Woodstock '99

The three-part Netflix docuseries, "Trainwreck: Woodstock '99," premiering Aug. 3, looks at how the music festival devolved into anarchy.

“I think in the ’90s, kids were in a different headspace. In the hands of the disgruntled, exhausted festival-goers, it was a disaster waiting to happen. There were a–holes in the crowd. Widely reported as an accidental event, people climbed on top of the slow-moving vehicle, and the set came to a screeching halt. “All my crew and the people from the record company were properly rattled. It was terrible,’” said Wardle. “And then it really surprised us. (Morissette had opened for the band, performing what MTV referred to as a “confident” if relatively low-key set, in front of a mostly “apathetic” crowd.) By the festival’s end, four incidents of sexual assault were being investigated, according to the docuseries. (SPIN Magazine’s 1999 report on the event was famously titled “ Don’t Drink The Brown Water.” At the time, and well after the festival, Oneida County health officials insisted the water was safe.) And while it’s true that sneaking onto the decommissioned military installation without paying was more difficult, there were were major issues from the start, like a significant lack of shaded space that only exacerbated festival goers’ misery, as a heat wave seared central New York that late July. “They were used to Woodstock being synonymous with bad weather and rains. New York state troopers and other law enforcement were eventually called in to quell the riot with force.

Woodstock 99 was a volatile cocktail of problems, doused in gasoline and with multiple matches thrown on the fire by out of touch officials who just wanted ...

Woodstock 99 was a volatile cocktail of problems, doused in gasoline and with multiple matches thrown on the fire by out of touch officials who just wanted to make a quick buck. Trying to pin the blame on nu-metal and rock music is, quite frankly, ludicrous. Fight Club is blamed for the root cause of the issues (despite being released six months AFTER the event) while American Pie is also cited as a problem. With plenty of talking head interviews, the episodes break down all the logistical problems with the event. During the hottest month of the year. Instead of the rolling hills and fields though, the promoters chose an abandoned airstrip for their base of operations.

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“I don’t want to hear about Native Indians and Leonard Peltier and all that crap,” she added, echoing the white fans’ limited attitudes. “In doing so, that doesn’t really help diversify music fans,” Dawes said. “There’s a power in that.” “They have certain anthems and phrases in their music that anybody can latch on to,” Dawes said. “But anything after that, hence the lyricism from Rage Against the Machine, is suspect, and you can just block it out. As we saw at Woodstock ’99, they reacted to that in ways that showed their inherent entitlement and violent objectives more than anything else. “Limp Bizkit, for instance, went directly to the mainstream, so you could buy albums at Target. Same with Rage Against the Machine.” “They wouldn’t be going to that because they would not feel comfortable going to a show where those bands are playing,” Dawes added. It was always on the radio, and music videos like the one for Korn’s “Freak on a Leash” or Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie” were heavily played on VH1 and MTV’s “TRL,” alongside Britney Spears and Aaliyah videos. If you were anywhere near a TV in the summer of 1999, images from the hellfire that was Woodstock were inescapable. Those interviewed in the docuseries — including journalists, festival organizers, musicians and attendees — often point to a number of logistical issues that catalyzed these horrific events. Those included the insufficient security, up-charged food and drinks, and malfunctioning sanitation that somehow led to attendees walking around drenched in a mud/feces concoction.

At the 11th hour, the most appropriately titled three-part Netflix documentary Clusterf*** had its name changed to a more politically correct but woefully ...

What Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 so viscerally portrays though is how easy it is for something of this scale to repeat in a world of today. Music festival organisers have become more liable and accountable, but have we as concertgoers learned our lessons to avoid the next trainwreck? Michael Lang at one point even blamed the culture, underplaying the actual scale of anarchist behaviour and reducing it to a case of "a few rotten apples". The onus of the catastrophe in a "clusterf***" is squarely on the mismanaging, and unlike a "trainwreck" it leaves no scope for ambiguity or natural causes to be blamed. But lining up artists with a penchant for rambunctious performances and then complaining that they did instead of having more people on-ground to check on the possible trouble, was not something they even fathomed back in 1999. At the 11th hour, the most appropriately titled three-part Netflix documentary Clusterf*** had its name changed to a more politically correct but woefully inadequate one: Trainwreck: Woodstock '99. For in its present form, the title only alludes to what is essentially the site of a disaster of epic proportions.

The new three-part Netflix documentary tells the dark story of a music festival that descended into chaos.

“It was an experience of a lifetime.” Two others agree: “It was the best time I’ve ever had and even 22 years later, it’s still the best time I’ve probably ever had… When all is said and done, you’d expect the festival-goers to still be suffering from PTSD. Wrong! “Although I had a kind of scary experience, it was a blast!” says Heather, who attended as a 14-year-old teen. The Peace Patrol were the anti-establishment security of sorts, however it turned out they were just a bunch of local kids drafted in to help with the running of the festival. As one festival-goer reveals, she woke up on the last day with “a very sore throat, cold sores all over my lips, ulcers all over my tongue and my gums and in my mouth,” adding that she couldn’t “eat, drink or talk… They glossed over all of that”. True fact: a year later, Scher went on to win Pollstar Magazine's Promoter of the Year in 2000. While the festival literally burned around them and a “sea” of young people went on a violent rampage, organisers Michael Lang and John Scher hailed it as a success to assembled media.

