Trainwreck: Woodstock '99

[greekmom]

12 hours ago, Rickster said:

I’m in the middle of the first episode, where they’re talking about prices. I just have to say, a $4 bottle of water in 1999 would be a bit over $7 today. Not that outrageous.

You are right. I did use an inflation calculator but forgot to hit enter. My bad.

[supposebly]

14 hours ago, Rickster said:

I just have to say, a $4 bottle of water in 1999 would be a bit over $7 today. Not that outrageous.

True. Although this was one small bottle. The temps were close to 100s with no shade. To be adequately hydrated, you'd need at least 6 per day. This was mostly 20somethings who had never been to anything like that and probably didn't bring much money. And the ones who came somewhat prepeared, most couldn't get their stuff past the gate. My friends and I were sneaky. We went in openly with what was allowed and also had quite a bit of stuff wrapped tightly in spleeping bags and the tent bags. We then had one of my friends hand us the rest of our stuff through the fence later. He then brought the rest later. We also made sure we went when the controls at the gate were a bit overwhelmed with the crowds so they didn't check properly.

I feel like the water was more expensive than that. But I might not remember correctly. I do remember being quite mad about it being too expensive, feeling bad about the people who hadn't prepared for something like this, and thinking that this would not end well. So we were talking of leaving early during Saturday afternoon. When we saw the first fires during the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we had already taken down our tents and were ready to go. The fences were down at that point, so it was easy to get to the car and get out of there.

Even I felt a bit like rioting when you feel confined in a hot place where they're trying to bleed you dry, you have already spent a lot of money for the tickets, and have nowhere to go. And I was mostly hydrated, sober, and had eaten. And had found a workable porta potty most of the time.

The free water was offered often right beside the portapotties, some of which were not working, and had fallen over. It was mostly in large open tanks. Of course it was contaminated.

[vibeology]

22 minutes ago, supposebly said:

I feel like the water was more expensive than that. But I might not remember correctly. I do remember being quite mad about it being too expensive, feeling bad about the people who hadn't prepared for something like this, and thinking that this would not end well. So we were talking of leaving early during Saturday afternoon. When we saw the first fires during the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we had already taken down our tents and were ready to go. The fences were down at that point, so it was easy to get to the car and get out of there.

They did mention that as the weekend went on and vendors started to sell out that prices went up so I'm betting your memory is spot on. 

[QQQQ]

I felt like taking a Silkwood shower after watching this.

I found it interesting that the van sexual assault during the Fatboy Slim set was deemed so horrifying considering the entire rave hangar sounded like Sodom and Gomorrah.

How many topless concert attendees have now been humiliated by video shown from a festival of 23 years ago? Are any of them now teachers, lawyers, doctors, accountants? 

[Racj82]

On 8/11/2022 at 8:27 PM, Rickster said:

I’m in the middle of the first episode, where they’re talking about prices. I just have to say, a $4 bottle of water in 1999 would be a bit over $7 today. Not that outrageous.

That was hyperbole but the price of water athe venue goes through its own healthy bit of inflation that actually is outrageous.

[bmoore4026]

My main takeaway from this mini-series is "Dudebros!  Lots and lots of milky white dudebros!" 

Also, screw Limp Bizkit.  Screw them straight to hell.  Always hated their music.

And it's pretty obvious this whole concert was a major factor in the MeToo movement.  That part about the girl coming down from the mosh pit and saying "I hate men now" made me wince.  But then came the part where, what was he?  The head of security came across that van and found that sixteen year old girl unconscious and a guy pulling his pants back on?  Yeah, that was nightmarish.  And right in the middle of the fucking riot and inferno, kiosk sellers and MTV reporters running for their lives.

One of the things that really got to me was the lady who was from original Woodstock saying "Keep cool, guys.  This is supposed to be about peace and love."  And all I was thinking was  "You poor deluded woman.  This was never about peace and love.  A bunch of drunk white boys don't give a damn about peace and love when they're drunk out of their skulls and have a bunch of "white rage" in them and feel the need to trash the place." 

