Locals provoke bar fight with Colorado Hell’s Angels

Members of the Colorado chapter of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club came to Carbondale’s Black Nugget Saloon a couple of Saturdays ago and got into a fight.But according to one of the only people who will talk about the incident, the fight was the fault of a few locals who threw peanuts and a beer bottle at Hell’s Angels members.No charges have been or will be filed against them or anyone else associated with the incident, and aside from the evidence of one man’s broken jaw and the fact that the Nugget closed down early that night, the whole thing might never have happened.”There’s really not a lot going on with it,” Carbondale Police Chief Gene Schilling said this week.He said his officers were called to the Black Nugget Saloon shortly before midnight on Nov. 19 and learned a couple of Hell’s Angels had been involved in a fight with a couple of local men a short time earlier.But, Schilling said, one of the men involved in the fracas, Peppino’s Pizza owner Kurt Trede of Carbondale, left the bar before an ambulance arrived to cart away the injured. The other man, Kevin Hilgeford of Glenwood Springs, suffered a broken jaw that reportedly had to be wired together so it can heal.Neither man, Schilling said, wanted to press charges over the matter.Hilgeford could not be reached for comment, Trede declined to discuss the incident, and bar owner Cassie Cerise did not respond to a request for an interview about the matter.But Rabbit, a bartender at the Nugget, was there at the beginning of the night and recalled that about a dozen Angels – eight men and four or five women – showed up for a benefit concert featuring several area punk bands. The benefit, she said, was to raise money to pay the legal fees of a local man called Shiloh, although she was not sure how he incurred the legal fees.But, she said, she was told Shiloh was a candidate for membership in the Colorado chapter of the Hell’s Angels, and that the club members had come to check him out.Rabbit said the Angels were “very sweet, and so nice” when she talked with them early in the evening. “Very peaceable, very friendly, very respectful, no signs of weapons of any kind.”But Trede and Hilgeford, she said, began baiting the Angels as soon as they arrived and that it went on for some time, at least until Rabbit left the bar. She said she witnessed the two men taunting the Angels, and at one point she said one of them was tossing peanuts in the Angels’ direction.”They definitely provoked the Hell’s Angels,” she recalled, adding that witnesses told her that the fight actually started when a local woman threw a beer bottle at one of the female Angels.”You can only push people so far,” was Rabbit’s assessment of the situation.However it started, she said, she was told it only lasted “two or three minutes, but once it happened everybody was in the middle of everything.” She said it became a melee that prompted the closure of the bar at 11:30 that night, before some of the scheduled bands had even played.”The specifics of it are not clear,” Rabbit said about the details that have come out and are rapidly becoming local folklore.”It’s just a bad mixture of alcohol and punk music,” she said.John Colson’s e-mail address is jcolson@aspentimes.com