Woodstock ’99 at 25: It Was the Worst of Times — And a Turning Point For U.S. Festivals

July 19, 2024 E Jazz Reporter

Artistes
Trigger warning: the following story features discussions about rape and sexual assault.

The first thing that hit you was the unbearable, eye-wateringly putrid stench. Then, the slow realization that some of the “mud” the kids at Woodstock ’99 were rubbing all over their viciously sunburnt, exhausted bodies and tossing at each other was not, in fact, just mud.

The sight of hundreds of young concertgoers wallowing in the fetid pool of human waste mixed with dirt pooling around the porta-potties would have made me sick if it wasn’t the 20th worst thing I would end up experiencing at Woodstock ’99. It was just one of the many flashing danger signs of the sinister, apocalyptic vibe that slowly spread across the three-day (July 23-25) festival 25 years ago — which was, of course, intended to honor the original 1969 peace and love gathering on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y.

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Instead, what became a disastrous cash-in on the good will of the original — following a well-received reboot in 1994 featuring Metallica, a mud-caked Nine Inch Nails, Bob Dylan and Green Day — turned into a fiery nightmare, ending in riots and reports of four alleged rapes and multiple sexual assaults.

I was there and watched in disbelief as more than 200,000 attendees baked on the tarmac of the decommissioned Griffiss Air Force base in Rome, N.Y. — a Superfund site that had formerly housed hazardous materials — at an event that was as far from getting “back to the garden” as humanly possible. Gouged by the promoters selling $4 bottles of water and flavorless $12 pizzas (with many of the promised free water stations just trickling or irretrievably damaged), the three-day event got progressively weirder, darker and scarier, as attendees whipped themselves into a testosterone frenzy to the strains of bro bands like Insane Clown Posse, Korn, Limp Bizkit and Buckcherry.

The many stories I wrote on site alongside my colleagues at the pioneering online music magazine Addicted to Noise — which later included a 20-plus-part, award-winning investigative series spearheaded by reporters Brian Hiatt and Chris Nelson that dove into the nitty gritty of what went wrong — are lost to history now, following Paramount’s recent decision to pull the entire MTV News archive offline. But those memories are still seared into my brain, and at the time I remember quickly dashing off a bleary-eyed day-after essay the morning after the fires assessing the damage to the site, the psyche and the legacy of the beloved original three days of peace, love & rock ‘n roll.

(It’s worth mentioning that the 1969 edition also had its own issues — including massive gate-crashing that forced overwhelmed organizers to reluctantly turn it into a free event, as well as miles-long traffic jams coming in and out and a lack of proper sanitation, food and infrastructure to handle the unexpected crowds.)

I stayed on site all night reporting on the aftermath at Woodstock ’99, watching as black-helmeted, storm trooper-like police in riot gear marched into the chaotic scrum while looters smashed ATMs and vendor carts, set fire to 18-wheelers filled with soft pretzels and crashed through the comically flimsy, daisy-covered “peace wall” meant to keep the non-ticketed hordes off site. Those depressing scenes came after days of watching young men harassing the many topless women who’d had their chests adorned with glittery paint at airbrush stations, while female artists such as Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow were greeted by cheers mixed with endless frat boy bellows of “show us your t–s!!!” A dozen state troopers and police supervisors were later demoted or suspended for posing in photos with topless women or agreeing to have their cruisers washed by nude attendees.

The MTV News crew was forced to flee the scene in a hurry after amped-up rioters began shaking their broadcast tower during the final night as fires broke out during the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ headlining set. “Holy s–t, it looks like Apocalypse Now out there,” singer Anthony Kiedis said as he looked out on the flames and smoke rising in the crowd. The veteran band had taken the stage wearing hard hats rigged to shoot flames into the air, and their decision to cover original Woodstock performer Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” proved to be ill-timed, as it was performed while a series of half a dozen massive bonfires sent flames into the sky all over the garbage-strewn field. The fuel for those fires: shattered shards of the what promoters had referred to as the perimeter-securing “peace fence.”

