It was 20 years today that Dave Matthews Band dumped 800 pounds of feces into the Chicago River and onto an unexpecting crowd of tourists on a Chicago Architecture Foundation boat. Brett McNeil, a reporter for the Tribune at the time, told Block Club Chicago, “I sat toward the bow of the boat, so I didn’t have a very good view of what was happening to us…The docent didn’t grasp what was happening in real time, I think he thought we’d been hit with water. Then a passenger from the back of the boat said, ‘That’s not water, buddy; that’s urine.”
To compensate for the incident, Dave Matthews Band donated $50,000 to the Friends of the Chicago River and have been stuck living down the incident ever since.