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Roughly one and a half years after first reading about it here and elsewhere I decided to finally binge-watch the 3-part Netflix miniseries about the infamous Woodstock ‘99 festival, released as episodes of the Trainwreck documentary series. I guess I’m lazy like that, or there are hard limits to my curiosity. Anyway, as I’ve commented on it here before, I did read and hear commentaries about this documentary and the one released earlier by HBO on the same subject, and based on these I assumed that I’ll be seeing some another tiresome woke Netflix slop about toxic masculinity and nu-metal being horrible and cringe. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised but also found that the rather little amount of woke commentary in the series seemed to be included in a rather ham-fisted and clumsy way.
To first address what was probably driving the dismissals/accusations about the series being woke propaganda slop: the topics of sexual harassment and assault are regularly brought up in it, which is understandable as this was eliciting much of the negative media focus on the festival. Based on the series there were three interconnected phenomena that were routinely taking place. One: women in the crowd flashing their tits, usually while being drunk or drugged, and prompting guys standing nearby to grab and grope them. Also, women who stage-dived were often groped all over. Three: as nudity was completely normalized from the beginning, which I imagine had much to do with the extreme heat, there were many cases of naked or semi-naked, similarly drunk or drugged women stumbling around and then getting surrounded by sleazy guys, usually also drunk or drugged, who also went on to grope them.
Plus there were rapes taking place, usually in tents and vehicles as mentioned by two interviewees, with a featured news segment mentioning 4 such cases being reported to the police. All this is mentioned in passing, except for one probable case of statutory rape which happened in a commandeered vehicle inside the rave hangar. I say 'probable' because the witness who described it said the otherwise blacked-out girl looked underage and it seemed like some guy just finished boning her, but he wasn’t sure. It also bears mentioning the context, namely that naked chicks were getting boned left and right in the dark next to the walls inside the hangar.
To finally move on to the culture war angle: there are two female interviewees relatively extensively commenting on the subject; one is a black former MTV reporter who curiously claims that the MeToo phenomenon was sparked by incidents and sexist behaviors such as these and a former attendee who was 14 at the time of the festival who said she’s just thankful that these behaviors are no longer considered acceptable.
I watched this and thought MeToo was obviously driven by multiple things, but I’m sure average drunk dudes groping drunk naked girls on festivals is definitely not one of them. Also, how do you then explain the 18-year time gap between the two? As someone of some experience at rock and metal festivals I also wondered: surely these behaviors cannot be said to be normal and acceptable during music festivals. What I think is fair to say is that they were routinely occurring on these particular festival, and that social and cultural factors that are peculiar to the late ‘90s were at play.
For example, widespread nudity was not the norm at the original festival, at least nowhere near to that extent, as far as I know, as evidenced by the many pieces of archive footage also included in this miniseries. Only by the late ‘90s did social licentiousness reach such an average level that such behaviors were normalized. Girls flashing their tits during music shows (and/or getting drugged on Ecstasy) is another expression of this, and I don’t think this was considered normal until the ascendance of nu-metal and rave, with both genres dominating Woodstock ’99. But still, it’s not like groping and touching was seen as a routine pastime during every similar festival in those times, I guess.
To mention some other things:
Curiously no member of Limp Bizkit was interviewed even though many Millennials apparently scapegoated them for the entire, well, trainwreck. Their former manager, on the other hand, was featured and he predictably denied any allegations, and it didn’t appear to me that the show’s narrative was trying to contradict him. However, it appears to be clear that him and the RHCP are responsible for cluelessly inflaming an already agitated and destructive crowd even further when an orgy of vandalism was already poised to break out, their only excuse being the organizers clearly not communicating effectively their request to help tame things down. On that note, no member of RHCP was interviewed either.
The incompetence on display on the part of the organizers is just hilarious, especially in included news segments of the bosses giving press conferences. A complete and delusional denial of the reality on the ground, one rosy and baseless statement after the other, refusing to take responsibility and shifting blame to a small number of evildoer attendees even on the morning after the disaster already happened. The mayor of the host town also came across as a complete dunce during those events, putting on an optimistic façade and actually having the temerity to even openly invite the organizers to return and put on another festival sometime later, doing all this at a point where everything already went to literally shit and things were to fall apart completely in a few hours.