Often considered "the day the music died", Woodstock '99 went down in history as a disastrous day in US music culture – but what happened and why?

He also ran Just Sunshine Records, which produced music from Betty Davis and Karen Dalton, among others. West Stage West Stage During the Red Hot Chilli Peppers festival-closing set, attendees took their cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Fire' quite literally, with bonfires breaking out throughout the crowd, cars being flipped and booths being torched. According to Syracuse.com, at least 700 people were treated for heat exhaustion and dehydration at the festival. With few tap water stations and bottled water being sold for $4 on site when the temperatures were hitting the late 30s in celsius, festivalgoers were both dehydrated and displeased with the situation.

Trainwreck Woodstock 99 on Netflix is a cautionary documentary series that investigates everything that could go wrong in a peaceful music festival.

Even when things were going out of control, they were painting a completely rosy picture in the media and not doing anything to stop the chaos. There weren’t enough sanitation workers to pick up the piling trash and the ones working weren’t doing the job well. The founder of the festival Michael Lang had tried to recreate the same kind of event in 1994, but things didn’t go too well and didn’t create much profit. It is some 3000 acres of area which worked as a base in the war but has been inactive. The series investigates behind the scenes to reveal the egos and music that fueled three days of mayhem at the Woodstock 99 festival. Woodstock 99 was supposed to be a millennium-defining celebration of peace, love and great music.

This tense, brisk watch inspires a sense of dread as it lays bare the rape, riots and arson that destroyed a 1999 festival. Sadly, the deeper questions ...

In the end, it doesn’t have the heart to go there in any depth, following the adrenaline-inducing spectacle of the fires and the riots instead. Was it the culture, or the environment? The biggest questions are why it turned, and why in such a particular and grotesque way. The crowd was – by many accounts and from the plentiful footage of the time – macho and aggressive, a “frat boy” culture dominating the event. A cardboard sign saying “show us your tits” – which someone had taken the time to make – is waved at female artists from the crowd. Each episode follows a day of the festival, from an optimistic start on Friday through to the apocalyptic scenes in the early hours of Monday morning, using a ticking clock to count down to each fresh catastrophe.

What was supposed to be an event celebrating the 30th anniversary of the iconic 1969 festival filled with peace, love, and music, devolved into a chaotic, ...

Throughout Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, attendees, organizers, and several of the artists that performed share their experiences from the festival. This direction not only creates a more “in the moment” feel it also helps distance the new docuseries from the 2021 HBO documentary Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, and Rage, which looked at the festival from a more modern view. Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 takes what other documentaries and news specials have done over the years and turned up the volume to provide an unprecedented look at the notorious event.

Its tone captures a bittersweet rush that you must have had to be there to truly get.

So much in this story could have been prevented, and predicted, and this documentary shows its collapse with one compelling passage after the next. The purpose of going to this story is to be amazed at how obvious these developments are. Trainwreck" is quickly paced with one episode for each day; its different themes, pop culture references, name-drops, and general schadenfreude always pop, but that acute nature can make it guilty of glossing over some of the more significant or curious pieces in the big picture. The series is especially compelling with behind-the-scenes footage, starting with VHS footage of planning meetings that went from nostalgic optimism to complete negligence. Similarly, this documentary is dedicated to humanizing those who were treated as animals and then perceived as such when they started to rebel, destroying the grounds by its closing Sunday night. They hired a bunch of popular acts who are paid to be angry (Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock) and then they gave thousands of concertgoers numerous reasons to be angry at them.

A Netflix documentary, 'Trainwreck: Woodstock '99' explores what went wrong at the copycat festival. Here's everything to know: arrests, deaths, ...

Reports from the 1999 concert revealed that there was a general lack of access to clean water, trash everywhere, and rampant reports of crimes like sexual assault, looting, and vandalism. Some people even died at the concert. According to The Baltimore Sun, more than 700 people had been treated for heat exhaustion and dehydration halfway through the weekend concert. And two decades later, in 1999, fans attempted to recreate another version of the iconic concert—dubbed Woodstock ‘99. But this time, it was a total disaster. This led to some people developing trench mouth. They were holding her arms; you could see she was struggling.”

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"That was literally the moment when everything started to look a bit less fun.” he says. You can change your mind at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the footer of any email you receive from us. "I was floored," Srybnik says, realising he had just witnessed a serious sexual assault. "Then I got the tap on the shoulder, and it's like: 'We gotta stop the music. The vans gotta go, and I said 'Aw, not tonight. "I'd been closeted in my dressing room all afternoon with people just going, oh it's a bit chaotic out there" he recalls.