Warning: There may be a little PTSD for anybody who was there triggered by the new documentary “Music Box: Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love and Rage” (HBO, 9 p.m.), chronicling the terrible concert held on the overheated concrete of a decommissioned Air Force base in upstate New York that seemed to embody the epitome of white frat boy rage at the time.
It wasn’t just the aggro-rock of headliners like Limp Bizkit and Metallica; it was all of the wwomen who crowd surfed who were routinely groped or violated; where a bottle of water cost $4 despite the stifling heat; where party boys cavorted in the overflow from the porta-pottys and pretended it was Woodstock mud.
Actually there was no real connection to the 1969 fest that gave the three-day fest its brand, despite attempts like Creed getting a guy from the Doors to sit in with them (the Doors never played the first Woodstock anyway). Love and peace murals all burned down with the rest of anything wooden left when the Red Hot Chili Peppers closed the concert on Sunday night (playing the Jimi Hendrix “Fire” with smirky irony).
By then, I was hi-tailing it back home in the van I had to sleep in for a few days because there were no accommodations for press as promised. I couldn’t get away fast enough. There might have been a few musical highlights that weekend that I may have forgotten (James Brown to start the thing?). But mostly it was terrible stuff like Fred Durst and company, urging the crowd to “break shit up,” in the words of one of their inane anthems. And an ugly, abused audience only too willing to comply.
What really brings it home for me in the documentary, which plays like the Fyre Festival films a few years back in the unfolding horror, are the press conferences where promoters denied that anything was going wrong, kids were actually having fun, and $4 wasn’t a bad price for a bottle of water in 1999.
Even today, the promoter John Scher tries to advance the outrageous notion that it was MTV who made it all look bad, because the crowd was throwing bottles at Carson Daly for playing too much Backstreet Boys (whose effigies were officially beheaded in the Offspring set). In other words: Fake news.
At least the Fyre Fest organizers got prison time.
“At least the Frye Fest organizers got prison time.” — Good one! 🙂