After suffering legendary gate-crashing at the original, peaceful event in 1969, which eventually swelled to half a million attendees, the 1999 promoters said beforehand that they were determined to lock down the military site. And in an effort that was comical until it was tragic, their solution was nearly six miles of plywood and steel fencing wall surrounding the tarmac, a barrier over which some fans easily tossed contraband to each other, and which they eventually breached on the final night. As the chaos erupted, I watched a stream of locked-out fans easily scale the wall. They were no match for the overwhelmed, by-then-exhausted uniformed force — which included more than 500 music fans in yellow “Peace Patrol” t-shirts, who’d had a total of two or three days of training and some of whom ditched their official gear to join the fun, and who struggled alongside 500 state troopers and a private security detail of 3,000 to maintain order.

Kid Rock during Woodstock ’99 in Saugerties, New York in Saugerties, New York.

KMazur/WireImage

To be clear: the riots and violence were not the direct result of the performers whipping up the crowd, the ill-chosen former military site or even what co-promoter Jon Scher derisively referred to as a few “bad apples” in the crowd wilding out. All of those factors certainly contributed to the weird vibe in the air, but the creeping sense that things were out of control took on a life of its own.

During what escalated into contentious daily news briefings by the promoters as the extent of the quagmire came into view to the assembled, frustrated press, Scher — who co-produced the event with original Woodstock co-founder Michael Lang (who died in 2022) — was asked repeatedly about the obvious breakdowns in infrastructure, crowd control and fan safety all weekend. Pushing back on reporters, at the time Scher often dissembled and appeared to brush aside concerns about what was clearly an increasingly out-of-control situation. More than two decades later, Scher continued blaming Limp Bizkit for some of the violence after their fans tore plywood sheets from a lighting tower to crowd surf while again brusquely brushing aside claims of mismanagement.

“Nobody came thinking they were going to stay at the Ritz Carlton,” he said in the 2022 Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, once again blaming “knuckleheads” (which he put in the 50-or-so range) for “causing trouble”; Scher made similar comments in another W99 doc from HBO in 2021 entitled Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage. His most outrageous claims came in response to questions about how women were treated on site and about the reports of the alleged rapes and sexual assaults. “There were a lot of women who voluntarily had their tops off,” he said in Trainwreck. “Then you get into a mosh pit and you crowd surf. Could somebody have touched their breasts? Yes, I’m sure they did. What could I have done about it? I’m not sure I could have done anything.”

Scher, who was not involved in the original Woodstock but did co-promote the 1994 version, was also not a part of a failed 2019 attempt at a 50th anniversary edition that melted down due to permitting and financing issues.

Speaking to Billboard this week, Scher says one of the lessons he learned was “you can’t have these heavy metal based bands” performing one after another in such an “isolated” location. Asked if that was disingenuous given the riot-free success of the all-metal touring OzzFest, as well as dozens of other hard rock festivals in the years since that have not devolved into such chaos, Scher says it was a “different era… it seems to me that by 1999 the ‘tribes’ got more aggressive… [But] these were dumb kids out having a blast, many inebriated.”

Scher again points to Limp Bizkit, saying that in his 50 years of promoting he’s “never” had to pull the plug on a band like he did when the Fred Durst-led group’s set got out of control during “Break Stuff” as fans began crowd surfing on plywood panels ripped from rigging.

He also says his team opened up some hangars to give weary fans some much-needed respite from the sun: “Who could have predicted the weather would be that terrible?” in the middle of the summer, he protests. Scher also points to the “intense” permitting and regulatory statues in New York regarding live gatherings, a direct aftermath of the 1969 festival, as the reason that the number of portable toilets, water stations and security were “more than adequate” for the job.

Unfortunately, he claims, the company hired to clean the toilets simply “didn’t show up” to service them twice a day as contracted and unruly fans wrecked a quarter of the free water stations, a combo that led to the “mud”-covered masses. “We couldn’t anticipate that,” he says, noting that the one reported fatality of an attendee was a young man who was helicoptered to a local hospital, where he later died.