While not openly naming late-stage capitalism as a culprit, the documentary creator clearly consider it to be the main culprit, and for a good reason, I think. Despite all the bullshit and pretense of doing everything to honor the great legacy of the original Woodstock, the overriding objective was to make maximum profit, driven by the bad example of Woodstock ’94 not turning any profit at all, and this went hand in hand with cutting to the bare minimum the budget for any services, facilities, staff and security, while at the same time banning the attendees from even bringing their own drinking water on site.
Interesting. I was at the first Coachella that same year. It had a somewhat more electronic music focus than Woodstock 99, with one tent entirely curated by Warp Records. There was far, far less debauchery than apparently what went on at Woodstock. The composition of attendees was more hipster-y and presumably UMC, which explains some of that. I recall two guys from San Luis Obispo who helped procure Autechre for the festival.
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MeToo was probably a mix of cohort effects and the effects of technology. It used laws which existed in the 90s, but was bolstered by the internet's power to bring together women to make accusations against men all at once. It also relied on an ample supply of feminists, which the MeToo generation supplied more sufficiently than previous generations. Debauchery at Woodstock 2 would have been way harder to prosecute than today because nobody had smart phones. Most people probably didn't even have cell phones. There are few to no recordings of what went on, nobody got "their rapist's" snapchat and exchanged instant messages, police might struggle to prove an accused man even attended, without the easy investigative tool of phone location records.
As a side note, the evidence produced by mobile phones is fascinating to me. Some time in the last 10-20 years, it became nearly impossible to get away with murder or any other serious crime. The main exception being situations involving some gang-banger in the ghetto and law enforcement doesn't particularly care.
Not really, at least in the US.
In the hood, you do not get away with anything for long. Friends of the deceased usually know well who did it, and prefer to deal with the perpetrator (and his friends) themselves. This is how old American self sufficient spirit looks like.
"Perfect murders" in classic detective stories style would be:
1/Victim dead, death recorded as due to natural cause, accident or suicide, no murder case opened.
2/Victim went missing, no missing case opened because, well, no one missed the victim.
How many of such cases are here is impossible to estimate.
I'm open to evidence against my claim, but the cite you provide doesn't say WHICH homicides are remaining unsolved.
So your claim is that the 58% figure quoted in your article consists mainly of homicides outside the "hood"?
The figure consists of homicides solved by formal white man's law, as opposed to ghetto street law.
How many people really get away with murder in such sense that they face no adverse consequences in their lifetime (excluding guilty conscience, if applicable) is unknown and unknowable.
So it sounds like you agree that, outside of the "ghetto," for the most part homicides get solved. Is that right?
But we can set an upper bound on it, agreed?
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I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.
Woodstock '99 is one of my first memories from transitioning from childhood to adolescent. One of my siblings wanted to go to it but there was no way my parents would allow it. When all of the MTC reporting came out, the focus then (that is, 1999/2000) was on how bad it was for all of the fans. Mostly, the focus was on heat, water, food, and shelter inadequacies. There were definitely reports of the sexual assaults, however, they did not take center stage. My thinking is that even MTV back in those innocent (lulz) days of 1999 didn't want to dwell on such heavy issues. I could be wrong.
There was zero "woke" angle and zero "this was particularly bad for the female attendees in general." I think there's something revealing about that. As "progressive" as MTV has always been, they, up until the Great Awokening, still believed in gender roles within the context of popular music. Rock Star dudes, of course, banged groupies. Pop Idols (Spears, Aguliera, Etc.) would make dancey-dance songs and then mix in some power ballads about being dumped. Boy Bands would do dancey-dancey almost without exception and the tween girls would swoon but Boy Bands definitely would not bang them. The details don't really matter. The point is that there were assumed "roles" (even within this progressive media outlet) and different actions were permissible - or not - based on which role a person occupied.
