What We Talked About When We Talked About Dave Matthews' Poop-Bus Incident
Ten years ago, the Dave Matthews Band's tour bus released hundreds of pounds of human waste into a Chicago river. The headlines were as punny as you'd imagine.
.Ten years ago today, Dave Matthews' tour bus ejected 800 pounds of septic waste into the Chicago River. Really, what more is there to be said? If you haven't heard the story before, bless you for remaining pure in the face of the Internet. If you haven't, there's not much more to it: Hundreds of pounds of sewage got dumped into a river, soaking a boat with approximately 100 people on it in human waste.
To think about that actually happening to a group of human beings is terrifying and nauseating and the worst. But for online headline writers a decade ago, in the halcyon days before Twitter, it was a field day. Oh, how the puns positively gushed out! It was, you could say, a shitstorm of puns.
While some took the simple route, choosing not to judge before knowing all the details:
Others were not so discerning. Others had their best poop jokes and pent-up Dave Matthews Band hatred ready and raring to rip. Like NME:
EW had the benefit of one of its staffers' aunts working on the architectural tour boats being able to provide a little context.
"There were 120 people on board, and at least two thirds of them got hit," Barbara Zink said at the time. "We're talking hundreds of pounds of slop! No one could begin to guess what hit them-until their brains registered the smell."
Lovely! But at the time, there was some confusion about if it was actually Matthews' bus (it was) and if he was on it (he wasn't). When it was finally discovered, you know that PoopReport.com, "your #1 source for #2," was on the case:
PoopReport.com did not use a pun, you'll note. PoopReport.com takes this shit seriously.
Of course, for the haters at the MockingMusic blog, the news was just same old, same old:
And The Standing Room happily doubled down on its poop puns:
Even years after the fact, Matthews was still eating... well, you know... for the incident:
Though he says he wasn't on the bus, Matthews still felt terrible. Not terrible enough not to say "If Snoop Dogg had done it, it probably would have raised his record sales" five years later, of course, but he's really sorry. He promises.
But luckily, Matthews could always count on someone else to muck things up down the line:
And Urban's poop was all over East 11th in New York! As Chris Rovzar said at the time, Matthews' sewage dump was "pretty damn country." But Urban waste? That's truly shitty.