The unpredictable hell that was Woodstock 1999: burning stages, sexual abuse and a stream of feces

It began with the exhortation to enjoy three days of "peace, love and music", and ended with burning stages, sound towers reduced to smithereens, razed tents, press and artists fleeing like souls from the devil, promoters barricaded in their offices and thousands of young hooligans, hungover and exhausted, wallowing in a stream of feces.

It was Woodstock 1999, “the day live music died”, according to the opportune expression of the

(reference to the mythical day music died, sung by Don McLean in

On August 3, Netflix premiered

a documentary directed by Jamie Crawford that is a hair-raising autopsy, in three chapters of around 45 minutes each, which many consider one of the most embarrassing and chaotic music festivals in history.

Between Friday the 23rd and Sunday the 25th of July 1999, in the town of Rome, in the center of the State of New York, a crime took place.

An attack, certainly, against music, good sense and a sense of decorum.

If Crawford's documentary makes anything clear, it is that the perpetrators were multiple, but none of them seems very willing to take responsibility at this point.

The first to pass the buck were Michael Lang, creator of the Woodstock franchise (who passed away last January), and John Scher, main promoter of the disastrous edition.

Both already participated in

, an HBO documentary that premiered last summer.

On this occasion, Lang and Scher chose to blame each other.

This time, in

, they both agree to look for another scapegoat: the public.

A generation of young people, that of the late nineties, "irresponsible, aggressive and anarchic", far removed from the spirit of peace and love of the original Woodstock of 1969. However, the interested version of the pair of bigwigs of the invention is not supported by almost none of the other voices that intervene in the documentary.

And there are many: journalists who covered it, like David Blaustein, of

or Ananda Lewis, of

MTV;

artists who were part of the poster.

like Jewel, Fatboy Slim, Gavin Rossdale (leader of Bush) or Jonathan Davis (singer of Körn);

production, security or sales staff;

toilets, civil servants, the mayor of Rome and a dozen long attendees who at that time were between 14 and 25 years old.

Those rains, these mud

The background is clear.

The 1969 edition was a more than obvious organizational disaster, but an indisputable cultural success.

Peace and love, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Grateful Dead, Santana, the

nation mobilizing against the war in Vietnam.

Michael Lang propelled all of this in a quixotic countercultural entrepreneurial display, but he had to take huge losses and only recovered the investment more than 10 years later, thanks to the film's soundtrack and

sales .

Michael Lang, creator of the Woodstock franchise (died January), and John Scher, main promoter of the nefarious 1999 edition, on stage at the festival on July 24 of that year. John Atashian (Getty Images/John Atashian)

In 1994, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the first event, Lang and his new partner, Scher, released a peaceful and artistically satisfying, but losing money, Woodstock 1994.

In 1999, they conspired to capitalize, once and for all, on the Woodstock brand with an event conceived and executed in a totally professional manner, without the naive idealism that had turned previous editions into ruinous businesses.

The festival was held at Griffis Air Force Base, an abandoned military compound outside the small New York town of Rome, more than 150 kilometers from the site of the first Woodstock.

The base turned out to be a very unsuitable venue for a three-day music camp.

It was an immense lot full of asphalt and neglected grass, with hardly any trees in which, in addition, the distance between the two main stages was around four kilometers.

To make matters worse, that weekend there was an extreme heat wave in the State, with temperatures of up to 39 degrees and a wind chill above 40 (somewhat more than the heat wave that has taken the coast this year East).

It is estimated that around 400,000 people paraded through that ugly and inhospitable outdoor venue during that weekend.

More than 250,000 gathered on Saturday night, the time of greatest influx.

From alternative tribe to angry mass

At that point, according to one of the attendees, Heather, who was 14 years old at the time, there were already many who were beginning to feel that they were being treated “like animals”.

Among the reasons for complaint, the prohibitive price of food and drink in the commercial tents took the cake.

Four dollars for a bottle of water (the equivalent of seven today), between eight and 10 for a slice of pizza, a sandwich or a burrito (today, about 18), in an event in which it was prohibited to bring supplies from abroad and for whose entrance they had paid 150 dollars (266 dollars today, 260 euros).

Other reasons for indignation were the lack of a waste management service worthy of the name (“already on Saturday morning we woke up to a sea of ​​rubbish that no one picked up”, explains Heather) or the precarious system of portable toilets, many of which they burst after a few hours due to excessive use, filling the enclosure with filth and spreading an indescribable stench.

Woodstock 99 festivalgoers wave to the camera from the front row on July 22, 1999. John Atashian (Getty Images/John Atashian)

What's more, as one of the people in charge of the health service acknowledges in the documentary, at some point during the weekend, the water from the free pumps that people used to quench their thirst, shower or brush their teeth, stopped be healthy

He was contaminated with feces from the latrines.

Not only could it not be drunk, its simple contact with the body produced, in many cases, skin rashes or infections of the lips and gums.

The poster of the festival did not contribute to temper the spirits either.

The insane lineup was dominated by hard rock bands or bands from the then - burgeoning

scene , a mix of hard rock and hip hop that swept young white Americans for 10 minutes

Groups like Korn, Creed, Kid Rock or the great stars of the moment, Limp Bizkit.

