Turnstile Ends Tour With Free Washington Monument Show, Raising About $261,000 for Relief
Baltimore hardcore band Turnstile closed its Never Enough Pt. 2 Tour with a free concert at the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, October 24. The show was also a fundraiser, and by Monday morning it had brought in about $261,000, according to the show's LaunchGood page.
Hardcore is a loud, fast style of punk rock, and the band's fans turned out in large numbers. Rolling Stone reported that about 60,000 people attended the concert.
The money goes to Human Concern International, an aid charity, for its relief work in Sudan, Lebanon and Gaza, where it is helping Palestinians. The original goal for the Washington Monument benefit was $150,000. The total raised by Monday morning was about $111,000 above that target.
LaunchGood is a crowdfunding site, a platform where campaigns collect many smaller donations from individual supporters. That makes the total a running figure. It can rise after the first days, and the final amount will depend on what donations arrive after the show.
The Washington show was not the band's first benefit on this tour. Earlier, Turnstile played a free hometown concert at Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, where it raised $35,000 for Health Care for the Homeless, a Maryland nonprofit.
Free concerts still carry real costs. A show on the scale of a national monument needs staging, sound and lighting equipment, security, and crews to build and run it. Those costs are what make a free show a bigger task than a ticketed one, even when no one pays at the gate.
For fans in Washington and beyond, the result is a concert that cost nothing to attend and a total that went to relief work. The band's Never Enough Pt. 2 Tour ends there, with the fundraising figure still climbing as donations come in.
