RIVER NORTH — Dave Matthews’ relationship with Chicago is a storied one. Final summer time, Matthews was noticed within the infield seats at Wrigley Area, with an unsuspecting fan in a DMB T-shirt sitting within the bleachers, nary the wiser.
However not each Chicagoan has had such a near-miss with Dave.
This week marks the twenty first anniversary of a second that, for followers of Chicago music tradition, will dwell in dysentery: The day a Dave Matthews Band tour bus dumped 800 kilos of feces into the Chicago River, providing an disagreeable bathe to the unsuspecting passengers of a tour boat passing beneath.
On the afternoon of Aug. 8, 2004, a constitution bus belonging to the Dave Matthews Band drove throughout the Kinzie Road Bridge and emptied its septic tank over the Chicago River. The sewage ran by the metallic grates of the bridge, and moderately than touchdown within the water — itself a well being hazard — it splattered onto greater than 100 individuals on a sightseeing boat operated by the Chicago Structure Basis.
Brett McNeil, a reporter for the Tribune on the time, was within the splash zone that day, taking an architectural tour on his time off together with his then-girlfriend.
“I sat towards the bow of the boat, so I didn’t have an excellent view of what was occurring to us,” he recounted to Block Membership.
Within the moments earlier than the bus handed over the boat, McNeil thought the noise was a avenue sweeper or a truck the town makes use of to water flower beds. However because the brown water splashed down — hitting McNeil within the arm — there was a direct shocked silence, then eventual panic from the passengers because the Port-a-Potty odor started to make itself identified, McNeil stated.
“The docent didn’t grasp what was occurring in actual time,” McNeil stated. “I feel he thought we’d been hit with water. Then a passenger from the again of the boat stated, ‘That’s not water, buddy; that’s urine.’”
From there, there was a “Monty Python skit-like” vomitorium because the passengers reeled from the brown slurry that had handed overhead, McNeil stated. A motorcyclist together with his helmet upturned needed to dump it out overboard. One lady sitting close to him stated she’d had her mouth open. McNeil, his girlfriend and a number of other others raced under decks to huddle over the air con vents; from contained in the glass enclosure, he might see individuals retching and puking over the facet of the boat.
The boat raced again to dock, ignoring the wake zone so the filthy, shocked passengers might disembark.
“I bear in mind individuals standing on the dock saying, ‘How are we going to drive residence?’” McNeil stated.
Just a few days later, the 2 Econoline buses in query had been recognized whereas parked exterior the Peninsula Lodge, the place Dave Matthews Band was staying throughout their Chicago cease. The remainder is Chicago historical past.
The perpetrator turned out to be the band’s tour bus driver, then-42-year-old Stefan Wohl, who pleaded responsible to prices of reckless conduct and discharging contaminates to trigger water air pollution. He bought hit with 18 months on probation, 150 hours of neighborhood service and needed to pay a $10,000 superb to Mates of the Chicago River.
The incident has continued to seize the imaginations of Chicagoans a few years later, with social media posts and homespun indicators alongside the Kinzie River Bridge commemorating the spot of the sloppy situation. In 2023, Riot Fest put up a commemorative plaque honoring the event as a kind of “official remembrance.”
Not everyone seems to be on board with the remembrance. The Chicago Structure Basis, the group that runs the river excursions, gave Block Membership the next response when requested for remark:
“There’s definitely no pleasure in reliving the 2004 occasion that traumatized our passengers and crew, in addition to Chicago’s First Woman, a household enterprise, and the CAC, a non-profit group. Collectively we’ve supplied acclaimed structure river cruises on Chicago’s waterways for greater than 30 years, and we select to not let what came about that day diminish our contributions in showcasing the town we love with the world. Out of respect for all who had been affected, we is not going to present any extra remark. Thanks on your understanding.”
Margaret Frisbie, government director of the nonprofit Mates of the Chicago River, remembers the incident nicely; as deputy director on the time, she was working a canoe race on the Chicago River that day.
“We had been horrified by what occurred to these individuals on that boat, as a result of it’s an unimaginable expertise,” she stated.
Why the fascination? “The hate for Dave Matthews and the love for poop jokes,” mused Jeremy Scheuch, artistic director for Riot Fest. One among his first duties (heh) in 2016 was to write an article on the occasion, and he remembers it having extra views than something the Riot Fest web site had posted earlier than then, even above bulletins and lineups.
To compensate for the incident, Dave Matthews Band donated $50,000 to the Mates of the Chicago River, which the group has since used to begin an endowment to additional its public coverage work to wash up the river and make it extra accessible to Chicagoans.
However many Chicagoans see the fecal fable as an erstwhile badge of honor for the town’s rough-and-tumble tradition.
“Individuals who dwell in Chicago take delight within the dumbest, best s—,” Scheuch stated. “It’s like Malört: It’s horrible, however it’s ours.”
“It’s scatological and utterly innocent,” McNeil stated. “What number of Chicago tales like this are there? That is our technology’s O’Leary’s cow — a fully livable civic touchstone of no consequence.”
Some Chicagoans have even taken to conspiracy theories, like imagining Dave Matthews himself pulled the lever. However McNeil takes umbrage to these concepts.
“I couldn’t care much less about Dave Matthews Band, however I feel he personally and the model of his jam band have paid type of an unfair worth for a contractor’s f—-up,” McNeil stated. “It’s like making Ford pay a big worth for the f—ing Bronco chase.”
For Frisbie, the story of the Chicago River incident is a narrative of constructive change.
“Twenty years in the past, individuals had been used to pondering of the Chicago River system as polluted and had been extra accepting of it, whereas at this time that’s now not true,” she stated.
Frisbie has seen the incident used as a educating second for Chicagoans about the necessity to deal with our rivers with care.
“What we realized on the time was that that type of remedy of rivers, when individuals suppose nobody’s watching, is extra widespread than individuals suppose,” she stated.
Frisbie, like others, hopes the occasion continues to show a testomony to sustaining the sanctity of the town’s rivers for years to come back.
To that finish, this week it was introduced that the Chicago River Swim will return in September. It will likely be the primary time individuals can swim within the river in 98 years.
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