Pitchfork

Bands, it's a hard road.  Shoplifters, petty thieves, and till-skimmers aren't just characters in Hold Steady anthems: As we've said a million times before, dudes will actually steal your shit.

Pitchfork-Recommended avant-hop sextet Subtle got jacked hard in Barcelona recently, as their laptops, livelihoods, and entire tour earnings-- a cool $15,000 altogether-- were nabbed from their tour van, according to several MySpace bulletins posted by Subtle mastermind Adam "Doseone" Drucker. "We are devestated," wrote Drucker to Myspace friends of Doseone. "This loss has been a very serious body blow to the band...."

According to Drucker, the crook(s) ran off with bags belonging to him and fellow Subtle member Marty Dowers. "In my bag was my glasses, passport, nanoloops, psp, laptop, and every penny of the tour money....in short this theif [sic] got a 15,000 dollar bag....."

Subtle had just wrapped up months of touring, which included a U.S. stint earlier in the fall and a bunch of European dates that brought them to Barcelona. Apart from Subtle finding themselves a good $10,000 in debt now, the fiends ran off with some priceless items as well. "I have also lost everything important to me which i can not afford to replace," wrote Drucker. "New subtle demos, solo songs, poems, artwork, you name it, they were all on my laptop...."

"Everything except my foreskin," Dose jokingly added in a later bulletin to MySpace friends of Subtle.

On the bright side, Doseone reports that he "backed up the 10,000 words for the next subtle record...so at least the most irreplaceable thing of all is still here."

And he's got a plan to earn back the lost funds: portraiture. For a mere $20 donation, Doseone will "do a personalized portrait of you or whoever you would like a portrait of" from a photograph you supply. Whether you're sympathetic to the Subtle cause or simply curious, that's a mighty fine deal. Place a request for your very own Van Dose by clicking here.