The media called it at the time “the worst festival of all time”. However, big names like James Brown were on the bill, les Red Hot Chili Peppers, Korn, Sheryl Crow, Moby, Offspring, Muse, Metallica… But it is not for its musical content that Woodstock believed 1999 left its mark on history, but rather because of the madness, the anarchy, the violence and damage perpetrated on this occasion. Events on which returns abundantly the documentary mini-series proposed for a few days by Netflix, the aptly titled “Chaos of anthology: Woodstock 99”.
Everything had started well, however, with the idea of celebrating the 30th anniversary of the most important rock festival of the 20th century, the Woodstock in the summer of 1969, in Rome, an American city located about a hundred kilometers from the original location. Michael Lang, organizer of the first and back in charge for this new edition, saw it as an opportunity to once again celebrate the values of the hippie era, love, brotherhood, mutual aid. But, before even starting, the project got off to a bad start. Because Lang’s partner, a certain John Scher, is there, and he does not hide it, to make money.
This is the whole point of the documentary, which offers multiple testimonials from participants, who experienced the event from the inside, promoters, those around them, the technical team (safety, health), participants , journalists who had covered the festival, and even musicians, like Jonathan Davis, the singer of Korn, or Fatboy Slim. The film brings together a plethora of archival images, often taken from videotapes, where we see excerpts of bands on stage (like Flea, the bass player of the Red Hot, playing totally naked, or Wyclef Jean, of the Fugees, facing an impressive incessant deluge of projectiles launched from the public), but also everything that happens around.
State police intervene with batons
What to understand that, quickly, the situation degenerates and that the gathering is transformed, crowd side, into rock’n’roll bacchanalia, even into an orgy. Security service totally overwhelmed in the face of 250,000 excited spectators, abundance of drugs, all under a blazing sun and while food and drinks are sold at exorbitant prices (the smallest bottle of water costs four times its price in the trade), ignite the powder. The last evening, it’s even the apocalypse.
Thousands of free candles were distributed to people to brighten up the night atmosphere. They will be used to start a fire, then many others, before, when the festival is over, enraged spectators start to break everything that comes to hand, which results in particular in the burning of twelve semi-trailers. , before the state police intervened with truncheons in this “war zone”, as one witness described it. Worse, while sexual assaults have already been reported in the previous days, we will then learn that at least four rape complaints have been filed…
If the documentary relates all this very well, it is a pity however that it puts these extremely serious events on the same level as the literally disgusting toilets from the first day, or the fact that the site very quickly became a gigantic garbage dump open. Anecdotes that will make those who lived through the festivals of the 1980s and 1990s smile, when the notion of well-being, even hygiene, often escaped the organizers completely…
Ditto for the accusations made against groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Limp Bizkit, guilty in the eyes of some of having completely put an already heated public into a trance and of having refused to calm things down. We can also regret that not a word is said about the fact that Michael Lang, here questioned a few months before his disappearance, in January 2022, hardly scalded by this fiasco, had tried, in vain, to go up a new edition in 2019for the fiftieth anniversary of the first Woodstock!
« Classic Chaos: Woodstock 99 », American documentary mini-series by Jamie Crawford, 3 episodes of 45 to 51 min.