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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.
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'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.
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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