King Khan Was Caught With Magic Mushrooms, Kentucky Paper Reports

UPDATE 5:55 p.m.: The band has issued an official statement. Read about it here.

That would be the Kentucky New Era, whose tagline, "News that hits home," seems especially fitting in this instance.

Late Friday evening, the paper published a story with the awesomely un-ironic headline "Musician Arrested, Rock Band Stuck In Christian County," which sheds a little more light on why King Khan & BBQ Show missed their nearly sold-out show last Thursday at Off Broadway.

Apparently Khan was caught with a little of the ol' psilocybin in Oak Grove Kentucky and didn't make bail until 3 a.m. Friday morning.

Here's the pertinent excerpt from the brief New Era report:

Police arrested Arish Khan, better known as King Khan, or Blacksnake, and his tour manager, Kristin Klein, at 2:20 p.m. Thursday. They charged both suspects with possession of a controlled substance, and Klein on a charge of driving with a suspended license, a spokesman at the Christian County Jail said.

Hunt said he knows little about the band's situation. "They're really hard to reach because only one of them has a cell phone, and it's like almost out of batteries," Hunt said. "The charger is in the car that got taken."

Khan was released after 3 a.m. Friday, a jail spokesman said. Klein was still being held on a $3,000 cash bond Friday afternoon. Hunt said the band members spent part of Friday meeting with a lawyer, "just trying to get their situation straight."

Tour manager Kristin Klein--charged with driving with a suspended license and possession of a controlled substance-- is now finally reported to be out of jail too

Of course, details in this case are still hard to come by and a sergeant at the Christian County Jail told us last Friday she had no record of either Khan or bandmate Mark "BBQ" Sultan ever being incarcerated there.

We're still waiting to hear back from Khan's publicist with the band's side of the story. (Keep in mind, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where cops in a tiny Kentucky town unfairly hassle a crazy looking Indian man wearing a huge shark-tooth necklace.)

As for the rest of KK&BBQ Tour...
...it's still unclear what impact the arrest will have. The duo are Canadian (Khan lives in Berlin) and the arrest may affect their work visa or something unfortunate like that. Their show on Friday in Lawrence, Kansas, went on without them, with scheduled openers Those Darlins (who delivered a knockout performance at Off Broadway) taking their place atop the bill. Saturday's gig in Denver was scrapped altogether, and our sister paper in Phoenix has no news as of yet on the band's scheduled date in the desert.

The moral of the story, kids? Keep the tripping out of your road trip.