![]() I saw a creepy, silent line of cops in riot gear I smelled enough ambient pepper spray to make my eyes tear. Later, I went back into the riot, watching a group of kids trying to turn over a tractor trailer they eventually succeeded, breaking someone’s leg in the process. I filed a poorly written story about Flea’s nudity and the moment Anthony Kiedis asked for used tampons to be thrown onstage and, oh yeah, all the fires. I trudged to a soon-to-be-looted merch area, bought myself a pair of boots, and finally made my way to the press area, where my editor yelled at me for disappearing. (I do remember a couple of bleary-eyed shirtless dudes applauding the ingenuity of this maneuver – thanks, bros.) ![]() I ditched my shoes and socks, rinsing my feet off with two dollars worth of water from a half-empty bottle someone left behind, and used discarded plastic bags to cover my feet. I was trying to rush back to the press hangar to file a story on the looming chaos, but my high-top Converse couldn’t survive the trench of sewage, leaked from the porta-potties, along the way. I watched as huge fires bloomed throughout the field during the performance some activist group had cleverly passed out a bunch of “peace candles” beforehand. ![]() Most of all, I remember the journey back from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ set. I managed to interview the Who’s John Entwistle after he played a hilariously ill-placed set on an emerging artists stage, possibly hitting a higher decibel level than any of the nu-metal dudes – and learned he was almost entirely deaf. A guy in a baseball cap urging a huge crowd of white people to indulge their worst impulses – what could go wrong? I missed a lot of music I might have wanted to see – Metallica, DMX, James Brown, countless others – while I was typing away in the hangar about other sets. I stood in the back of a field and watched an ocean of kids bludgeon each other, sometimes to the point of fracturing bone, as Korn unleashed something undeniably powerful – a sound that seemed apocalyptically new back then and is now vaguely ridiculous, which is how it goes. There was music at Woodstock ’99, yeah, and not all of it bad. Risky Business: Every Tom Cruise Film, Ranked - Updated Some of my recollections are just wrong – turns out Fred Durst was wearing a dark blue baseball cap, not his usual red one (to be fair, I was also on hand for the filming of the “Nookie” video in Long Island City that year, and the two events have blurred.) Two decades on, my actual memories of the event are an impressionistic mess, despite the fact that I spent a year afterwards working on what would become an award-winning investigation of the flaws in its planning with my colleague Chris Nelson. I was there, reporting for the now long-defunct website SonicNet, trudging back from distant stages to the press’ designated plane hangar to file report after report that no one at the festival could actually read, with smartphones still thoroughly nonexistent. By the time they got to Woodstock, it sucked. Twenty years ago, perhaps not unreasonably, they tore shit up in the wake of a loud, ugly, pointless gathering of fans and bands and rappers and DJs who had nothing in common with each other and no real reason to gather, except to enrich the organizers and the people selling them bottles of water in 100-degree heat for four bucks each. The riotous kids of Woodstock ’99 are all pushing 40 now, and maybe they’ll pour a little extra lighter fluid on the grill this weekend in memoriam (they can come back, baby – rap-rock never forgets). They were dreaming when they broke stuff forgive them if they went astray.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |