Trainwreck: Woodstock '99
Year: 2022
Directed by: Jamie Crawford
Starring: David Blaustein, Michael Lang, Ananda Lewis, John Scher & Colin Speir
Episodes: 3
BBFC: 18
Published: 08/09/22
Directed by: Jamie Crawford
Starring: David Blaustein, Michael Lang, Ananda Lewis, John Scher & Colin Speir
Episodes: 3
BBFC: 18
Published: 08/09/22
I wouldn’t exactly consider myself a big music fan, never have been, but you’d have to be living under some kind of rock to have never heard of Woodstock. The image that often springs to mind for people is the original 1969 Woodstock, where peace and love were the driving force behind what was at the time the largest music festival ever, becoming a momentous occasion in popular culture and a defining moment in history for people of that generation. But thirty years later the name Woodstock would become soiled by corporate greed and mismanagement, exactly the thing the ‘69 festival stood against. Netflix’s new three-part documentary series takes a look at Woodstock ’99 and tries to work out just what went wrong.
Following a disappointing twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock in 1994, Woodstock founder Michael Lang along with promoter John Scher planned to make the thirtieth anniversary in 1999 bigger, ‘better’, and primarily recover all of the money they lost with Woodstock ’94. With three days of rock and roll planned at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, Woodstock ’99 was set to be the true successor to Woodstock ’69. But with a lack of security staff, vendors overcharging for food and drink, a lack of sanitisation effort from the organisers, and enticement from some of the performing artists, things turned sour and what was supposed to be a concert about peace and love spiralled out of control leading to numerous sexual assaults, deaths, and a full-blown riot that left the area destroyed and in flames.
Following a disappointing twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock in 1994, Woodstock founder Michael Lang along with promoter John Scher planned to make the thirtieth anniversary in 1999 bigger, ‘better’, and primarily recover all of the money they lost with Woodstock ’94. With three days of rock and roll planned at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, Woodstock ’99 was set to be the true successor to Woodstock ’69. But with a lack of security staff, vendors overcharging for food and drink, a lack of sanitisation effort from the organisers, and enticement from some of the performing artists, things turned sour and what was supposed to be a concert about peace and love spiralled out of control leading to numerous sexual assaults, deaths, and a full-blown riot that left the area destroyed and in flames.
Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 details the accounts of organisers, staff, and news reporters that worked Woodstock ’99, as well as a handful of attendees, to try and uncover what factors led to the concert ending the way it did. Was it the fault of the attendees as the organisers would have you believe, or was it a collection of failures from the organisers that led to attendee outrage?
I feel like director Jamie Crawford presents the issue as impartially as one can. Whilst Lang and Scher were the only people defending their decisions, Crawford lets the interviewees speak for themselves and rarely gets himself involved. The staff members from the event present a reasonably impartial viewpoint, and whilst they definitely do air on the side of the problems primarily stemming from Lang & Scher, that conclusion is come to over approximately two and a half hours of thorough analysis.
The archive footage gathered from news reports, MTV, and attendees of the event is both breath-taking and horrifying. Seeing a crowd of tens of thousands move in total unison is mesmerising, but also extremely frightening when you consider that those in the middle were stuck there with no way out. Then of course seeing the chaos break out during the evening of the second night, and throughout the third day really hammers home just how dire the situation was.
I’m also not a believer in the whole ‘violent art makes people violent’ thing, but something really does need to be said about the line-up that Woodstock ’99 had, and how some acts were complicit in the events that unfolded. Heavy rock is inherently aggressive, and whilst it may not promote violence, it’s understandable that people are going to get physical when listening to it. So having a festival of ‘peace and love’ be comprised primarily of heavy rock music doesn’t really make much sense.
Then there’s the case of a band like Limp Bizkit who were encouraging the crowd to damage festival equipment and egging the crowd on when they became violent. The fact that they refuse to accept any kind of responsibility for what happened during and after their set because of their behaviour really makes a shocking statement about how much they care about the safety and wellbeing of their fans.
Woodstock ’99 will go down in infamy as one of the worst festivals that ever happened. Everything that could go wrong did, and watching it unfold over the course of this documentary is like watching the Titanic hopelessly collide with the iceberg. Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 is a great mini docu-series, and especially if you’re a fan of festivals then I feel it’ll give you a lot to think about, and a lot to appreciate about the festivals that do take proper care of its attendees.
I feel like director Jamie Crawford presents the issue as impartially as one can. Whilst Lang and Scher were the only people defending their decisions, Crawford lets the interviewees speak for themselves and rarely gets himself involved. The staff members from the event present a reasonably impartial viewpoint, and whilst they definitely do air on the side of the problems primarily stemming from Lang & Scher, that conclusion is come to over approximately two and a half hours of thorough analysis.
The archive footage gathered from news reports, MTV, and attendees of the event is both breath-taking and horrifying. Seeing a crowd of tens of thousands move in total unison is mesmerising, but also extremely frightening when you consider that those in the middle were stuck there with no way out. Then of course seeing the chaos break out during the evening of the second night, and throughout the third day really hammers home just how dire the situation was.
I’m also not a believer in the whole ‘violent art makes people violent’ thing, but something really does need to be said about the line-up that Woodstock ’99 had, and how some acts were complicit in the events that unfolded. Heavy rock is inherently aggressive, and whilst it may not promote violence, it’s understandable that people are going to get physical when listening to it. So having a festival of ‘peace and love’ be comprised primarily of heavy rock music doesn’t really make much sense.
Then there’s the case of a band like Limp Bizkit who were encouraging the crowd to damage festival equipment and egging the crowd on when they became violent. The fact that they refuse to accept any kind of responsibility for what happened during and after their set because of their behaviour really makes a shocking statement about how much they care about the safety and wellbeing of their fans.
Woodstock ’99 will go down in infamy as one of the worst festivals that ever happened. Everything that could go wrong did, and watching it unfold over the course of this documentary is like watching the Titanic hopelessly collide with the iceberg. Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 is a great mini docu-series, and especially if you’re a fan of festivals then I feel it’ll give you a lot to think about, and a lot to appreciate about the festivals that do take proper care of its attendees.