Trainwreck: Woodstock 99, Netflix
The disaster of Woodstock 99 seems to be what happens when you spectacularly misalign real motive and PR positioning.
Thirty years after the original Woodstock, which is remembered as one of the greatest multi-day music events of all time, one of the main organisers tried to do it again.
Michael Lang got together with some of the biggest names in the industry to try and put on the mega-concert.
A similar effort five years earlier – imaginatively titled Woodstock 94 – was only partially successful. It was well attended, but the fencing surrounding the site was insufficient and only half the revellers had tickets, thus the event didn’t make any money.
The ’99 event was not going to have this problem, the promoters vowed.
To ensure this, they selected as a venue the recently closed US Air Force base at Rome, New York, about 150 miles from the original Woodstock location.
Rome, as befits a military installation, had excellent security, big empty hangars which had housed aircraft and an almost endless expanse of asphalt.
The plan was to get 250,000 paying guests through the gates and to sign up as many as possible for a pay-per-view event on television.
Lang connected the event with the ‘love and peace’ hippie motivation of 1969 by defining the ’99 event as a community peace response to the Columbine school massacre earlier that year.
Netflix tends to stretch documentaries to breaking point to create a series, but in this instance the three 45 minute-episodes (taking viewers chronologically through the three-day event) works well.
Things started to go wrong almost immediately.
The principal difficulty was that while promoters signed, not unreasonably, what they believed would be the most attractive acts, they didn’t account for the atmosphere a selection of nu-metal acts would bring.
And it wasn’t a ‘peace and love’ vibe.
Limp Bizkit and Korn and their messages of resentment and anger attracted a young, and often aggressive, male audience.
This combined with insufficient toilet facilities and rubbish collection, over priced food and drink and a stonkingly hot weekend of weather with no shade on site and acres of asphalt to reflect the heat, created an ugly situation.
Security, which it was suggested was reduced for commercial considerations, was unable to cope and the event became a Lord of the Flies free for all.
The concert-goers tore the place apart and burnt much of it to the ground. The opening scenes of the documentary show the aftermath and it’s like looking at a Ukrainian town that’s been shelled by the Russians.
Sexual assault, in particular, was rampant, with some of the descriptions in the documentary distressing to listen to.
It’s rather terrifying if you have children of festival-going age, but nonetheless a powerful documentary on the consequences of doing things for the wrong reasons.
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Sky Sports Action, today and last Saturday
Highs and lows, boom and bust – it’s the natural cycle of the world.
However, the New Zealand rugby union team appeared to be an outlier, dominating the sport for decades.
But the crash appears to have finally arrived for the All Blacks, conincidentally or not, just three months after they sold almost 6 per cent of their brand to a private equity firm
They have lost five of their last six tests, including a home series to Ireland and a humiliating defeat to South Africa by the highest margin in almost a century last Saturday.
Today they face the Springboks again, in what looks like a final chance for coach and captain.
South Africa versus the All Blacks has always been the defining rugby union clash, today may be an epoch making one.
