Club that has good reason not to let people dive off its stage had to explain how guy got injured falling off its stage after climbing on it

A hardcore band that loves having its fans climb on stage got the Paradise, 967 Commonwealth Ave., hauled before the Boston Licensing Board this morning to explain how one of those fans wound up with head injuries in a tumble from the stage.

The board's hearing was formally on a police citation for "dangerous condition (mosh pit)."

Venue attorney Dennis Quilty started by denying the Paradise has a mosh pit: "There is no such thing as a mosh pit at the Paradise," just a large seatless floor, he said. "We don't condone mosh pits, we don't have a mosh pit."

The Paradise, of course, has a permanent place in Boston rock lore for the 1997 stage dive by Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe and a 335-lb. lineman - who landed atop a woman who then had to have two disks removed from her spine and part of her hip removed and reused to help fuse her spine.

However, both Quilty and Paradise General Manager William Guerra did concede that, in fact, a patron got up on stage and then promptly fell off and hit his head on somebody else's body hard enough to get injured around 9:50 p.m. on April 18 - despite the best efforts of roughly two dozen guards assigned specifically to keep people from getting up on the stage.

Two other people were also injured that night, although not enough to require EMS transportation - a woman who became dizzy and fell to the ground and another woman who also fell to the ground for unspecified reasons.

Guerra said the band, Sunami, enjoys having fans getting up on stage. He said one of his managers talked to the band's manager earlier in the day and talked about the no-fans-on-stage rule, and that she basically told him, sorry, the band really "does enjoy" having fans climb up on stage and then she chuckled and said something like "best of luck stopping them."

Sure enough, that night, "there were a few hundred people in front of stage and band was encouraging them to mosh and slam dance and get up on the stage," Guerra said. Security guards were stationed along the stage to try to stop that, he said.

Guerra said the fan in question, in fact, managed to get up on stage over the head of a guard trying to stop him - and that the guard "got a little bit of an earful from the member of the band" for trying to do that, although the band member later apologized.

A fan-posted video of the performance shows people climbing up or being pushed up on stage - with at least one person taking a head-first dive into the slam-dancing, beer-spraying crowd.

The board decides Thursday whether the club could have prevented the incident, and, if so, what sort of penalty to apply.