Spirit of the Beehive is an experimental indie band from Philadelphia, and they are one of my favorite current and active bands. They are incredible live - as I posted about before - and they also made one of my favorite albums of all time, called Hypnic Jerks. But that is beside the point, as I wanted to share what happened to them over the past couple days because it is one of the worst things that could happen to a band on tour. And it's crazy. To set the stage, they were mid-tour, and were in Seattle when this all went down. and the below is exactly what they posted on their Instagram account:
10/4/24 - last night at 4am our van and trailer were stolen at a hotel by the seattle airport. the trailer had every piece of gear and all of our merch inside of it. info for the vehicle is below and the list of gear is in this post. please share and keep an eye out! we will share more info as we have it... Trailer was found with almost nothing in it. Gear and van still missing. 10/5/24 - today was a bad day. thank you everyone who has reached out or shared our last post. small update below:
after a day of running around seattle, we tracked down our trailer but found that it was virtually empty (they left our tote bags, hats, one guitar amp and the bass cab). the van and remaining gear/merch have still not been tracked down. among the things stolen from the trailer was our ableton rig, laptop and hard drives which had all of our live show files + recording files on them. as a result we will have to cancel the remainder of our tour and are suffering extensive monetary loss.
we have opened up a gofundme to help stop the bleeding and get our people home. we understand that not everyone is in a position to donate, sharing the link is also greatly appreciated.
link in our bio. thank you 💕
10/5/24 - hey everyone, corey and zack here with an update from our home for the next week.
the outpouring of love and support in the wake of this theft has been unbelievably humbling. thank you to anyone who has donated, shared and offered us gear or help in any way.
today we were able to fly 4 of us home. zack and i rented a uhaul and are beginning the 40 hour drive to tow our trailer from seattle back to philly.
it has been an emotional couple of days and we still have a mountain of insurance claims, police reports, further expenses & messages to comb through. we will update the gofundme link as we have more info and will compile as many photos of our stolen gear as possible.
we are down bad right now but we will be back. much love to you all. peep the last slide to watch the security footage of our van being stolen.
10/6/24 - the saga continues…
this morning at 830am we received word that our van had been found and impounded. we spent the morning figuring out logistics of where it was taken and getting some good seattle based friends on board to go check out the condition and potentially claim it.
as of 20 minutes ago we have received word that the van has been restolen from the impound lot. this shit is crazy and we dont know what to do at this point. seattle people please continue to keep an eye out for our van (blue ford e350, PA plate LTB3679) because clearly someone is still using it. we are filing a new police report as we speak.
our gofundme is still live and almost at our goal for gear replacement. we are endlessly grateful to anyone who has donated and any gear company who has offered assistance in replacing items that we lost.
hoping to have better news soon. thank you all
10/7/24 - it is impossible to put into words how grateful we are for the love & support that we have received in the past few days. thanks to all of your donations we have hit our initial goal to replace our gear and can begin the process of rebuilding. we have set a secondary goal to account for merch/personal item loss, travel expenses and paying our crew.
transparency in a situation like this is super important to us, and once we make it back home and have a chance to itemize our expenses for rebuilding i will post a breakdown of how the gofundme money will be allocated. any donations that reach beyond our expenses will be donated to hurricane helene relief.
thank you thank you thank you 💕
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That last post was about 1 hour ago from the time of me posting this. I felt so bad when I first read this because - though they are an amazing band with a successful career - I'm sure they don't have pocketbooks akin to the likes of the Rolling Stones, and the amount of financial hardship and stress this had to have put on them must have been so overwhelming, not to mention the attachment you get to your unique instruments and equipment you slowly save up for and collect throughout the years - all to just be gone in a blink of an eye... and the van... and the trailer... and their merch... and their audio files with years of dedication and work probably saved to them. Just awful and must be heartbreaking for them. (Also for the van to be RE-stolen from the impound lot is CRAZY).
I met some of these folks briefly after one of their shows in Cleveland over a cigarette outside the Grog (I basically told them the standard "great show, you all killed it"). But they seem like genuinely good people, and are clearly amazing artists. Plus doing the Lord's work of hitting the road and going on tour is no easy lifestyle - and I love the fact that they don't overlook Cleveland when doing so. If anyone deserves the help to get out of this shitty situation, its them. So I wanted to share this here, as they are close to reaching their goal in the GoFundMe they set up, and as they mentioned, will be donating all the excess funds collected to Hurricane Helene relief. Here is the link to their GoFundMe if you want to help out:
For context, here is the link from their first post when everything was stolen: https://www.instagram.com/p/DAtlblCSsBC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Here are some of the pictures of the amount of gear that was stolen: