Blog by Chuck Haber

On Aug. 1, 2009 a drug task force under the direction of District Attorney Nancy Vernon raided the Church of Universal Love and Music's Funk Festival in Acme, Pennsylvania. Forty officers - mostly masked, carrying assault rifles and in full body armor - held the crowd of 500 concert goers at gunpoint for five hours while they searched fans and band members for illegal drugs. The raid netted five ounces of marijuana, some psychedelic mushrooms, a few hits of acid and lots of pipes. Twenty-eight people were arrested.

An escalation of police activity have plagued festivals all across the country. It's one thing to get busted in the parking lot for smoking a joint. It's something else to be backstage and suddenly a guy in a ninja outfit jumps out of the bushes and puts a gun to your head.

The bands 420 Funk Mob and DRUGS have had a long relationship with Willy Pritts and his Church of Universal Love and Music (CULM). They performed at the Church five times in three years before the venue was shut down by the State and Fayette County for zoning violations. Basically, the County and State wanted the weekend concerts to stop; the area wasn't zoned for it. They also questioned if CULM really was a Church. Pritts and CULM countered in a 2006 suit that they were a Church whose sacrament was music. The shows were not concerts, but religious services. Forcing them to stop would be a violation of their freedom to worship as they chose.

Three years and many motions later, the County lost its case against the Church. The settlement forced the County to pay CULM $76,000 dollars in restitution. They were allowed to hold 12 services a year, and officials had to let them be and end the harassment of Church goers. The federal case was settled out of court in February, the day before it was set to go on trial. That afternoon, Pritts called to let us know they won and asked if the 420 Funk Mob and DRUGS would headline their Funk Festival in August.

It was a beautiful summer day when 420FM and our special guest, Meters' guitarist Leo Nocentelli, and DRUGS rode over to the Church from the hotel. We got there about an hour before the band was to perform. We took a couple of minutes and checked out the scene.

The Church site is really a beautiful place. It's set on 122 acres in a natural amphitheater. The stage is at the bottom of the hill and is covered by an airplane hanger type roof. All the campsites face down towards the stage. Little kids run all over the place, having fun. It was nice to come back after four years and see the atmosphere had not changed. It was still a family-type place.

After a quick set change, DRUGS hit the stage and played a blistering hour and twenty minute set, bringing the festival crowd out of their tents and down to the dance floor. Following the set, DRUGS and 420FM went backstage to get something to eat and drink before returning to the hotel. While we waited at the van, we noticed an ambulance and two police cars tearing up the hill on a side road. We thought someone was hurt and they were on the way to help. As we watched them crest the hill, we noticed a group of armed masked men in ninja suits and camouflage body armor running and stumbling down the hill toward us and a family of unsuspecting campers cooking dinner.

We watched in disbelief as six men jumped out from behind the camper and trained their automatic weapons on a family of four. One minute the Dad was putting mustard on his hot dog, the next he's had a gun at his head with two more pointed at his little girls as the police searched through their crayons and coloring books for contraband.

Then armed men in riot gear with assault weapons started running out of the woods yelling and screaming. While we are taking all this in a black van came speeding up to us and six more armed men in masks jumped out barking, "Don't move!" They herded us to the sound board while the others descended on the backstage area.

For the next hour no one was allowed to move while the police finished locking down the venue. They began searching everyone -  concert goers, vendors and band members.

When the cops began the raid, Ivan Neville and his band Dumpstaphunk had just arrived. They got rounded up on the stage at gunpoint and were searched along with everyone else. It was ridiculous.

With all the firepower they were carrying, the task force apparently expected an armed insurrection, not some pot-smoking hippies. "I would say 99% of the people were there to have fun," said P-Funk keyboardist Clip Payne, who performs with 420 Funk Mob and DRUGS. "It wasn't a big drug fest like the police were making it out to be. It was overkill."

Finally, after about two hours, I was allowed to go backstage. The band members told me what happened. Joey Eppard and Adam Widoff had guns pointed at their heads by one cop while another searched them. Leo Nocentelli was forced to the ground with a gun to his head. They confiscated his Bosch and Loam contact-lens eye solution "because it might contain acid." Ted Orr, partially blind because of diabetes, thought the person in front of him with the mask was just playing a joke until a second cop put a gun to the back of his head, a boot in his back and shoved him to the floor.

The cops also made a point of taking peoples' cell phones and deleting the photos in them if they caught anyone snapping pictures of the raid. Our cameraman shot most of it on a high definition video camera, but the police found his camera and confiscated all his film.

"This has nothing to do with you people," they told us. "We're not here to bust any band, we're looking for one man: Willy Prits. He's the reason this is going on."

The out-of-control cop loaded up the 28 people they arrested in vans, among them our percussion player Richie Nagan, and left the venue almost six hours after they first burst in.

Amazingly, the show went on. After a six and half hour delay, Dumpstaphunk lit up the night with their New Orleans funk. Clip Payne and Steve Molitz (from Phil and Friends) joined in for an encore of Sly's "Thank You."

After a quick break, 420 Funk Mob played a short but sweet hour-plus set. It was a guitar player’s dream come true, with Ted Orr, Eric McFadden and Leo Nocentelli burning some furious licks as the band worked its way through a set that included old-school Funkadelic and Meters tunes.

"As far as festivals go, the Church was the most family orientated event I've ever been to," said Rob Robinson, who produces the New York Harvest Festival. "There was nothing blatant going on as far as I could see. There was no ‘open air drug market’ like I've seen at other events, and I have been to hundreds of them."

Though local politics was at the heart of the CULM raid, the increase of police activity at festival and concert sites across the country is something to be very alarmed about. Bonnaroo, Rothbury, All Good, Mountain Jam, Camp Bisco, Gathering of the Vibes and others across the country have experienced a surge in police activity and arrests for simple drug possession, mostly for weed. But this was the first time the police actually rolled into a festival, put everyone at gunpoint and searched them, even band members who were there to fulfill a contractual obligation.

On Aug 3, Fayette County officials filed an injunction against the Church and put in a motion to get back the $76,000 dollars they had to pay the Church.

Ten days later, a federal judge banned future concerts at CULM, saying the Church had violated the settlement agreement.

On the CULM website, a notice informs that a "All events are canceled (hopefully only for this year)."

“I was afraid they were going to kill people,” Pritts states. “It was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The site asks that "anyone with any video, audio or pictures of police pointing guns in anyone's face, especially children, or any other things that would compile evidence of they way they treated us, send them to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to compile evidence of the malicious way in which they raided. Camera phone pictures of your torn up campsite, etc, anything that could help build a case would be appreciated."

Chuck Haber manages 420 Funk Mob and DRUGS

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