I don't think that's the case anymore. Part of the great awokening was a homogenization in all directions. Rock Stars can't be drunk messes who bang groupies anymore. That's toxic masculinity. At the same time, Teen Pop Idols can be weirdo hypersexual entities (thinking of Sabrina Carpenter here). And everyone can (should?) have some sort of "my mental health struggles" part of the biography ready to go at anytime. It's all so authoritarian.
I read a note a few weeks ago that pointed out that describing something as "late stage" only really makes sense retrospectively, or for a phenomenon which has a predictable end state (e.g. the last few weeks of pregnancy are "late stage pregnancy"). Describing our current economic condition as "late stage capitalism" carries more than a whiff of wishful thinking. Indeed, I predict that capitalism will survive all of the people currently using the phrase.
A few years ago I used to see stickers for some Irish socialist party dotted around Dublin, prominently featuring a quote attributed to noted Irish socialist James Connolly, which said something along the lines of "the time for reforming the capitalist system has passed. It must be destroyed." When I searched for the exact wording a few months ago I was unable to find it, so he may not even have said it at all. In any case, I'm sure you've guessed the punchline: Connolly died 110 years ago, and a far greater proportion of the human race lives under capitalist economies than communist/socialist ones than did in his lifetime. Turns out the old girl had plenty of life in her yet.
Perhaps this is unfairly charitable of me, but I prefer to read the phrase as "capitalism of late", that is to say, it means "recent capitalism" rather than "capitalism near the end of its life".
Probably most people who use it are indulging in wishful thinking, and have hopes of some sort of imminent economic reorganisation, not to say revolution, but the word 'late' by itself can be read in a less ridiculous way.
As others in the thread have noted, the specific phrase "late stage" is reminiscent of "late stage cancer". I think people who use it in the absolute rather than the relative sense are thinking of it this way, and therefore, are not hopefuls looking forward to a revolution, but doomers who anticipate that runaway capitalism will literally kill the planet - or at least Civilization As We Know It - in the foreseeable future.
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You can still be dedicated communist while believing that communism will win in far, distant future. It is hard, but not impossible.
The canonical example is classic of Soviet science fiction, Andromeda by Ivan Yefremov.
Context: Soviet science fiction during Stalin's time was bound by "close limit" rule.
No daydreaming, no wild space fantasies churned by capitalist hacks as opiate for the working class, just describe scientific and technological breakthroughs that are coming in the near future.
Usual plot was: In 1946, heroic Soviet polar explorer gets lost and freezes solid in the arctic ice. Later, in communist future, he is discovered, thawed and revived into full health, and his old friends (in their young and vigorous 120's) get him into flying car and show him the wonderful communist world of 2026.
Andromeda is not like this.
It is utopian communist future, that happens to be far future. Geologic scale future, when all that is left from our civilization is black radioactive layer in the strata (and some mysterious artifacts).
It is clear why such work was problematic, even during the post-Stalin thaw when big K himself promised victory of communism in 1980.
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I’d prefer not to start discussing something here that is only tangentially related to this miniseries, nor am I an economist or a redditor for that matter, but if you wish to discuss late-stage capitalism in general on this site, I’ll be happy to take part. To keep this comment concise I’d make the following argument.
In early-stage capitalism: the concentration of capital is yet of a low level, some natural resources are still untapped and not depleted, some markets are still unclaimed and unexplored, the low-hanging fruit is generally yet not picked, market forces did not yet eat away at social norms and cultural traditions (fertility rates and family formation rates are still high, and labor is plentiful), the environment is not yet poisoned and contaminated all over. In late-stage capitalism, none of that is true anymore.
"Late stage capitalism" is phrase born of Marxist revolutionary optimism/wishful thinking.
"Keep fighting, comrades! The clock is ticking, the bourgeois pig system is crumbling! The masses are waking up, the revolution is just around the corner! Trust the forces of history!"
No one wants to imagine that we are still in early stage of capitalism, and communism will finally win sometime in the 40th millenium.
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“Late Stage Capitalism” is a reference to Marx’s statement about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalist economies. All the twenty-dollar bills get picked up and everyone starts scumming the margins for tiny increases in efficiency.