And, of course, the three people who put this thing together don't care what happened.  That's the biggest part that infuriated me.  Destruction, multiple injuries, rape.  And they could careless.

Now that I've seen this, I'm wondering if Hulu still has that Fyre Festival documentary on.  I always want to call it the "Fire Island Festival", but no.  If any LGBT got put through what happened at the Fyre Festival, it would be Stonewall 2.0 all over.

[Hedgehog2022]

On 8/4/2022 at 6:52 AM, merylinkid said:

Watched this last night.    The promoters are  STILL blaming "the kids."    Dudes, you confiscated all food and drink and then charged those "kids" festival prices for WATER.    You loved how great the weather was but didn't think about how hot it was on that field.    Then you didn't have enough security.   "Peace patrols" at a large event are not a good idea.   You need easily identified, TRAINED security.   Not a handful of college kids with nice t-shirts.   

The worst was the attitude towards the rapes.   "Oh it didn't affect the event ..... except for the women who were rapied."   Ummmmmmmm, yeah it did affect the event.   

At least no one DIED at Fyre Fest.   But I swear all through the first episode I expected the Billy guy (I don't care enough to go look up his name) from Fyre Fest to be involved somehow.   Who knows maybe he was there as a kid and that's where he got the idea.  

For the record, the original Woodstock actually had a lot of the same problems.   They just get glossed over for the "peace and love" narrative.   It was muddy, and dirty and too many people with not enough security or facilities.   Food adn water were scare.   The drugs leds to medical emergencies.    There were probably rapes.   So if they wanted to recreate the original Woodstock, they kinda did a good job.

But I could have gone my entire life without seeing Flea's naked ass.

Watched all of the episodes...my take away as a "Boomer" who was 17 when Woodstock took place and had many friends who attended, was that the producers, Lang and Scher, were in this to make alot of money. Simply put, it was a money grab from the producers, vendors and any other marketers involved. Little thought or care was put into the safety aspect or the basic needs of festival attendees. The original Woodstock was basically saved by hippies like the Hogfarm and others who came prepared to cook and feed people for free. The medical tents were voluntary in some cases with attendees of the festival who happened to be medical students or were interns or residents at New York hospitals. There were medics and local medical EMT's there as well...never did they experience people trashing the tents or stealing supplies as they did at Woodstock '99. There seemed to be an ambivalence and a condescending attitude from Lang and Scher towards the attendees and even towards the people hired to work for the '99 festival itself. Their aloofness and callous behavior towards the staff and what was going on down on the ground is mind boggling.

In the late fall of 1969 there was another festival that took place in San Francisco at Altamont. Put on by the Rolling Stones, it promised to be a West Coast Woodstock but turned into a nightmare. The documentary of this fesitval "Altamont" is shocking in its vivid recording of a stabbing of a man by the "security" for the concert...the "security" hired for this event were the Hell's Angels and it was a mess from start to finish. They punched Marty Balin, lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane and shoved and kicked other people standing in front of the stage. By the time the Stones hit the stage, it had evolved into a street fight and the Stones could barely finish a set...Mick pleading with the Angels to go easy and for the crowd to love one another was futile. They abandoned the stage and flew out on helicopter. The peace and love vibe that had permeated Woodstock just months before was gone. 

Not all concerts/festivals turn into actual shit shows but some do and the people who produce and organize them should bear the responsiblity and ownership of their failure to make them as safe and peaceful as possible. The original Woodstock was lucky...most of the attendees were just college kids or had recently graduated from high school. There was a different atomsphere then...it will never be replicated again. Hell, Mick Jagger tried just a few months after and it exploded in his face. For Lang and Scher to think they could simultaneously go for the cash grab/commercialization of the original Woodstock, book heavy metal, "Nu metal" bands that spoke to the anger and rage of that generation and not think that this would be problematic, is mind boggling. Lang's brilliant idea of handing out candles to the crowd was just remarkable in its tone deafness. His and Scher's views on what happened at the festival are a sad referendum on the level of disregard they had for the attendees. 

