Trainwreck: Woodstock 99

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Barbs89

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I saw this documentary was being made for Netflix last year and fell down a massive rabbit hole of YouTube docs and news articles, it was the perfect storm and actually quite scary to think how bad it was. I’m watching the first episode now!
 
Watched it tonight too and wow so shocking. I thought it was a well produced documentary with some excellent original footage and interviewees who were at the festival and witnessed first hand what was going on.

Blame can be apportioned to the crowd obviously, the bands who incited some of the incidents and the promoters who covered so much up.

I wonder how many people have watched this who were there and part of the carnage instigators?
 
watched it yesterday. I get how just a few people can incite a riot. All it takes is one person to kick off and one other person to join in then its herd mentality. Its 3 equal parts to blame to me, you get all the young men high on drugs and drink acting like animals to the poor women and their surroundings, the organisers (mostly the co founders who kept saying nothing was going wrong and there was no incidents) and then you had Limp Bizkit telling the riled up crowd to break stuff. (Not blaming the bands but even Korn kept them reasonably calm)
Maybe if they had proper security and not just kids then maybe it wouldnt have got so out of hand. When they gave the crowd candles - I dont know how the organisers thought that was a good idea considering how destructive everyone had been that day.
 
I have just finished watching this. Intresting searching for it on facebook thiers so many posts from people who were thier saying how great the whole weekend was and the second stage was much more chilled then the main stage.
 
Watched it all a few days ago. Such a nostalgia rush. Been listening to Limp Bizkit ever since. Break Stuff is my guilty pleasure 😂

It was very misleading with the line up though. Made out that Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit were the big acts. I think LB were 3rd on the bill behind RATM and Metallica, and Kid Rock was on very early in the day. Surprised they didnt speak to Alanis. I'm sure they showed something that said Hole were playing. They weren't.

I'm just really surprised there were so few deaths - just 3 (one heat exhaustion, one heart attack, one run over when leaving).
 
bubbadabut said:
Watched it all a few days ago. Such a nostalgia rush. Been listening to Limp Bizkit ever since. Break Stuff is my guilty pleasure 😂

It was very misleading with the line up though. Made out that Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit were the big acts. I think LB were 3rd on the bill behind RATM and Metallica, and Kid Rock was on very early in the day. Surprised they didnt speak to Alanis. I'm sure they showed something that said Hole were playing. They weren't.

I'm just really surprised there were so few deaths - just 3 (one heat exhaustion, one heart attack, one run over when leaving).
Click to expand...

Ah I was about to say I'm amazed there wasn't any fatalities.

I really enjoyed this, couldn't believe what I was watching! It just got worse and worse. It's weird because I was a huge Limp Bizkit, nu metal, fan but had never heard about this before...and please tell me how, as a teen, I did not realise how beautiful Gavin Rossdale was back then 😍🥵
 
The first festivals I went to were in 99 so this was very nostalgic for me! I have been to Reading when tents were being burned down and portaloos tipped over, but nothing as bad as this.

It wasn’t a great time for music. Late 90s/early 00s had some good music but there were a lot of angry guys. Festivals around the time were a lot more masculine and the aim of them was to get as fucked up as possible. I think modern festivals are a lot more gender balanced, and while there’s still lots of drink and drugs, they tend to have a calmer atmosphere.

I will say, I felt so so sorry for the attendees when they were filming the hot days. I went to Glasto one year when it was baking hot, and even though we were in the countryside and there were shady areas, it was so uncomfortable! I can’t imagine how awful it’d be to stand in the bright sun all day on tarmac in that heat. No wonder people got so drunk.
 
I have a friend on FB who was there and said it wasn't as bad as they made out! Maybe it was dependent on if you were right in the moshpit or amongst all the trouble.

Also American festivals look "whack" to me, isn't there a festival called burning Man in the middle of the desert?
 
Really enjoyed this documentary; I don’t remember anything about it at the time (would have been 17 but live in the UK) What a tit show! Well parts of it - if there were 250 000 people there then I can well believe that they majority would have stayed out of trouble. It only takes a few (and that could be a few hundred!) to make it look like absolute carnage.

Obviously the greedy organisers who cut all the budgets are to blame - I’m sure if they’d had more security, sanitary toilets, clean water, people cleaning up litter, decent priced food etc the crowds would have been less likely to destroy it all! Plus it was a stupid idea anyway - you can’t recreate something like the original 69 festival, it’s just not going to be the same in a totally different era with different music types. Whoever gave out the candles is the biggest moron.

Thought the main promoter guy’s comments on the rapes of women were pretty telling - he had no shits to give! No wonder he let it get out of hand like that.
 
I’ve been to a fair few gigs and the ones that get a bit scary are always the ones in inappropriate venues with poor organisation. So much of what happened is down to that.
Metal gigs/ gigs with mosh pits are perfectly fine most of the time as long as the people there have good gig etiquette. It did feel like in some cases the acts themselves were blamed for the antics of the crowd- like they have some ability to control it but I disagree. It’s a lot of responsibility to place on acts, especially when they can’t necessarily see what’s going on and when there’s probably a bit of an expectation that gigs will have the support staff and resources necessary to shut down bad behaviour or to pull out people in trouble.
 
I am absolutely staggered by the fact that there were only three deaths - I was thinking about the likes of Travis Scott concert which had far more. I also wonder why they didn't mention them in the doco.
 
I think deaths are quite common at festivals. There seems to be at least one a year at Glastonbury and this was twice the size. It’s usually either drugs or a pre-existing medical condition. Perhaps they were concerned that if they mentioned the deaths, it’d be implied they were due to failings by the organisers.
 
Didn't seem to occur to the '99 organisers that a lot of the demographic most likely to cause trouble at festivals weren't on American shores in 1969...
 
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