The growth of tipping culture in the US, as much as I dislike it outside of specific traditions, does feel like a negative sign for capitalism: "you can just ask people if they want to pay more, and sometimes they do!" Whole careers have been built around Patreon and pay-if/what-you-want models.
On the other hand, this feels less Marx ("from each according to their ability") and more Banksian post-scarcity: "from each according to 'eh, why not?'".
If only!
When only some people tip, they get to play a little prisoner’s dilemma. Those who pay the surcharge reduce the cost of labor to the employer, and thus the cost to any free riders. In turn, the non-tippers benefit themselves (and harm the employee) more than they inconvenience the employer.
From each according to “how much do I want to be (seen as) an asshole, today?”
That's interesting, because I see a slightly different prisoner's dilemma. If I tip in advance, I'm paying a modest premium to get better service than everyone else; to reduce the chance of anyone adulterating my food/drink, etc. But if everyone tips in advance, employers reduce hourly wages and we're all back to square one. And I don't get better service. It would be great if customers could coordinate and agree never to tip, but as with most prisoner's dilemmas that is difficult.
So basically, I see the tippers as the defectors while the non-tippers are the cooperators.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone tip in advance.
But if that were the case, yeah, it’s a race to the bottom the other way.
DoorDashing is like that, tipping an advance. You do it as an incentive to give great service, not as a confirmation of great service given. Predictably I'll leave a generous tip but they won't come to the door, wanting me to go out to a parking lot (I usually order only when at a motel) and forget things.
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As guy mentioned, it's getting pretty common. I find it pretty offensive when (1) I am being asked for a tip before the service has been performed; and (2) all the person is doing is handing me something over a counter.
Nevertheless, I sometimes tip in advance in hopes of getting better service. For example if the person is preparing a mixed drink and therefore has discretion over how much effort (and alcohol) to put into my order.
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The "opportunity" to tip in advance is all over coffee shops, and in more and more quick take-out places (ice cream parlor, etc). You order your drink, they punch it into their tablet kiosk, then flip it around to you and it asks how much you want to tip before you swipe your credit card. It's pretty awkward to tap "other amount" and enter "0". I've seen on the internet (i.e. no idea if true) baristas saying they'll spit in drinks where they don't get tipped.
Oh. Oh, duh. Yeah, I didn’t even think of that as advance. To me, it’s the end of the interaction.
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Heh, I recently got to answer a tip prompt on a credit card reader from a sole proprietor.
There is certainly an element of this, especially IRL. But there are also examples like Andreas Kling writing much of SerenityOS and the Ladybird browser while paying rent with donations for BSD-licensed software.
This was probably something built into the software and not something deliberately chosen by the business.
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"Werner Sombart, who used the phrase Spätkapitalismus (literally "late capitalism") in his 1902 work Der moderne Kapitalismus. Sombart was developing a stage-theory of capitalism, arguing that the system passed through distinct historical phases: early, high, and late. His framework was descriptive and evolutionary, not necessarily apocalyptic."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
The gist of it is that it's a shibboleth and a cue to boo the outgroup on command.
If there's anything someone dislikes about modern consumerism or globalization, it's a convenient brush to paint with. Gentrification? Late stage capitalism. Rent too damn high? Late stage capitalism. Netflix enshittified its offerings? Late stage capitalism.
In this regard it serves exactly the same social function as "neoliberalism" once did.
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Looks like it only made it into the third volume? So the term is "only" a little over 100 years old now, and the "stage" it purports to describe is only a little over 110 years old.
To be fair, Sombart describes the previous two "stages" as being about 150 years long each, so maybe he wouldn't have thought we're quite due for the end of his last one yet?
If you ask for details, the short-term plan usually boils down to some form of palace economy, with the interviewers imagining themselves among the decision-makers inside the (in this case metaphorical) palace rather than among the decision-targets outside. The long-term plan in theory is for their wonderful planning to allow everyone to flourish and thereby become some sort of New Soviet Man, who will simply make correct and selfless decisions himself and thus allow the decision-makers to return back to their labors. In practice for some reason the long-term never seems to come.
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No idea about a canonical definition but it makes sense to me that forms of social organisation have a life cycle similar to e.g. tech like Google Search.
