‘The big fudge: Woodstock ’99’, the horrible story of the worst music festival ever

On paper, it seemed like a great idea: let’s recreate Woodstock to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the peace and love music festival that was at the epicenter of the hippie movement. Wonderful. What followed was four days of carnage. The event was marred by deaths, rapes, assaults, violence and arson, and will go down in history as one of the worst music events to ever take place. It almost set fire to the legacy of the original, in ’69.

Now, a three-part Netflix documentary is going to cover the chaos of that long weekend in Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99What really happened to make it such a horrible mess?

The context

Five years before ’99, there was a Woodstock ’94 festival that also ended in catastrophe. The storms turned the site into one huge mud bath, more than doubling the expected attendees (estimated around 350,000), meaning the crowd could not be safely monitored and two people were killed. In another part of the event, the lead singer of the band Jackyl burned a stool on stage, used a chainsaw and fired a gun during his performance; some bands were muddied off stage.

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It was written on the wall (or maybe it was just the mud) that a second reenactment of the Woodstock festival probably wasn’t a good idea, given the problems that arose with the first event. But the organizers and promoters continued, apparently oblivious to the heat generated by Woodstock ’94.

The montage

Woodstock ’99 was held at a former air force base in Rome, upstate New York. The space, mainly concrete and asphalt, was the worst place for a music festival, especially when the two main stages were 3 km apart from each other. The weekend of July 22-25 was also destined to receive a heat wave. More than 400,000 people bought tickets.

There were very few trees or shaded areas, and campers were forced to pitch tents on the trail. There were fences around the site, not only preventing people from entering, but later escaping. The organizers had not made enough facilities available to their guests, and toilets and showers soon overflowed from the heat.

Even though the festival grew out of the 70’s spirit of peace and love, this 90’s event was commercialized to the max. MTV sponsored the entire festival, with a weekend-long pay-per-view for $60. The four-day party was covered by many corporate sponsors and the venue had pop-up malls and ATMs everywhere, which would have come in handy as punters would lose money faster than Lehman Brothers in the bank collapse. Burritos were $10, a pizza was $12, and more importantly, as customers baked in the scorching heat, bottled water was priced at $4, the equivalent of $7 in today’s money.

The chaos

As temperatures rose, so did the aggressiveness in the male-filled festival lineup (as noted by The New Yorker, only three female soloists performed throughout the weekend). By the time Limp Bizkit took the stage Saturday night, egged on by singer Fred Durst, members of the audience began ripping wood paneling off the walls during their song. Break Things. During his set, Durst said, “It’s time to let loose right now, because there are no fucking rules.” The pogo was out of control, but later, in an interview, Durst denied encouraging it: “I didn’t see anyone get hurt. You don’t see that. When you look at a sea of ​​people and the stage is twenty feet up and you’re performing and you feel your music, how do you expect us to see anything bad? ”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers followed in the spirit of Limp Bizkit, already a “good idea” from the anti-gun violence organization PAX for everyone to light the candles they had distributed during the song. under the bridge, adding to the dire situation. Candles were used to light bonfires and empty bottles were lit. After the set, the crowd was told not to panic, but there was a “little problem”: one of the audio towers had been set on fire and caught fire.

Netflix

As the wild atmosphere continued, things became even more dangerous. ATMs were torn down and broken into, merchandise stalls were looted and robbed, the site was destroyed and numerous objects were set on fire.

According to Billboardthere were “five rapes and numerous cases of sexual harassment and assault” over the weekend, and as reported by mtvtwo women were allegedly gang raped in the crowd during Limp Bizkit and Korn sets.

One festival goer, David DeRosia, collapsed in the crowd at Metallica’s performance and later died, believed to be from “hyperthermia, probably secondary to heat stroke”. According to Syracuseher mother sued the festival promoters and on-site doctors because they were “negligent in failing to provide enough drinking water and proper medical care for the 400,000 attendees.”

Courtesy of Netflix

There were protests from the National Organization for Women against sexual violence against women at the festival, and then the official site, Woodstock.com, posted topless photos of attendees without their consent, captioning them with quotes like “good match” or “show us your boobs.” VH1 reported the news that promoters were being sued numerous times for “distress and dehydration.”

As San Francisco Examiner journalist Jane Ganahl wrote at the time, it was “the day the music died.”

Is there going to be another Woodstock Festival?

In short: probably not. At the end of the 2021 HBO documentary Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage, the late Michael Lang, who organized the original festival and those that came after, was asked if he thought there would be another Woodstock, given the carnage that unfolded at the turn of the millennium. He said that, at his age, he had learned not to rule anything out, but it doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.

The legendary promoter passed away in January of this year at the age of 77, due to Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In the years after Woodstock ’99, Lang found success writing about the original festival (his 2009 book, The Road to Woodstock, became a New York Times bestseller) and even tried to put on a fiftieth anniversary festival in 2019, which was ultimately cancelled. Scheduled to take place in Bethel, New York (after being moved from the Watkins Glen International racetrack), it suffered a series of bumps before organizers canceled it: first cut from three days to one, financial and legal difficulties arose from the start, and many headliners, including Miley Cyrus, Jay-Z, Santana, and Dead & Company, among many others, canceled their appearances due to the chaotic production process.

The festival was officially canceled on July 31, 2019, with Lang largely blaming Japanese investment firm Dentsu Aegis, which had raised concerns about the amount of money being spent on artists, for withdrawing from funding the festival. . Lang planned to hold a small fundraising event at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in the same year, but it did not happen, and Lang did not live to see the festival held again.

Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 it’s already available on netflix.