Alcohol and small towns, always an eventful mix – and this time I’m not even talking about the show. In fact, the crowd last night was excellent. It was everything that happened after the show that was like an episode of Twin Peaks.

First, right beside the bus two girls got into a full fledged fight. It seems one of them had just had some sort of sexual tryst with the others boyfriend inside the club and (as one might imagine) it led to an all out Prairie version of the Ultimate Fighting Challenge. This was then followed by a woman in a pickup truck getting out of her vehicle and challenging someone to a fight on the other side of the bus not long after.

But the real problem, and this is a very serious matter, is that we literally sat on the bus and watched people leave the venue at the end of the night, stagger to their vehicles, and actually get into their cars and drive away. It was a terrifying sight to behold.

Given that it’s such a small town, one would think there would be, at the very least, some sort of police presence in the parking lot, but there was none. If that sort of thing happened in my hometown on that scale, given the volume of traffic in Vancouver and its outlying areas, it would probably produce at least a dozen drunk driving fatalities in a single night.

It’s certainly nothing to be proud of, that’s for sure.

Let me present you with a scenario.

Let’s say that you’ve decided to drive drunk. Let’s then say that you get pulled over by the police and one of the officers asks you to blow in their face. Let’s say that because of the obvious presence of alcohol on your breath you are suspected of drinking and driving and one hour and fifty-six minutes after you were originally pulled over, your blood alcohol content registers .14, almost double the legal limit.

How would you plead in court?

Better yet, were you driving a rusted out 1978 Honda Civic and couldn’t afford the best defense attorneys in the Province of British Columbia, how would you plead? Chances are you’d plead guilty because you wouldn’t have the sort of financial resources at your disposal to try and get you off the hook for being stupid enough to endanger the lives of others.

Men take responsibility for their actions. Little boys that can afford it hire defense teams to attempt to get them off the hook. Even little boys that go on about their harsh impoverished upbringings.

Some years ago I made a comment during an interview with Chart Magazine. I said that many of the modern rock bands at the time sounded the same. Among those mentioned was Nickelback. Because of that statement the band’s lead singer, Chad Kroeger, eventually went so far as to say in an interview with Rolling Stone…

“I don’t know how city kids deal with things, but when you talk shit about somebody from a small town, they find you in a back alley and they deal with the situation. They beat the living piss out of you and then laugh at you the next day when you’re seen around town all marked up.”

I’m not going to get into the obvious insecurities that that statement displays. Being lumped into the same category as Creed is, I suppose, grounds for violence as far as Kroeger was concerned. But the truth is, in our business, no matter how many records you sell, be it the few that I sell primarily in Canada or the millions that Nickelback sells globally, there are always going to be people out there that don’t enjoy your work. So what are you going to do? Threaten them all?

I have no idea if Chad Kroeger actually did spend time in juvenile detention, which he also mentioned during the same interview with Rolling Stone. But one thing is for certain, juvenile detention is not prison, and prison isn’t the sort of place that multimillionaire rock stars that believe themselves above the law, and responsibility, want to find themselves. Then again, in this day and age, the likelihood of him actually serving a six month sentence if found guilty is unlikely. Because unlike poor kids from small towns, wealthy rock stars commonly don’t have to face the same severity of justice.

The bottom line here is simple. Were your average reckless individual found to have a blood alcohol content almost twice the legal limit almost two hours after being stopped, they’d probably have the hammer dropped on them. But even more than that, what sort of man attempts to squirm their way out of talking responsibility for making a decision to get into an automobile and endangering the lives of others?

Everyone makes mistakes, there’s no question about that. It’s whether or not someone has the integrity to own up to them that separates the boys from the men. And that applies to those from small towns and cities alike.