I don’t know if we will ever solve the mystery of what was thrown at Bob Weir’s head during the only concert the Grateful Dead ever played in Montana, but we now have some interesting evidence in the case.
OK, it’s not really evidence. Let’s just say we now have some interesting, illustrative archival materials with which we can begin to approach a plausible conclusion.
Let’s review the case. I recently wrote about that Dead show, which took place on May 14, 1974, at the Adams Field House on the University of Montana campus. I mentioned how I finally managed to get into the show quite late, and how I witnessed something being thrown and striking Weir in the head.
Ed Beaudette, with his Aber Day pitcher.
In the comments on Facebook, three people who were at the concert said the object was a bottle, but only one of them said so definitively — the other two “thought” it was a bottle — and the definitive one admitted to having been “high flying” that night.
Meanwhile, in the comments under the blog post itself, three people stated categorically that the object was a pitcher, and two of them specified that it was a pitcher from the Aber Day kegger. What was the Aber Day kegger?
It was a party of legendary proportions, an annual outdoor Woodstock-like bacchanal that was an intoxicating amalgam of music, mud, sawdust, overalls, cowboy hats, sunburns, reefer and Olympia beer.
For some ridiculously low price like $10 or $12, you got a full day of music and an Aber Day pitcher that gave you access to unlimited refills of 3.2 Oly. Aber Day was Missoula’s signature event, so it just seems to make sense that if someone was going to throw something at the Grateful Dead — not in a violent way but as a kind of offering — it was going to be an Aber Day pitcher.
Aber Day pitcher, with Grateful Day sticker.
On the other hand, that is the kind of consideration that might play tricks with the memory. Because an Aber Day pitcher seemed like the perfect thing to have thrown, in retrospect, in memory, it became the thing thrown. But it must be said that the people who remembered a pitcher seemed to have remembered it well, and specifically.
Then came the archival materials referred to above, from Ed Beaudette, a staff attorney for the Montana Department of Transportation who lives in Deer Lodge County. My first newspaper job was in the Anaconda bureau of the (Butte) Montana Standard, and Ed’s first job out of law school, I believe, was working next door to my office for the Dahood law firm.
Beaudette, too, distinctly remembered that the object thrown at Weir was an Aber Day pitcher. Better yet, he still had his own Aber Day pitcher, which he photographed over the weekend. Even better yet, his pitcher has an Oly sticker on one side and a Grateful Dead sticker on the other. As Beaudette remembered it, they were giving the Dead stickers out at the concert.
Same pitcher, with Oly sticker on the other side.
And Beaudette was not only at the concert, he was working for ASUM Programming at the show — just like the guy who gave me and my friend his pass to get us into the concert. Beaudette started with ASUM Programming in 1973 and was the house/stage manager from the fall of 1974 through the spring of 1976.
During that period, he said, ASUM put on shows by, among others, Fleetwood Mac, KISS, Jethro Tull, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Doc Watson, Vassar Clements, Count Basie and Chick Corea.
Beaudette also worked at three Aber Day keggers. After leaving UM, he promoted several shows at the historic Washoe Theatre in Anaconda (the same building that housed my bureau office) including Doc and Merle Watson and Taj Mahal.
So there you have it. As I say, there appears to be no way to prove what was thrown at Weir, unless some long-lost Zapruder shows up with a roll of film someday, but I think it’s fairly safe to say it was an Aber Day pitcher. Last Best News has been honored to have played a small part in adding this bit of fabric to the wonderful tapestry of Montana history.
