Woodstock '99: a Case Study in Cluelessness

Even IF Woodstock '69 hadn't been an environmental disaster, this was a dumb idea

I remember watching a documentary on the Fyre Festival in 2017, which turned out to be a major scam by Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule.

It was promoted on Instagram and other social media by the usual suspects—-Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadad, all of whom had been paid for saying touting the event. McFarland pled guilty to a count of wire fraud and a count of defrauding a ticket vendor and was sentenced to six years.

But almost 20 years earlier, a similar fraud had been perpetrated on naive young people and no one served a day in jail. The organizations were hit with several lawsuits. That was “Woodstock ‘99,” another three days touted as “love, peace and harmony” just as the original in 1969 was.

Although Woodstock 69 was mostly peaceful (as the lib media says), that was largely because, as one participant remarked, “There was a lot made about how peaceful it was. But what else would half a million kids on grass, acid, and hog tranquilizers be? . . . . if anything, [Woodstock] was the point at which psychedelics ceased being tools for experience . . . and became a means of crowd control.” At the end, it looked like a “battlefield, [with] zombies crawling over a field littered with paper cups, plastic wrappers, and half-eaten food, gnawing on corn husks, slobbering over ketchup- and mustard-smeared half-eaten hot dog rolls sprinkled with ants.” It generated the single largest pile of garbage in human history and of course all the “fun-loving” kids left it for someone else to clean up.

Even Joan Baez, queen of the counterculture, who arrived in a helicopter, refused to eat any food, convinced it might be laced with LSD.

This time, however, at Woodstock 99, it would be different. Michael Lang, who had participated in the promotion of the first Woodstock, and John Scher, had extensive concert promotion experience, and Lang knew what disastrous elements of the first Woodstock had been concealed in the glorification of the festival in the media and in the movie “Woodstock.”

Netflix aired a documentary about it, “Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love, and Rage.” What became clear is that the promoters had two wildly antithetical and contradictory goals in mind: 1) make money, 2) recreate the original with its emphasis on peace, harmony, and collectivism. Even had the culture not changed dramatically since the 1960s, these would be very difficult to harmonize.

The leading bands, such as KORN, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and (note their name) Rage Against The Machine were angry white boys who went full Pearl Jam Angst. Ya never go full Pearl Jam Angst.

Semi-metal, head-bashing, mosh-pit forming music was little more than screaming over heavy metal chords, and it absolutely resonated with the mostly male audience at W99. As one of the younger members of the promotional/organization team noted, the producers had no idea that the music had changed, nor who the bands were. They essentially were inviting Vladimir Lenin to a meeting of the Young Socialists and came out shocked that these crazed, alienated yuts would actually want to destroy stuff, even if there were no other logistics problems.

Porta-potties began overflowing the first day. What many took for “mud” was a sea of dirt and feces. Water was tainted by day three, when you could find water at all. Bottled water sold for $4 a bottle in pre-Joe-Biden non-inflationary years! That’s the equivalent of about $15 a bottle today. Poor yuts, who arrived with little money in the first place, were tapped out after the first day. A festival hot dog was $10. Back then. In 1999.
So a generation of yuts who had been raised on the notion that all business and all corporations were greedy capitalist pigs didn’t need much prodding to demonize all (gouging) vendors, as we will see on Day 4.

The heat was nearly unbearable, and since the venue was the abandoned Griffiss Air force base, there were runways . . . but no shade. My estimates of the male/female ratio was about 10:1. And all of them were filthy, feces-laden, and often naked.

Women, who were encourage to take off their tops, were shocked to find that men expected them to not only display their breasts, but make them available for physical examination. “Show Your Tits” was a common handmade sign.

By the end of the final act, with such soothing bands as “Megadeath,” the “Red Hot Chili Peppers,” and “Godsmack,” the message of revolt, “Get-even-with-em-ism,” and violence had sunk in. All it took, literally, was a match, which the zonked-out goofball paisley-brained acid-dipped promoters provided by passing out candles. Yes. Candles.

Flammable material in the form of garbage piles was ignited but soon enhanced by the crap-covered yahoos scaling the wooden privacy walls and tearing them up like so much kindling. That’s when things really went Full Bizkit.

One or two small fires became a dozen, then the beer-soaked sots climbed on the various recording and video towers and toppled them. It was a miracle dozens were not crushed when they finally collapsed. What had these innocent towers ever done to this gang of lone ragers?

But they weren’t nearly done: someone suddenly realized that The Man who was extorting them for water and Fritos was just a few hundred yards away. The mobs descended on the vendor areas like an army of Zulus, sweeping away any “security,” pillaging the products, and breaking open ATM machines. To all this, Lang continually referred to as “a few bad apples” or a small number of individuals. There are European nations that don’t have this many individuals in their army!

Having set fire to the main concert areas (but not the stage itself), the hoarde moved to the various vans parked in a line like American warplanes on Oahu on December 7, 1941. One van fire spread to the next, and soon fuel tanks and propane tanks were exploding. Again, the wonder is that dozens of yuts weren’t decapitate by flying metal.

Finally police with shields and riot gear arrived to end the Rock-and-Rolly Horror Show. Then pompous MTV hosts, particularly Amanda Lewis, slammed the music itself—-which paid for their very existence—-as an early version male me-too-ism. These are the same people who groveled over the marvelous new angst music that we should take seriously. (The "last of the real rock bands," said one rock-osopher.

Choosing profits over logistics would have made sense if the promoters were dealing with resposible adults, say, at a football game, who understood high prices were just the cost of attending. But the profit model caused Lang and Scher to farm out everything from garbage collection to security (the word was a joke when applied to the “yellow shirts” of the “peace patrol” that were hired). Like Libyan mercenaries hired to protect the U.S. consulate in Benghazi—-who dropped their weapons and ran at the first sign of trouble—-the “pps” beat a hasty retreat in the face of a 200,000-strong mob. But the “love, peace, and happiness” original Woodstock model was equally stupid, as it failed to understand that this wasn’t the 60s anymore.

For decades kids had been alienated by the education system, told they are powerless, convinced that mindless raging music or equally gutteral rap was appropriate musical expression, then at a single event were herded together to the tune of a quarter-million and were subsequently exploited and gouged. That they couldn’t foresee this outcome either made them two of the stupidest individuals in North America or two of the most crass examples of everything socialists say about capitalists.

In the end, the biggest thing separating the two realities of the Woodstocks’ giant piles of trash, medical trauma, and utter irresponsible hedonism was only one thing:

The 69 hippies at least felt good when they left.

Larry Schweikart

Rock drummer

Film maker

NYTimes #1 bestselling author

Political pundit

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