Today, we equate modern festival disasters with the ill-fated Fyre Festival and the tragedy of this year’s Astroworld. But years before them, the first name on everyone’s mind for all the wrong reasons was Woodstock. Not the legendary, hippie love-in of 1969, but the epic trash fire that came 30 years later in 1999. What began as the party to end all parties closing out the 20th century descended, in just three and a half days, into arson, assault, vandalism, riots, violence and even death. One MTV host went so far as to describe conditions as being that of a “concentration camp.”
So, what exactly went wrong? That’s the subject of a fresh Netflix documentary series on the subject, appropriately titled Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99. The mini-series spends its handful of episodes examining the preamble, duration and fallout of the festival’s comeback – its second of that decade, in fact – with interviews with the key organisers, staff, attendees and acts – including the lead singers of Korn and Bush, who played on the Friday when things began heating up. It’s not the first of its kind, but there’s eye-opening new ground covered in the new boots-on-the-ground accounts that make it absorbing viewing for both those who know the story and those that don’t.
Listening to these eyewitnesses assembled for the Netflix show, pinpointing how Woodstock ‘99 went off the rails seems to be threefold: incompetence, culture, and greed. In regards to that first point, ignorance or naivety may also be considered accurate descriptors – or to be more generous, a general sense of out of touch-ness. The late Michael Lang, who co-founded the original Woodstock and was instrumental in doing so again three decades later, was evidently no longer quite ‘with it’ as the kids he’d become totally culturally disconnected from might say. This was the peak of nu-metal and rap rock, with top-billed acts including the likes of the aforementioned Korn, alongside Rage Against The Machine, Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit and heavier dinosaurs like Metallica and Megadeth. Though there was a decent spread of counter-programming, angsty moshpits and sweaty rave dens were a given, and with 250,000 in attendance, on a scale like few – if ever at all – had seen.
When one of the production crew featured in Trainwreck pointed this out, he claimed he was ignored, something that emerges as a cautionary pattern over the course of the documentary. This is not to say that neither the bands or fans were solely to blame for the riotous behaviour than ensued, but simply that the security team (e.g. the laughably-named ‘Peace Patrol’) and the rest of the crew were too few in number, training and preparation to handle any of them.
Footage of Woodstock ‘69 paints a picture of doped-out, long-haired college kids sitting crossed-legged in a field, keen to give peace and love a chance. Contrastingly, Woodstock ‘99 looks like one of the nine layers of hell – one where corporate greed was allowed to run rampant at the expense of not just customer satisfaction, but customer survival.
It’d be all too easy to point to what youth culture was perceived as back then -, particularly in the context of rising American school shootings – and say the kids were most definitely not alright anymore. Not only was rage music popular, but the incredibly disturbing clips of gangs of young men surrounding topless women, assaulting female crowd surfers and the four reported cases of rape paint a horribly topical portrait of masculinity in light of today’s more politically correct world. These were young men emboldened by both a ‘boys will be boys’ lack of consequences and, reflectively, the peak of the frat house teen sex comedy era, like the American Pie franchise.
It would be a stretch to say the festival organisers knowingly or willingly encouraged this behaviour, but its pay-per-view video service, available via MTV, taking those watching at home inside its grounds turned a lurid lens on every shocking and titillating thing it could find, meaning that it certainly showcased and capitalised on it.
What this particular retelling surprisingly fails to cover are the deaths that occurred from overdoses, heatstroke and dehydration. Fatalities are an unfortunate norm for large-scale festivals, even well-organised ones, but the sheer number treated by medical staff – reportedly in the hundreds – at Woodstock ‘99 sounds like something on par with a field hospital in a war zone. Though the record temperatures were, of course, beyond the organisers’ control, the choice of location (a tarmacked air field base) and quality and cost of facilities certainly were. Early on, sanitation contractors failed to collect enough of the waste, quickly leaving the site coated in rubbish. On top of this, a critical lack of shade, overpriced bottled water ($4) and contaminated drinking and bathing water from overflowing toilets, combined with the round-the-clock partying, eventually led to severe fatigue and even some cases of the WWI-named trench foot and mouth disease. Knowing this while watching attendees slip ‘n’ slide through what they believe to be mud is absolutely stomach-churning.
Though they’d likely prefer you to point the finger of blame of Fred Durst inviting the crowd to literally Break Stuff and Kid Rock requesting he be pelted with water bottles, Michael Lang and co-promotor John Scher are the pair that come off the worst in Trainwreck. After all, it’s hard to really fault artists for doing what they’ve ultimately been paid to do: come out, match the energy of the crowd and make sure they have the time of their lives (and many of them did, despite the terror that ensued). While many of the performers did get the audience excessively riled up, there are also transcribed calls – again, not fully featured in the documentary series – from Durst and other performers to try and curb some of the seriously bad behaviour unfolding in front of them.
Lang and Scher, even after over two decades to reflect on what went down, demonstrate a damning level of responsibility-shirking. In interviews and press conferences at the time, they confidently told members of the press – who saw what was happening with their own eyes – that everything was going wonderfully smoothly, even patting themselves on the back before the thing had wrapped up. Worst of all, when questioned on the issue of rape in the present day, Scher dismissingly says that with the population of a small town on-site, statistically, these things are going to happen. On the one hand, yes, it’s difficult to police every aspect of an event that size, but on the other, can you imagine what the public outcry would be if the organisers of Glastonbury, for instance, said that attendees should just accept – even anticipate – the possibility of death and assault because of the sheer numbers and there’s nothing they can do about it?
The grossest miscalculation, however, was the decision to hold a candlelight vigil during the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ performance of Under The Bridge on the last night. Intended to be an anti-gun violence demonstration, by this point, giving a quarter of a million frustrated, broke, thirsty, overheated kids literally swimming in their own filth with hardly any oversight thousands of candles was neither legally sanctioned by risk assessments nor sound common sense. Naturally, the Chillis abandoned the idea of getting through to the firestarters, breaking into a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Fire instead. While the press crucified them for the decision, Anthony Keidis later stated in his autobiography it was pre-planned at the request of Hendrix’s sister.
Chronic disrespect is the overriding feeling as you watch the apocalyptic footage of Woodstock ‘99 being razed to the ground. If you treat people inhumanely, you shouldn’t be surprised when they then react inhumanely. The attendees were treated without respect and so they did the same to their surroundings. Maybe there was something in the water – other than faecal matter – at the time that made youth culture in the late 90s particularly susceptible to toxicity. But seeing the difference in living quality between the pampered artists’ area and the animal pen that paying customers were locked in, separated by a single wall, you can’t help but root for the dystopian inequality to be torn apart, and the bastardisation of everything Woodstock became to die. Forever.
Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 is available to stream on Netflix.
words HANNAH COLLINS