RACINE, Wis. — Unconcerned sources report that the clumsy efforts of crowd-killer Danny Wilkins at a house show by local horror punk band Root River Revenants inflicted only a few casualties, with 23 of 26 attendees walking out of the show unscathed.
“It was actually kind of embarrassing to watch,” said Revenants fan Kelly Long. “I don’t want to shit on the guy, ‘cause he’s clearly doing his best at this whole thing, but it just doesn’t seem like his best is very good. Like, I kept seeing him throw punches way outside the pit, but most of the time he just missed. I didn’t even realize the show was winding up at first because pretty much everybody was on their feet and unhurt. I mean, Eli was bleeding pretty bad, but he was bleeding when he came in, so I don’t think it’s related.”
The Revenants’ guitarist, Lina “Headless” Horstmann expressed concerns related to the incident.
“The real bummer in all this is that we’re not sure how to count the turnout for that show,” Horstmann said while biting a scab on her wrist. “Like, we got 26 people in, and we were gonna have a big announcement because our old record was 24, but are we allowed to count the three guys who died? There’s just no clear guide on the etiquette here. And anyway, I think two of the guys were dead before the last few people got in, so it might have only been 24 people in there at one time. It’s just so hard to navigate this stuff sometimes.”
The local scene’s foremost expert on crowd-killing was unsurprised by Wilkins’ limited lethality.
“Yeah, Danny’s a decent kid, but he never has a fucking clue what he’s doing,” explained Chris “Three-Eyes” Cheng. “He comes up from Milwaukee, and he always says it’s because he went to school out here, but honestly I think they got fed up with him pulling this kind of half-assed shit. The Revenants fucking suck, and the basement they play in is enormous. That meant there was a ton of empty space, and nobody else was moving at all. It was way too easy to just walk away from the guy flailing his arms all over the place. Danny really needs to understand that if you wanna kill a crowd, there has to be a crowd.”
At press time, Wilkins agreed to enter a combination therapy and coaching program to either stop or improve his crowd-killing, called “Get Well or Get Good.”