Bruce Springsteen cover band pulls out of Trump inauguration gala

Not wanting to tick off The Boss, a Bruce Springsteen cover band says it won't play the Garden State Presidential Inaugural Gala on Thursday.

Since 1980, the B-Street Band has played 200 shows a year, and in 2013, after performing during President Obama's inauguration, signed a contract to play four years later. They obviously didn't know who would be president at the time, but once Donald Trump was elected, "the complexity of the situation became real immense and intense," Will Forte, keyboardist, manager, agent, and publicist for the band, told Rolling Stone. The group received "thousands of emails from both sides" when it was announced they would be playing the gala, Forte said, and they had to "get out of the storm."

Springsteen is a vocal critic of Trump, and after Forte started seeing headlines declaring that the band was personally hired by the president-elect, he knew it was time to call it quits. "We felt that we had to make it known that we didn't want to seem disrespectful, in any way, shape, or form, to Bruce and his music and his band," he told Rolling Stone. "I don't want to upset them. We owe everything to him, and our gratitude and respect to the band is imperative above all else." Forte said he doesn't think there will "ever be a cover band of our size in the history of music that has gotten the attention of something this big," and "whatever the consequences are for breaking a contract, I'm willing to take because this is much more important."

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