As for the many alleged sexual assaults and four alleged rapes, after his poorly received comments in the films, the promoter was careful to explain that he was, “not saying they didn’t occur… but [according to Scher] not one person who said they got raped reported it to police during or after”; The New York Times reported on July 29, 1999 that four women reported to New York State Police that they had been raped at Woodstock ’99 and that a crisis counselor on site said they’d seen at least five women being gang-raped in the crowd. At the time, Police Captain John Wood told the Associated Press that, “it’s going to be difficult to pursue this because people have scattered to all parts of the country” and in the years since there don’t appear to have been any arrests or convictions tied to the alleged sexual assaults.

Scher’s careful to stress that the sexual violence may have occurred, and that his team sent senior security team members into the crowd to find the alleged offenders as well as alleged victims — but that it was a small group of hard rock “knuckleheads” and “animals” who were the main perpetrators of the violence and riots; out of the 200,000 on hand, Scher says less than 2% (this time he put the number at around 2,000) were responsible for the rioting, disorder and violence. “What happened was an atmosphere we didn’t really anticipate — one that was probably three-quarters men and women who took their tops off or who weren’t wearing any clothes,” Scher says.

James Brown performs on the east stage at Woodstock ’99 in Rome, New York at Griffiss AFB Park for the 30th Anniversary Concert July 23-25.

Frank Micelotta/ImageDirect

Regardless of the explanations of why things went wrong, I have to say that over the course of a 30-year career covering music, I have attended all but a handful of Lollapalooza festivals (the original touring edition and the stay-put in Chicago), the first four Coachellas and all but two of the Warped tours, in addition to dozens of other festivals — and this was still an unparalleled experience for me. While other festivals have had technical glitches, unfortunate injuries (as well as tragic heat-and drug-related deaths) and unplanned annoyances, not once have I seen anywhere near the type of chaos and disorder I observed at Woodstock ’99.

Have I seen young men grab women (and performers) inappropriately while they crowd surf, fans try to hop the eight-foot-tall fences around Grant Park in Chicago to bust into Lolla, or scramble for a sliver of shade at Coachella when the temperature hits the 100s? Of course.

But Woodstock ’99 was a different beast. After the initial salad days of touring festivals in the 1990s that launched Lolla, the jam-focused H.O.R.D.E., the R&B/hip-hop leaning Smokin’ Grooves, Ozzy Osbourne’s metal-themed OzzFest, the female-focused Lilith Fair and several more, Woodstock ’99 felt like the end of an era.

The shock to the system of the festival business afterwards had immediate consequences, many of which you can thank for the more comfortable, safer festival experience that has become standard operating procedure in the 21st century.

A week after the Woodstock ’99 fires were put out, California promoter Goldenvoice announced the first Coachella festival, an event they pointedly promised would be “high-comfort,” located on the picturesque, lush Empire Polo Club fields in Indio, CA. Attending that first year, the vibe was like a bizarro version of what I’d experienced just months earlier — with ample free water, bathrooms and parking, misting tents, shady rest areas and not a whiff of the air of menace and mendacity I experienced in Rome. Even during the ground-shaking headling set by Rage Against the Machine, fans cooked by the nearly triple-digit heat all day moshed to their heart’s content with little to no reports of the kind of violence and violations suffered at W99.

Billboard‘s senior director of live music and touring Dave Brooks says that after Woodstock, promoters began to share best-practices with each other, while dissecting what Scher and company got wrong and realizing that “an accident at one was bad for the whole business.”

“Festivals after Woodstock were more about the music community and the ethos of the festivals, where it went from merely surviving to something more like creating a utopian scene and expression of ideals,” Brooks says, noting that such events now are much safer. They are, of course, by no means impervious to tragedy, as evidenced by the 10 crowd-crush deaths and hundreds of injuries at 2021’s Astroworld Festival as well as 2017’s mass shooting assault on Las Vegas’ Route 91 Harvest festival in which a sniper killed 60 people and injured more than 800 more while firing a high-capacity rifle from an adjacent hotel.

