Anyone who’d been planning to see punk rocker Dead Bob on Friday night at Thee Stork Club in Oakland is out of luck. The show has been canceled — as has Dead Bob’s entire West Coast tour with punk supergroup UltraBomb (whose bassist, Greg Norton, was a member of 1980s royalty Hüsker Dü).
John Wright, a Canadian who performs as Dead Bob, alerted fans Wednesday in a Facebook video that his visa application was not approved in time for the tour. Because UltraBomb was using the same crew and transportation, that band — whose members come from three countries — also had to cancel.
“Although the situation is entirely out of our control, it’s not fair to keep the clubs and organizers all languishing in the same limbo we find ourselves in,” said Wright, 62 and a former member of the punk band No Means No. “We need to cancel this and try again.”
Thee Stork Club said it had put in a refund request for fans through the ticket seller, according to owner Billy Joe Agan, who added that Dead Bob’s management may try to rebook for a later date.
The U.S. State Department didn’t outright deny Wright and his touring ensemble P-2 visas, the category for entertainers and athletes. Rather, their applications are mired in the gears of bureaucracy.
“There’s no doubt they’ll be approved,” Wright said in the video. “We just don’t know when … even though we did plan far ahead.” In true Canadian style, Wright apologized for the mess, noting that he’d love nothing more than to melt fans’ faces off.
It’s not just Canadian punks caught in a visa quagmire. This is the season when summer music festivals reveal their lineups, but for some foreign-born touring acts, it’s turning into a season of cancellations. One week earlier, La Onda — a three-day festival in Napa produced by the organizers of BottleRock and featuring musicians of various Latin genres — lost its closing-night headliner, Grupo Firme, after the Trump administration revoked members’ visas, accusing them of supporting Mexican cartel violence. Singer-songwriter Bells Larsen, who is transgender, was forced to cancel his entire U.S. tour this spring because the gender marker on his documents did not match the sex he was assigned at birth.
Even superstars are feeling the pinch: Visa complications upended British singer-songwriter FKA Twigs’ North American tour in April, including a planned stop at Coachella.
According to James MacLean, Dead Bob’s agent and president of Toronto’s Atomic Music Group, several factors are at work — chief among them, U.S. immigration services’ caseload. He suspects the staffing turmoil that has rocked the federal government this year may have depleted the ranks of experienced visa officials.
Dead Bob submitted his application three months ago, which in times past would have been sufficient. But the pace has slowed significantly, and MacLean feels there has been an erosion of trust around this once-routine process. “No one’s willing to go out on a limb anymore and say, ‘We know this band. They’ve applied 20 times in the last 10 years.’”
Reached for comment, the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada said it was aware of Dead Bob’s visa situation but could not comment on specifics. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ “processing system it constantly changing,” the group said in a statement.
The Standard encountered a catch-22 of our own when we reached out to the State Department, which referred questions to USCIS. That agency uses a telephone chatbot that, when asked to be connected with a human representative, insisted on emailing this reporter boilerplate responses. Further, its website specifies that issuing visas is the responsibility of the State Department.
Is America worth it?
Deron Delgado, the head of Dirtybird Records — now a subsidiary of San Francisco-based Empire, which works with international acts through offices on six continents — said he recently tried to book Canadian electronic duo Smalltown DJs to play at 1015 Folsom in SoMa, but they declined, fearing the gig might interfere with a separate visa application for July’s Dirtybird Campout x Northern Nights festival. “They were like, ‘We can’t come down and risk it,’” Delgado said.
Ever-higher visa processing fees — which hiked up significantly under President Joe Biden in 2024 — combined with the possibility of bureaucratic purgatory and President Donald Trump’s willingness to lash out at critics like Bruce Springsteen, have spurred artists and their reps to reevaluate whether playing in the U.S. is worth the trouble. “I’ve heard it from managers all over the world. They’re rethinking their 2025-26 schedules,” MacLean said. “And I have artists who are at the end of their careers saying, ‘We’re just done with all this.’”
He declined to name names, citing a desire not to damage any musicians’ standing in the eyes of an ever-more-watchful U.S. government. While impossible to quantify, the chilling effect is real. “It’s like me saying, ‘I’m afraid the KGB’s listening,’” MacLean said. “We’ve said to artists to watch what you say right now.”
Moody Jones, Empire’s general manager and a Canadian national, agreed. To him, the U.S. used to be the place where international artists went to earn respect. “But now it’s become a challenge more than anything,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense, and the fans are paying the price.”
This lose-lose situation may intensify, depriving performers of gigs and fans of chances to see their heroes. “I fought the law, and the law won,” as punk gods the Clash once sang. Only now, the law is winning even when the punks cooperate.