Woodstock 1999 was supposed to be a thirtieth anniversary celebration of the original Woodstock 1969 festival. It was held between July 22nd and July 25th, 1999 but 200 miles away from Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, NY in Rome, NY instead. It was heavily promoted and MTV intended to broadcast much of the festival but it was also available live to pay per view cable TV customers in the US.
Woodstock’s stalled-before-it-started 50th anniversary celebration has taken over much of the news cycle this summer, but some of us haven’t forgotten the disaster that was Woodstock ’99, which kicked off its main stage 20 years ago today.
When the organizers of Woodstock 1999 planned the third edition of the peace-promoting music festival, they sought to extinguish the unruly atmosphere that plagued the 1994 iteration. Five years earlier, concertgoers easily snuck in beer and other contraband items through a chain-link fence that barely separated the festival from the outside world. But those conditions — which impeded police efforts to maintain order — were mild compared to what would result at Woodstock ’99.
The well-documented, pervasive misogyny of Woodstock ’99 is more relevant to America in 2019 than the “free love” politics of its original iteration.
“This is not the real Woodstock. They messed up. They messed up the whole name of Woodstock.”
Woodstock 50 appears to be dead with less than a month to go for the 50th anniversary of the original 1969 festival. The 2019 event has been plagued by disorganization, but may also be struggling because of the legacy of a related Central New York festival that happened 20 years ago this week: Woodstock ’99.
STEPHEN VIDER
Episode 6 of ‘Break Stuff’ explores the violence against women that garnered headlines in the wake of the festival
The new three-part Netflix documentary tells the dark story of a music festival that descended into chaos
May 2004
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34(2):141 – 166
DOI:10.1111/j.0021-8308.2004.00240.x
It’s 2022, and—as though we didn’t have enough contemporary problems on our minds—people can’t stop talking about Woodstock ’99. The wave of reappraisals of an event that made instant history as one of the biggest music-festival catastrophes since Altamont began on the 20th anniversary of the debacle, with the Ringer’s eight-part podcast Break Stuff. Last summer, Ringer honcho Bill Simmons kicked off his HBO rock-doc series Music Box with Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love, and Rage, a divisive film that sparked weeks’ worth of discussion. And now, here comes Netflix with Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99, a three-episode docuseries on the same topic.
At least two women were raped in the mosh pit at Woodstock ’99 last weekend, according to a volunteer who witnessed one assault and a rape counselor involved in assisting the victim in the other.
In each incident, which occurred on different nights of the three-day, 30th-anniversary Woodstock ’99 festival, the woman was allegedly raped and assaulted by multiple men, as concert-goers around the crime cheered her assailants on.
The first episode of ‘Break Stuff,’ The Ringer’s new documentary podcast series about the doomed festival, explores whether the bad boys of nu metal were really the cause of the chaos
While festivals can be some of the best experiences of a lifetime, Netflix’s new three-part documentary, Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, shows just how wrong they can go when shockingly poor organisation is combined with nearly half a million people. “If you thought the 6am scene at Glastonbury’s Stone Circle was messy, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” wrote Leonie Cooper in The Independent’s review of the documentary, which depicts the “absolute horror show that was Woodstock ’99”.
Documentry
Woodstock 1969 promised peace and music, but its ’99 revival delivered days of rage, riots and real harm. Why did it go so horribly wrong?
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