“There’s no fool-proofing it, but things are much better,” says Brooks of today’s massive festivals — which, while safer, still sometimes result in tragic deaths, heat-related illness and deadly weather events. “Content and blaming hard rock acts is not an excuse for crowd-control issues… plenty of hard rock festivals take place around the world that don’t result in riots,” says Brooks.

As an example, when Lollapalooza established a permanent beachhead in Chicago in 2005, promoters dialed in comfort and safety via an impressive display of security, robust fencing and perimeter maintenance — while also offering plenty of free water stations, shady rest areas and rapid-fire responses to dangerous situations via clear chain of command.

There too, when the legendarily intense Rage played the boisterous crowd repeatedly pushed forward, causing a domino-like collapse of sweaty fans during a raucous 2008 headlining slot. In that case, the band halted the set three or more times to give security and attendees a moment to settle, diffusing what could have been a dangerous situation.

And when a freak, dangerous storm popped up in 2015, Lolla organizers pulled off what seemed like an impossible task: calmly evacuating more than 100,000 attendees from the park to safe shelter in less than an hour, and then just as professionally inviting them back in, with almost no incidents of note to report.

While I sprinted to my hotel room as horizontal torrents of rain pelted me along Michigan Ave., all I could think was, “thank God this isn’t Woodstock ’99.”

Sheryl Crow performs on the east stage at Woodstock ’99 in Rome, New York at Griffiss AFB Park for the 30th Anniversary Concert July 23-25.

Frank Micelotta/ImageDirect

Despite the deservedly terrible reputation the festival has developed over the past quarter century thanks to the final night disaster, Scher says he’s talked to “hundreds” of people since who said they had an “absolute blast” at Woodstock ’99. He also says the “peace” fence didn’t come down until the last night when someone rammed a Mercedes sedan through it — at which point the festival had already ended abruptly, after what he remembers as two-plus days of “amazing” music. He also stresses that he didn’t believe he was dishonest during the sometimes three-a-day briefings, but merely did not “embellish” his answers.

I’ll admit he’s not wrong about the music. There were, to be fair, some lasting musical memories for me from those three days of madness at Woodstock ’99. They included seeing James Brown for the first and only time as he opened the festival with one of his legendary high-energy sets and the undeniable bounce of DMX’s career-peak sunset performance — one of the first, and blessedly last, times I witnessed more than 100,000 white fans yelling the n-word at the top of their lungs with zero chill. Then there was the Twilight Zone-like experience of hanging with one of my musical north stars, an exhausted George Clinton, at the Rome airport the day after, as we commiserated on what the intergalactic funk legend said was the “definitely weirdest” experience he’d ever had. (Consider that for a minute.)

“I think the bad things that happened happened and I’m not here to deny that,” Scher say of the fest’s overall grim legacy. “But once you get past the sensationalism from the press, the overwhelming majority of people had a great time… I’m proud of the lineup and music, but I’m certainly not proud of the problems that happened.”

The lessons learned from W99 were harsh, and a few of the complaints from those times persist. Yes, some of the most popular contemporary American festivals have fallen prey to the rampant commercialization, corporate signage-overload and pricey VIP experience traps that leave some fans with an icky taste in their mouths.

But, thankfully, things have gotten better and festival promoters have gone to even greater lengths to ensure safety and security, even as ticket prices have climbed into the stratosphere for many major fests. At the very least, never again have I walked through the grounds of a major festival and typed the phrase I distinctly recall SMS’ing to one of my editors as the weekend devolved into madness: “This seems bad. Like, really bad.”

Stories about sexual assault allegations can be traumatizing for survivors of sexual assault. If you or anyone you know needs support, you can reach out to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). The organization provides free, confidential support to sexual assault victims. Call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE) or visit the anti-sexual violence organization’s website for more information.