John Summit calls out fans for being disrespectful

John Summit has asked fans to stop pulling him at his shows. In an Instagram story over the weekend, he wrote: "can u guys please stop pulling me and shoving phones in my face and throwing sh*t at me it's getting disrespectful."

The plea comes in the middle of CTRL ESCAPE, his first arena tour, which has a B-stage built so he can get close to the crowd. He has been leaving the main stage to DJ at a pop-up booth in the crowd, set up in a different spot at every stop.

In Houston on November 5, fans reached out for him from both sides as he walked across the floor, and a cowboy hat came flying at him. In Fort Worth, footage from the pop-up booth shows phones held inches from his face.

Erik Fink, his production director, posted a video on his own Instagram story telling fans to be respectful. "Don't grab, don't pull, don't start slinging drinks all over the place," he said, warning that otherwise "the B-stage, we're just not gonna do it." In a comment under a news post about the plea, he went further: "Crowds keep acting like this and we won't be doing anymore crowd moments. Hands off the merchandise people."

Summit isn't against phones at his shows. "I don't believe in the whole no-phones policy," he told Interview Magazine in 2024, though he added that another pet peeve is fans who stay on them the whole time. For this tour, he told The Hollywood Reporter he hopes that by the end of the night "the phones are down, you're dancing, you're in the moment."

It isn't the first time this year some fans have gone too far. In September, after fans in Buenos Aires expected another 40 minutes from his set, Summit said part of the backlash turned into abuse in his DMs.

The tour moves on to the Schottenstein Center in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, November 13. It ends on December 12 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, his biggest headline show so far.