Clearing the air.
This past weekend, country newcomer Dylan Marlowe performed at Country Jam USA in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The lineup on Saturday featured Tigirlily Gold and Marlowe, followed by Craig Morgan, Jake Owen, and headliner Sam Hunt. And after his set, Marlowe decided to venture out to the front of house to watch his buddy Jake Owen perform.
Of course the artist had his all-access pass from the festival. But apparently one security guard didn’t care, and kicked him out anyway.
Marlowe posted a video, which has since been deleted, showing a security guard holding on to the back of his shirt while escorting him out.
@dylanmarlowefan this is so crazy 😭😂 @Dylan Marlowe #dylanmarlowe #dylanmarlowemusic #country #countrymusic
At one point you even hear Owen, who was on stage performing his song “On The Boat Again,” stop and say “There’s Dylan Marlowe!” as the opener throws up his hands.
And on Sunday, he took to social media to explain what went down.
According to Marlowe, he was just trying to watch Jake Owen’s set from a place where he wouldn’t cause a disruption:
“Just trying to stay out of the way. Front of house was like this tower, so there’s like second story, first story of the booth. And so we’re up top watching, probably for 10 or 12 minutes. This dude comes up and he says, you know, we can’t be there.
So we were like very, it started off very politely. You know, we’re like, hey, we have these. I still have my wristband on. Like these are all access. This is what we were given to our tour manager for us to wear to be anywhere we want to be to be able to watch it front of house or to be able to go anywhere outside the gate. That’s what we were told. Or to use our artist credentials…
He was like, no, I don’t care. So-and-so said you can’t be up here. So we kind of went back and forth of like trying to explain to him that we had just played and that we were trying to just watch Jake’s set, stay out of the way… I asked him where else we could go then that would be out of the way. And he kept saying the pit.
But if we go in the pit during the middle of the day, it’s going to probably cause a little bit of a scene just because we just got off stage and we’re in the same clothes. So last thing I want to do is try to make a scene during Jake Owen’s set because that to me is disrespectful during his set.”
Yeah, I can imagine it would be a little disruptive if Marlowe were to walk out into the pit after just performing on stage. The security guard may not have known who he was, but the crowd definitely would have.
Marlowe admits that he didn’t handle the situation as well as he could have:
“I also won’t lie and say like I wasn’t kind of rude back to the guy because I’m not going to paint it like I was just this perfectly, you know, great dude who didn’t, who wasn’t rude back to him after he was rude to me. So definitely, you know, not saying that I was perfect by any means.
But so we walked downstairs to where the guy continues to say, hey, you got to get the F out of here, get the F out of here. Not allowed to be down here either. Which like we had these passes so we knew we were allowed to be there.
So then these cops come up and I was like, oh God. So we talked to the cops and we say, hey guys, like we had these passes. Not sure like what the confusion is because we were told these are all access passes. We’re just trying to watch the set.
To which the cops responded, this dude, this security guy is our boss and he’s telling us to get y’all out of here. So after that, there was definitely a few heated words exchanged to that guy. Nothing like crazy, crazy, but I feel like he was being kind of rude to me and I was rude back to him and I shouldn’t have been.
So I definitely feel bad about that. And I know there’s probably people that are going to comment on this and say you did nothing wrong. I would have done the same thing, yada, yada, yada. But I just, and for what I believe in and what I’m trying to like get out there, push the message, this isn’t like the message I’m trying to push for myself or to anybody.”
Marlowe says he took the video down because he didn’t want it to reflect poorly on the festival when it was just “one bad apple” who caused the problem:
“The festival was great, and all those people there were great… I posted it from a place of frustration yesterday. I was pretty angry when I got backstage.”
And after he posted his statement, the festival acknowledged that there was a miscommunication and apologized to the artist for how their security handled the situation.
In a post on Facebook, Country Jam shared Marlowe’s video that there are “two sides to every story,” but says that it could have been handled better:
“While there are two sides to every story, we completely agree that communication and this situation could have been handled better. We sincerely apologize to Dylan Marlowe for the miscommunication.”
All in all, it sounds like there are no hard feelings on either side, and it may have just been a case of an overzealous security guard who didn’t realize his mistake.
But at least he was keeping concertgoers safe from…the opening act.
