage. “I’m sorry we had to stop our set,” says Hipa online, “but I was quite discombobulated for a good while, and more importantly, the EMT dude wouldn’t let me play because my head was bleeding quite a bit, or some sort of mumbo jumbo like that.”

Amid sympathetic comments posted at Blabbermouth.net was one from username Power of Napalm, complaining, “Metalcore bands have been promoting concert violence for years.… It just serves them right when they get some of that violence delivered to their stage while they perform. I just see this bottle throwing as an integral part of the metalcore bands’ glorification of the violence. You have sown the wind, now reap the whirlwind, fuckers.”