Okay, so I talked to Troy (for about 5 seconds, lol), Tim and Schmier (Destruction) a bit earlier. Apparently, this building looks like a normal rectangle building from the front, but the whole back part was a "condemned" type house attached to it. There were many issues with the place, namely the power problems. By that, I am talking about the fact that when the people at the club just turned on the "house lights", the breaker tripped. Now, if a breaker trips with just that, how are you going to be able to plug in any other lights or amps or monitors or microphones? The crew worked for quite a while trying to see what they could do with the power - anything that would salvage the show. If you were put in a situation like that and you cannot get a solid amount of power, I think you'd walk away too. It's too risky of a situation, I'd say anyway. Also, there were apparently two tiny speakers - and by tiny, I mean 6" or something like that. I think my tabletop stereo has bigger speakers.
The "stage" was basically the living room of this "house" and the drum riser was maybe 7' x 6' - in other words, maybe big enough for the drumset and not the drummer (poor Steve and Marc, no love for the drummers). The crew really tried to work with this "venue" because they and both bands really do hate cancelling shows, but there was nothing more they could do. Yes, Into Eternity would have loved to have done an impromptu acoustic gig or something instead of not playing at all, but they are not the only ones on this tour in that tour bus. If not everyone is comfortable with the venue and whatnot, you have to compromise, and that compromise was to cancel the show and go on to the next venue.
I should also mention that Tim was outside talking to the record label at some point while things were being figured out. He was just in front of the building and he hears gun shots. He looked down to the corner and saw a bunch of gangbangers being all confrontational-looking. The label asked him what the sounds were and he just said oh, it's just gun shots down the street. LOL He saw a cop car go down the street and I think he said the second cop car stopped by him and told him at some point that he was sitting in basically the worst and most dangerous part of Charlotte and that there were a lot of gangbanger type people that lived and visit that area.
So needless to say, the bands got out of there. I just hope that everyone can understand that none of the members of either band or crew wanted to cancel the gig, but it just was all-around not safe. It's really sad that promoters would subject a band and their fans to something like this and lead a booking agent to believing that places like this are "actual" venues. When Tim was talking to the promoter or someone at the club, he asked about what kind of bands actually play there and the person told him that semi-national bands have played there in the past, but they wouldn't name any names.
Please don't be mad at the bands. Be mad at the promoter if anything. The guys in both bands really wanted to apologize for having to cancel.
