No Show in Russia for Bloodhound Gang

MOSCOW - Memo to the Bloodhound Gang: In choosing acts of irreverent humor, keep in mind the next leg of your tour.

“Don’t tell Putin,” Jared Hasselhoff, the bass guitarist for this American rock group touring in Europe this summer, told a cheering crowd at a concert in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa. Mr. Hasselhoff, known as Evil, then wadded a Russian flag into his pants and used it as a prop in an act of scatological humor, after first handling a Ukrainian flag with reverence.

Unfortunately for the Bloodhound Gang, Russia was the band’s next stop. And If not President Vladimir V. Putin, Russians and Russian officials certainly did taken notice.

By Sunday, the authorities had canceled the band’s concert in southern Russia, at the behest of the minister of culture. Angry Russians pelted the band’s van with eggs and tomatoes on its way out of the town of Anapa, near the concert venue.

Then, a group of Cossacks, or traditional Russian frontiersmen, known for their nationalist sentiments, assaulted the rockers in an airport lounge and tried to smother a band member with an American flag, before the police broke up the scuffle.

Though Mr. Hasselhoff publicly apologized and noted that passing items of all types through his pants is a band tradition, the top law enforcement agency in Russia, the Investigative Committee, threatened to press criminal charges for desecrating the national flag. The band reportedly left via a connecting flight through Moscow on Sunday, earlier than planned.

At the show in Ukraine on Wednesday that touched off the Russians, Mr. Hasselhoff first held aloft a Ukrainian flag and passed it to a band member with the admonition “don’t let it touch the ground.” Then he crumpled a Russian flag, unbuckled his belt and pulled the flag through his crotch and out the rear of his pants.

The band’s frontman, Jimmy Pop, told the crowd he disagreed with the act, saying “Russia is better than America, so I disapprove of that.”

And then, indicating a willingness from a band whose albums include “Use Your Fingers” and “Hefty Fine” to insult people without regard to creed or nationality, Mr. Pop compared America to the sexual shortcomings of former girlfriends and set into playing the next song.

Still, Russia’s minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, wrote on Twitter that “these idiots are not going to perform” in Russia, and that he had spoken with the local authorities to halt the concert.

To be sure, flag desecration is illegal in many countries, but the Russian authorities have become particularly sensitive to the political overtones of Western rock acts after Madonna spoke out in favor of gay rights and freedom for jailed members of the punk group Pussy Riot at concerts here last summer.

Over the weekend, the flag stunt lit up the Russian blogosphere. Misha Kozyrev, a music critic for Dozhd, an independent television station, wrote on Facebook that he rarely agrees with the Russian authorities these days but “this is just such a case.”

“The difference between real punk and the Bloodhound Gang is that real punk is about context: here is what makes them mad, here are their ideals,” he wrote. “Jimmy Pol and company were not about context, only the form. Their goal was to make as many people mad as possible.”