I neglected to mention the citizens of Bethel, NY and other surrounding communities who contributed food, rooms, free groceries, etc...to the festival attendees and those trapped on the NY State Thruway. Women who were thinking of their own sons and daughters who might have been a part of this and needed food rolled up their sleeves and made hundreds of sandwiches to be distributed. People who originally were opposed to the festival and didn't like the idea of "hippies" invading their quiet rural town changed their minds after seeing the peaceful nature of the concert goers and gave them gas for the cars, free coffee and pastries, etc.etc...it was an all hands on deck effort of the townspeople and local law enforcement to help in whatever way was needed. This did not happen at Woodstock '99...for obvious reasons.

Edited September 11, 2022 by Hedgehog2022

[peppergal]

On 8/8/2022 at 10:37 PM, greekmom said:

One thing I do not understand. 

They were on an airbase. If it was an airbase, it would have facilities such as barracks and latrines.

Why were those not utilized?

Also, the airbase (not mentioned in the documentary) had areas of concern for environmental factors. Why would they allow a concert to take place?

The air force base was realigned in 1995 at which time the flying wing(s) moved out.  The side of the former base available for the festival was the air field side that would have had toilet facilities that could handle maybe 1000 people at most.  Housing in the air field area would have been limited to those who needed to be on-call with immediate access to the flight line in the case of sudden nuclear attack, so a couple hundred at most.

The other side of the base was redeveloped.  The Rome Lab was kept around and would have needed to have access restricted due to their R&D mission.  Festival goers would have needed to be kept well away from those buildings, so adjacent buildings would also have been a no-go.  Housing on an AFB is usually mixed.  While there would have been barracks and dining hall facilities for unmarried enlisted folks, married folks would have been in houses or town houses on base or living off base. Those on base family units would have been snapped up almost immediately by civilian developers as soon as the base no longer needed them.  Unmarried officers would often choose to live off base if they weren't on-call air crew so there tended to be fewer of those units than there were people that would have qualified for them.  The old dining facility might have been still up and running in use by the national guard, but based on its size it would have handled maybe 5k mouths per meal period if they were running flat out and doing takeout only chow line.  If they were doing grab and go sack meals, especially things like sandwiches which needed minimal cooking, then 10-15k. 

The old enlisted barracks would have either been redeveloped into something else or mothballed by 1999, and at maximum capacity probably held under 3k people.  You have to keep in mind the AF is much smaller than the Army.  There are currently less than 300k active duty folks in the entire USAF, so a single small base would not have had infrastructure for anywhere close to 250k people even back in the 90s when the active duty force was larger. 

I suspect that splitting the attendees into the haves and the have nots would not have gone well.  I also suspect that even if by some miracle all of the barracks and dining facilities were functional and unoccupied and they figured out a way to partition a portion of the attendees into VIP guests with access to them, the cost of insurance/damage bond and professional personnel (cooks, plumbers, real security, etc) required by the building owners would have been way beyond what those cheapskates running the thing were willing to pay. 

Though you do bring up an interesting thought. I wonder if there was a way they could have paid the Army national guard (which is used to dealing with larger numbers of people with fewer creature comforts than the AF) to set up a tent city of those mobile dining halls, tent barracks, MASH tent, portable latrines and so on.  Not that they would have been willing to pay for it, or been willing to have the soldiers mingling with the "peace patrol,"  but I wonder if it was even possible. 

[lasu]

I'm really disappointed that neither this documentary or the one on HBO decided to blur nudity or faces.  I already was uncomfortable with it, because although the internet existed in 1999, no one had ANY idea of what was coming.  Digital cameras existed but were very expensive, and most college kids didn't have them, much less understand how digital media would take over and never, ever go away.  I'm not sure how fair it is to take images from kids partying nearly 25 years ago in a different world and widely distribute them now.  I just feel like there wasn't an understand of the eternal lasting consequences of their actions at that time, and that should be taken into consideration.

