Mo. picked as new site of Insane Clown Posse event

Steve John, CEO of the Monterey Peninsula Foundation and tournament director of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am golf tournament, poses beneath photographs of Clint Eastwood, left, and Bing Crosby on Friday in Pebble Beach, Calif.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Members of Insane Clown Posse, Violent J., left, and Shaggy 2 Dope.

ST. LOUIS — An annual festival headlined by the rap-metal group Insane Clown Posse will be staged in Missouri after six years in southern Illinois, promoters of the trouble-plagued Gathering of the Juggalos said.

Suburban Detroit-based Psychopathic Records Inc. offered few details on the shift from the Hogrock campsite near Cave-In-Rock — the gathering’s home since 2007 — to the CryBaby Campground in Kaiser, a rural community about 170 miles west of St. Louis.

The Missouri site, labeled Harlequin Park, offers “the same level of intimacy that we enjoyed at [Hogrock] for all those years but this campground also has plenty of flavor that [Hogrock] didn’t have,” including cell phone reception and nearby hotels and shops, the promoter said in an online newsletter. It said the four-day event will take place in August.

While drawing some 10,000 people each year, the Gathering of the Juggalos has developed a reputation for unruliness marked by drug overdoses, fights, arrests, and deaths. Fans of Insane Clown Posse duo Joseph “Violent J” Bruce and Joseph “Shaggy 2 Dope” Utsler are known as Juggalos.