In addition, there were groups with an abrasive sound and a visceral discourse such as Offspring, Metallica or Rage Against the Machine, completely alien to the spirit of peace and love of the first Woodstock.

Thirty years ago, fans of Joe Cocker or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had faced the inconveniences and inclemency of a massive event precariously organized with happy stoicism.

Even Janis Joplin, seeing them so accommodating, was concerned from the stage for their well-being and urged them to complain if they felt treated inconsiderately ("don't let them make you swallow shit you don't deserve").

However, as early as Friday, July 23, 1999, it became clear that fans of Korn's charismatic frontman, Jonathan Davis, only shared with the

of three decades ago his penchant for stripping in public.

That concert, described by Ananda Lewis as “an insane explosion of energy”, already showed that Woodstock 99 was not going to be a docile audience.

On the contrary, they were vehement, aggressive young people, very willing to take the atmosphere of freedom and impunity that was breathed to the limit and very little forgiving of the discomfort they were suffering.

The decisive turning point came on Saturday night, during the Limp Bizkit concert.

In the words of David Blaustein, that night “three different versions of Fred Durst [singer of the group] competed on stage”.

On the one hand, his instincts told him that in this crowd of ecstatic, hysterical kids, many of them naked, something big was brewing.

His common sense suggested that he try to relax the atmosphere.

And his ego was instigating him to become the high priest of the revolt.

The ego prevailed.

Durst offered a wild and frenetic performance, and ended up inciting his audience to unleash their rage and “break everything”, not to resign themselves “to the conformist shit that people like Alanis Morissette [also present on the festival lineup] want sell you”.

They ignored him.

A Woodstock 99 festival goer sleeps in the sun on a concourse littered with trash. Andrew Lichtenstein (Corbis via Getty Images)

As soon as he got off the stage, Durst gave an interview as brief as it was revealing:

"Have you ever seen anything like that, Fred?"

“No, I've never done anything like that.

“I suppose you have seen from the stage that there have been serious incidents.

“Well, yes, but that's not our fault.

The climate of violence moved hours later to the electronic music tent where Norman Cook, better known as Fatboy Slim, was performing.

At two in the morning, the sudden arrival of a van on the dance floor forced Cook to interrupt his performance.

When the security personnel managed to gain control of the vehicle, they discovered inside a half-naked and drugged teenager with obvious signs of having suffered a gang rape.

lit by fire

But the real disaster was consummated on Sunday night, during the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, the fireworks that would end up closing the festival.

The trigger was an absurd decision that most of those interviewed attributed to Michael Lang: distributing tens of thousands of lighted candles among the attendees to ask them to carry out a spontaneous act of tribute to the victims of Columbine, the institute in which a mass shooting months before.

The public used the candles to light bonfires.

And the Peppers, ignoring promoters who had suggested they call for calm from the stage ("You wouldn't listen to me, I'm a musician, not a prophet," their frontman, Anthony Kiedis, told an increasingly overwhelmed John Scher), limited themselves to saying that the fire at the foot of the stage reminded them of

and chose Jimi Hendrix's

as the encore .

Impossible to conceive of a more inopportune choice.

In the barely three minutes that the song lasted, the three or four already existing bonfires were transformed into a dozen.

After the concert, a pitched battle ensued in which thousands of young people were involved.

The pyromaniac drive gave way to scenes of euphoric violence worthy of the novel

.

They devastated everything, to the point of leaving the air base in a state that reminded, according to a member of the organization, "Bosnia", then at war.

They destroyed the commercial tents, forced their cash registers, knocked down the sound towers, razed the

-inspired murals that covered the security perimeter, tried to break into the VIP area and the organization's offices by force.

On the most difficult day of the Woodstock 99 festival, attendees lit bonfires to protest against the nefarious organization. Andrew Lichtenstein (Sygma via Getty Images)

magazine

, "they unleashed all the anger accumulated in three days of aggressive music, inflammatory messages and systematic abuse by incompetent and unscrupulous organizers."

For Berman "the festival was, from the beginning, a complete nonsense, assuming that 250,000 people could function for three days as a community capable of self-regulation, in conditions of absolute abandonment by the organization, without serious incidents" .

's Rebecca Nicholson

gives a fairly similar interpretation of events, but adds that "Woodstock 99's most sinister legacy is the sheer number of rapes and acts of sexual abuse and harassment that occurred over those three days." both from “poor security” and from the “climate of impunity and toxic masculinity that existed in the rock scene at the end of the nineties”.

The apology for nudism, playful shamelessness and free love hid "an atrocious machismo and a nauseating lack of respect for women's sexual freedom."

Ananda Lewis goes a step further by saying that the Me Too movement is, to some extent, “a reaction to the culture of misogynistic abuse that was brought out, very forcefully, at Woodstock 99″.

But perhaps the most far-reaching reflection is that of Heather, the then-teenager who acknowledges, a couple of decades later, having spent one of the best weekends of her life at Woodstock, but congratulates herself that her daughters "They will no longer have to suffer things that girls" of their generation had "resigned themselves to consider normal."

That disaster 23 years ago still casts a long shadow.

The night she died live music is very much alive in the memory.

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