But what really pushed me over the edge was that BOTH documentaries showed images of women whose clothes were being pulled off and/or were being groped by random guys in the audience.  If you agree that ripping off a woman's clothes is wrong, how can you feel showing images of a woman's clothes being ripped off is ok?  And how can you show what is almost certainly sexual assault, without even blurring the women's faces?  I feel like it's just another violation on top of the original violation.

I spent a lot of time thinking about why the nudity from Woodstock 69 seemed so different than 99, and it was the objectification.  I'm not holding 69 to any sort of idealistic standard, but I do think the objectification and sexualization of women was vastly different in 99.  While there might have been a lot of people having sex at 69, "getting pussy" and "fucking that bitch" are completely different things.  

One thing I found interesting in the HBO documentary was the DMX segment where he was leading the entire audience in a call and response of the n-word, and what that must have been like for the very few POC who were there.

And to clarify something another poster said, I'm not sure how much the promoters made off of the concert, but the $200K was how much ROME made for hosting the event, in comparison to how much the city that hosts Coachella makes.

[truthaboutluv]

On 8/6/2022 at 9:54 PM, Enero said:

I will say Gavin was so hot when he was young. He’s not aging horribly now. But the footage of him at Woodstock was…whew. Very very good looking man. 

Yes, yes he was. I had a massive fangirl crush on Gavin back then. Half my love for Bush's music was just because Gavin was so hot, lol (okay, their music was good too). And despite my crush, I didn't even hate when he and Gwen started dating (as is customary in fandoms for hot famous guys - to hate the woman they're dating) because in my opinion, Gwen was the coolest chick back then so that pairing just made sense. 

That completely unrelated note aside, I binged this documentary only this past weekend so I know I'm coming in a bit late with my thoughts. I will say that there wasn't anything revealed in the documentary that I didn't already know about from years of reading articles and hot takes about the event and even reading about the backlash back when it happened. 

It was interesting watching the clips because as a millenial, I was 16/17 when this happened back in 1999 and I actually remembered watching all the performances from the comfort of my couch. I don't know if anyone remembers this music station called The Box, but they aired the whole thing. I don't know if it was a bootleg stream or what but I just know I saw many of my favorite acts, all again, from the comfort of my couch. And yes, that means I unfortunately saw ALL of Flea live and in color as it happened. 

My couch was the closest I was ever going to get to that mess, because even back then, teenage me found NOTHING appealing about music festivals. I don't like crowds, I don't like people in my personal space, I don't do slumming - so I always need a proper bed and shower and clean toilet facilities, etc. So nope, no ma'am. This was a hard pass for me. What's also funny to me is that I remember leaving and coming back to watch the acts I cared about and ignoring the ones I didn't. And I swear, all the ones highlighted in the documentary as ones the crowd went insane for were acts I completely ignored - Korn, Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock for sure. 

I watched the Limp Bizkit segment just thinking the whole time, "and all this over a basic asf group with an even more basic asf lead singer." Fred Durst was such a mediocre artist to me back then and even more so now. But I guess as many have pointed out - unfortunately it was part of that dochebro culture that existed at the time. I was amused at the end of the documentary when the note said there was no plans to revive another Woodstock - because like why? Aside from the epic disaster that was the 1999 mess, Woodstock '99 funny enough helped inspire and usher in Coachella. So what would be the point of ever doing another faux Woodstock when Coachella exists. 

This was definitely the result of piss poor planning and management, greed and the culture of the time. And all of these factors combined to result in a complete and utter shitshow. 

[monagatuna]

I have very few claims to fame in life. I don't have any really famous relatives, the circumstances of my birth and life have been moderate at most. None of my ancestors were the first X person to do Y.

But I can say with all the pride deserving of such a factoid that I was born on this very air force base where Woodstock II took place some 21 years later. Hooray me.