It’s fair to say that the image of the Woodstock Festival in the public consciousness bears little resemblance to reality. Sure, Woodstock was fun for those who went and performed, and the festivalgoers were quite well-behaved and content in the face of adversity there, but logistically it was a nightmare. There wasn’t enough for everyone, given that three times as many people planned for showed up because they felt entitled to going without paying, and traffic jams, shortages, and hospitalizations for health problems aplenty were needed. But it was a success in what mattered most because the people came together to pitch in, especially those from the neighboring community to help ensure the festivalgoers were happy and healthy (enough).
That giving spirit is what helped burnish the Woodstock myth, especially in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary film. But it became contorted and twisted to represent a utopia that never was, most notably for the festival’s founder, Michael Lang. The image became reality, and he has spent more than 50 years chasing the ghost of something that never actually existed. We especially saw that pre-COVID, when Lang tried to get a 50th anniversary festival off the ground, but fell apart. But it was there when Lang helped, in a limited sense, with two prior anniversary festivals in 1994 and 1999.
Suffice to say, we can all agree that Woodstock ‘99 was an absolute pile from beginning to end. Oh sure, there were plenty of great performances at the festival you can see on YouTube, but the vibe in putting it together was all wrong. Lang had ceded most of the responsibilities to John Scher, who decided to chase a fully mercenary, dollar-driven enterprise, to be the first iteration to be profitable. This is the true moment that set up the disaster to come, as choosing an unsuitable festival site, a searing heat wave which was exacerbated by surrounding tarmac, lack of enough amenities, price gouging, and insufficient sanitation ran rampant. But no one actually stepped in to help this time around. Instead the artists were left in a bubble of being unable to sense the mood of the crowd and focused entirely on their setlists and rehearsing, and the crowds were left to their own devices, which represented a cataclysm of rapes, mosh pit participants stomped to death, property damage, fires and riots.
Then and now, Scher has been incredibly odious in refusing responsibility for the way the festival was put together, saying that it was the fault of MTV (who was broadcasting the festival along with pay-per-view packages) for setting the tone, or that journalists were out to smear the festival, saying, “these few instances by bad apples have been grossly exaggerated.” Today, Scher even blames the women who were raped for going about “almost naked. These events shouldn’t have happened and I condemn it. But these girls expected to walk around this way and NOT be touched?” And this isn’t from 1999, this is more than 20 years after the fact, to boot! Lang for his part, basically has thrown Sher and the festival under the bus, saying “it’s not my festival, and it’s certainly not Woodstock.”
All of this comes together in a new HBO documentary entitled Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love and Rage, which has drawn a polarizing reception from the audience, to say the least. While critics have raved about the documentary, audiences are saying “woke-ist identity politics cancel culture strikes again to cancel nu metal bands and blame white people for everything, and saying that riots over $4 water bottles leads to Reddit incels and MAGA insurrectionists.” Even the critics praising the documentary think it is a bit reductionist in its execution, particularly for equating David Fincher’s Fight Club as helping be partially responsible for the actions of angry twentysomething white males raping women and destroying property when the story is a deconstruction of that anger and exposes its lunacy, that the Clintons and the Lewinsky affair somehow set this up, that many of the crowds were left angry because Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, that Limp Bizkit incited the riots (when the timeline has always showed the riots began during the simultaneous closing sets of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Megadeth), and certain other pontificating by people who didn’t attend the festival.
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For those who have seen the documentary on HBO/HBO Max, what do you take away from it? Is this an intriguing but flawed documentary that overplays certain facts and gets others wrong?
If you have Woodstock/Woodstock ‘99 stories to share, including if anyone attended, feel free to do so.