So for capitalism:
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I think its just a rhetorical trick to suggest that the transition from Capitalism to something else is nigh, and all the weird, distasteful, negative aspects of society right now are therefore proof that we're near the end.
And maybe, by continually suggesting this, actually encourage behaviors that bring the transition about?
"Late" as a temporal stage can only be defined in relation to the actual end of a thing, right? If the end is indefinite, it is incoherent to identify something as 'late' prior to it actually ending/resetting.
Not like anyone is going to call them on their missed prediction if we're still doing Capitalism in 30-300 years.
“Late” can be used like “mature,” I think. Stable in its development. Perhaps ossified or stagnant, even.
I agree that most people using the term are more interested in prophesying the end of capitalist systems. They’ve been doing so since before Marx himself. He framed it as “tendency of rate of profit to fall”; under that metric, “late stage” would mean “relatively low rate of profit.”
'Late' can also mean 'recent' or 'current'; viz. the War of Southern Treason being called 'the late unpleasantness'.
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The people who use the phrase use it in the way you would say "late-stage cancer". You can infer what they think of capitalism from that. It's usually college-age people or redditors who used that kind of phrasing initially, though it's become common enough that you see it pop up elsewhere from people who don't necessarily hate capitalism (often in the way capitalism is blamed for the excesses of consumerism). In general, it expresses that capitalism is unsustainable and that the thing that's called an example of late-stage capitalism is an example of how a dying capitalist system will break down and fail, or of how capitalism ends up killing its host.
Or if they want to make a more historical point: they use it in the way you'd say "Late Republic", the period of the Roman Rebublic that was characterized by civil wars, mass slavery / slave rebellions and internal instability.
Same result, really.
Or the Late Empire, alternatively.
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Where three people died, eight women miscarried, and the logistics were so badly planned that the organisers had to appeal to local farms to provide food and water?
I still don't understand why Woodstock occupies such a vaunted stature in the American imagination. "Hendrix played 'The Star-Spangled Banner', but he made it all, like, distorted and stuff. Far out." Okay?
I see that others already gave detailed answers. I’d add a couple of things. Michael Lang, the organizer of the original festival was also an organizer of Woodstock ’99, and probably (the documentary doesn’t go into detail about this particular aspect) had a big role in promoting the event as them paying homage to the original after 30 years, resurrecting the old spirit of peace and harmony, bringing people together and basically providing the same great experience. It was the BS they kept repeating even as the disaster unfolded, in order to conceal what a naked money grab it was actually supposed to be.
You and I will probably never understand Woodstock because neither of us are liberal US Boomers (I presume) nor were we there. With regards to its cultural legacy, the deaths and miscarriages don’t matter one bit. It was surely the one defining, uniting life experience for hundreds of thousands, taking place before their illusions and ideals were forever shattered.
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The stuff around Woodstock is "good ol days" type remembering by Boomers (including by plenty who weren't there) about how great their early 20s were (basically an Onion headline about some guy remembering how great and trouble-free the world used to be, which just happened to be when he was 22). It got cemented by a hagiographic documentary released in March 1970. If you watch the original with none of the later extras, it looks like a 3day party with amazing music.
In hindsight, it was easy to paint as the highwater mark of the 60s. Altamont was December 1969. The Manson murders were summer 1969 but the trial didn't start until summer 1970 (which is amazingly fast by modern murder trial standards). Not hard to pull them together into a death of the 60s montage.
I like pointing out that the summer of love was 1967, and there were already people calling BS on the whole thing at that point. Also worth noting that HST claimed the highwater mark was SF in the mid-60s, not anything about Woodstock.
🎶 Those were the best days of my life 🎵
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https://theonion.com/area-man-always-nostalgic-for-four-years-ago-1819566584/
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Yeah that's basically what I've come to think about it. This NYT article about its history. Basically, it was a muddy, disgusting mess, that mostly became famous because of a very carefully edited movie about it that came out a year later. The iconic Jimmy Hendrix performance was actually the last act, a day after it was supposed to end, and most of the crowd had already left. They had no no bathrooms, limited water, lots of rain, and 800 drug overdoses.
