Police shut down All-American Rejects backyard concert
An All-American Rejects concert in a Missouri backyard was shut down by police who were fans of the rock band, and they were allowed to finish one more song before ending the event.
On May 18th, the band played in the backyard of a house near the University of Missouri in Columbia. “The cops just shut us down,” the frontman, Tyson Ritter, says in a TikTok video of the event. After much booing from the large crowd and hassle on the band’s side, he reveals, “They said we can play one more fucking song!” before launching into 2008 anthem Gives You Hell. “I guess we’re getting kicked off campus,” Ritter also says in the clip.
Mark Fitzgerald, the Columbia Police Department’s assistant chief of police, told CNN in a statement that the band, their security staff and the crowd were “very cooperative” with officials, despite the concert being “in violation of several local ordinances.”
The officers that responded, according to Fitzgerald, “listened to a couple of songs” before the patrol sergeant informed the band and their security staff of the rules. “The Sergeant told me that he knew exactly who the band was and listened to them a lot while he was in college,” Fitzgerald revealed. “The Police Department would be happy to have the All-American Rejects return and play in Columbia, hopefully with the proper permits and approval.
The tour includes stops at college house parties in Missouri and Wisconsin, a Minneapolis bowling alley, a barn in Iowa, and a house party in Chicago. It is a promotion of their upcoming album; the first single, Sandbox, was released on May 23rd.
Frontman Tsyon Ritter spoke to Vulture about the choice to tour in these unusual locations. He explained, “I recently read something about people financing their tickets. [It’s] the complete inaccessibility of the concert experience in 2025, and how it’s juxtaposed against these wild and weird economic times.”
He continued, “We took $50,000 out of our own pockets, booked a bus, put the crew salary on, and started this wild sort of ride.”
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