Was it less violent than the 99 version? .. maybe? The music at least was less angry. And there's less evidence of violence. But my suspicion is that there was actually a ton of sexual assault at the original event, it just didn't get recorded because there were a lot fewer cameras back then and everyone was high. Those 60s hippies were nasty, and there's lots of other disturbing accounts of their bad behavior.
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I remember hearing in another documentary that later about 20 million Americans claimed to have been there...LOL. There was also a running joke among hippies: if you say you remember being there, you're lying.
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It’s worth noting that in my bubble, Woodstock is just some people doing drugs in a desert, including among the elderly.
Edit: it shows how much importance we put on it to not know it was held at a different location from burning man. I don't understand why 'some losers did drugs at a concert' is famous.
As @VoxelVexillologist notes, Upstate NY isn't a desert; it was famously a mudpit in the original and 1994 and 1999.
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Not a word I associate with upstate New York, usually, although I'll admit I've never been to Woodstock.
Comparisons with modern Burning Man in Nevada probably aren't that far out of line, though.
It actually took place on the area of a dairy farm.
Yep. Gemini AI amusingly positively compares the "mud" from the original Woodstock with the "mud" from Woodstock '99, claiming the latter was contaminated with port-a-potty overflow. Well, I'm sure it was, but not only did the original Woodstock have the same problem, even without that the "mud" was probably 40% cowshit.
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I'm not sure that three people dying is unusual for a supposed attendance of 400,000 people over the course of three days.
The annual death rate for 25-29 year olds in the United States in 2023 was 1.24 per 1000. Source.
((1.24 expected deaths / 1000 people) / 365 days) * 400000 people * 3 days = 4.07671232877 expected deaths.
The actual attendance might have been smaller than 400,000, the average age different, etc. And the math might be simplistic. But this gives an idea of the math, at least.
As for the vaunted stature in the American imagination...
I'm a big fan of the music of that time period and I find that other people who are interested in that time period usually don't put much emphasis on Woodstock. It was just one of many famous music events from back then. Woodstock is more commonly made central by narratives that try to capture the 1960s in a really quick synopsis. It has become an easy stand-in for the 1960s, so if you want to refer to that time period you can just show a couple seconds of Woodstock footage, same as how if you want to really quickly refer to the early 1940s you can just show a couple of seconds of footage of Hitler giving a speech.
I think many of us have seen such history synopses on television. It goes something like this: couple of seconds of Elvis dancing, then JFK assassination footage, then the Beatles landing in the US clip, then a couple of seconds of Woodstock, then some footage of Nixon, then the Sex Pistols doing "Anarchy in the U.K.".
Some of the music performed at Woodstock is really good but I think that most of the musicians who performed at Woodstock played better on other occasions. I think that Hendrix's Woodstock performance is overall not very good. From that show, I like Woodstock Improvisation more than Star Spangled Banner, although it is sloppy.
I think Hendrix was best in the studio. I like his studio Star Spangled Banner much more than the Woodstock one. 1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) is fantastic.
I would imagine those 1.24/1000 deaths are dominated by traffic accidents and, secondarily, fatal overdoses. It’s not like 1.24/1000 25-29 year olds are just dropping dead at random.
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This reminds me of something I forgot to mention: one attendee did die during Woodstock '99. Interestingly this is not even mentioned once throughout the 3-part series.
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But that only invites further questions. 400k people attended Woodstock, with three deaths (and between 4-8 miscarriages) in three days: it's universally remembered as a festival built on free love, hope and optimism. 300k people attended the Altamont Free Concert, with four deaths in one day (including one killing self-defense): it's universally remembered as a uniquely horrific event, the decisive end to the hope and optimism of the 60s hippie movement. When people talk about how awful Altamont was, are they really claiming that it was (going by your maths) four times more lethal than expected, and one-third more lethal than Woodstock? From the way people talk about these two events, that's not remotely the impression I get.
Another metric: Woodstock '69 had a fatality rate of 0.75/100k, while Altamont's was 1.33/100k. I just have a hard time reconciling the disparate reputations these two events hold in the popular imagination.
I think it’s obvious. Of the three recorded deaths at Woodstock, one was a simple accident (you shouldn’t fall asleep on a hayfield where tractors move around) and two were drug overdoses. Compared to this, there were 742 recorder nonlethal overdoses according to Wikipedia. I imagine any jurisdiction in the US affected by the opioid epidemic (more or less all of them?) would be rather happy to produce such a ratio in their police reports. There was not one recorded murder or rape. Compared to this, hired security stabbed a man to death in Altamont, which is a significant difference. (The other three recorded cases of death were due to mundane accidents.)
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I can’t imagine that they score the same on overall level of violence.
More importantly for public perception, though, none of the Woodstock deaths happened in the front row. On camera.
Also, not one recorded case of either murder or rape in Woodstock.
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Altamont didn't have a tremendously large number of deaths for such a large event, but it was violent in a way that Woodstock, from what I've read at least (I like the music of the time period but am not an expert on these festivals), was not.
It was alleged, though disputed, that some bands and/or managers arranged for the Hells Angels to provide security for the performers. It true, it was a very bad idea. The Hells Angels were unpredictable and violent, which should have been known at the time. Hunter Thompson's book about them, which described them as being close to dangerous wild animals despite the author's heavy counterculture sympathies, had already been out for 2 years at that point.
There were multiple reports of Hells Angels getting into violent melees with the crowd even before the murder of Meredith Hunter. A Hells Angel even punched a musician, Marty Balin.
In another incident, Mick Jagger, singer for the Rolling Stones, was punched by an unknown assailant when he arrived at the venue.
To add to the narrative, Rolling Stone magazine, which back then was actually influential among the youth, wrote a story soon after the festival that described it as a disaster.
It's also possible that the fact that the race of Meredith Hunter played a role, given the racial tensions of the time period and the fact that the youth counterculture was generally looked to with hope that it would help to resolve these tensions.
I think that the actual violence of the event combined with the journalistic coverage and the desire for simplistic, broad-brush-stroke narratives ("end of an era!", "counterculture dream turns dark!") to give the event its narrative resonance.
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Boomer Lore, basically.
They had some great music, that much is true.
Woodstock was a last big hurrah before reality set in. The Altamont free concert where some Hells Angels killed a concertgoer (and a bunch of other stuff) happened a mere 4 months later.
So they go from genuinely believing that free love, free drugs, and free music had the power to change and fix the world, to eventually facing down the fact that all of those things had some major downsides.
I don't know what I expected, "black man stabbed to death at 60's music festeval," to look like, but this didn't dissapoint.
It's like a Family Guy sketch.
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I understand that the Altamont free concert is widely understood to have served as the death knell of the optimism of the 1960s hippie movement. But I genuinely don't understand why Woodstock hadn't already accomplished that. Three people died. I appreciate that three people dying from negligence is less dramatic than one person being stabbed to death: but still, what kind of exchange rate is this?
Huh: in addition to the lone stabbing at Altamont, there were also three accidental deaths I hadn't heard about. The hope was that Altamont would be the "Woodstock of the West". I guess they got what they wanted, and then some.
Woodstock was planned for 50,000 people and ten times that number showed up. There were a couple accidental deaths, but no violence, despite the fact that security was woefully inadequate on paper. The myth was that a half million well-meaning people could overcome hardships like bad weather and traffic nightmares and still have a good time. Altamont was completely different from the beginning, with fights breaking out throughout the show. One of the biggest problems was that the stage was only about 3 feet off the ground, and there was a crush of people trying to climb on it throughout the show. The Hell's Angels they hired (for $500 in beer) to protect the stage area were drunk and unqualified, so there were constant scuffles in front of the stage. Even before Meredith Hunter was killed, the atmosphere was so bad that the Grateful Dead noped out. That this only happened a few months after Woodstock meant that the juxtaposition was fresh in people's minds, and it was easy to paint Altamont as the end of an era. It didn't help that across the pond, the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was beset with similar problems.
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Well the original Woodstock had the benefit of there being a Documentary crew on site and, in the final cut, basically valorized the entire thing rather than focusing on the controversies or failings.
And I'm sure most people formed good memories of it in retrospect.
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