Anyone who had Fyre Festival down as the worst festival of all time has obviously never heard of Woodstock ‘99. An event set up to invoke the peace and love ethos of the original music and arts festival in ‘69 ended in violence, riots and utter carnage, leaving the site and the attendees looking like they’d been to war. In comparison, Fyre now looks like a roaring success.
The British director Jamie Crawford is now exploring what went on in the apocalyptical four-day weekend in a three-part documentary series for Netflix called Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 documentary. Speaking with the key organisers, the musicians who played and some die-hard fans, the series helps piece together the shocking story and work out what went so horribly wrong.
The whole event is a wild story that seems to have been largely forgotten in the years since. Here are the most shocking moments in the gripping documentary:
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The deluded organisers downplaying all the chaos
Crisis, what crisis? While the festival literally burned around them and a “sea” of young people went on a violent rampage, organisers Michael Lang and John Scher hailed it as a success to assembled media. Footage of the daily press conferences show them not only downplaying all the violent incidents, but totally misrepresenting the truth. In the old footage, Scher is seen telling the press: “We had some amazing music. Then you’ve got knuckleheads, maybe 50 of them, causing trouble… so let’s try to focus on the overwhelming positiveness.”
As one irate reporter says in the film: “There were people being mistreated, there were people being maimed. They glossed over all of that”. True fact: a year later, Scher went on to win Pollstar Magazine's Promoter of the Year in 2000. Funny how the music industry works, isn’t it?
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The assaults, and the lack of accountability from organisers even now
Amid all the feral behaviour, there were four reported rapes and reportedly many cases of sexual assault over the weekend. The organisers dealt with this in the same way as everything else: downplay and deny. One particularly harrowing moment is recalled by one of the festival staff after the weekend was over: “When I got back into the office, I started getting phone calls. It was a hysterical mother, talking about how her daughter had been raped.”
One of the organisers, John Scher, even now, 23 years on, doesn’t take accountability for the horrors that women faced in the festival: “Woodstock was like a small city, you know? All things considered, I’d say that there would probably be as many or more rapes in any sized city of that… but it wasn’t anything that gained enough momentum so that it caused any on-site issues, other than, of course, the women it happened to.”
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People were essentially drinking raw sewage, leading to outbreaks of trench mouth
With water at $4 ($7/£6 by today’s standards) a pop – rising to $12 at the end of the weekend by mercenary food traders – amidst heatwave conditions, it's no wonder there were 25 minute queues at the public water fountains on site. But after the festival cut corners on sanitation contractors, a health and safety inspector found that human faeces was leaking into the drinking and shower water, making a toxic “shit mud” that many people were happily splashing around in. As one festival-goer reveals, she woke up on the last day with “a very sore throat, cold sores all over my lips, ulcers all over my tongue and my gums and in my mouth,” adding that she couldn’t “eat, drink or talk… I found out I had something called Trench Mouth”. Yes, that’s the same Trench Mouth that initially affected World War I soldiers when they experienced prolonged periods of trench warfare, meaning they couldn’t clean their teeth and ended up with painful and bleeding gums. Bleak.
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The truck crashing into Fatboy Slim’s truck
One terrifying part of the festival’s downfall occurred during Fatboy Slim’s set in the rave hangar. After being told, “Oh it’s a bit chaotic out there” (putting it mildly) during his headline set, a group of people stole a van and drove it into the middle of the tent, which was packed full of thousands of ravers. A machete was found in the van, as well as a teenage girl who the stage manager believed had been sexually assaulted. Fatboy Slim’s set was halted, the crowd turned on him and he was bundled out of the hangar for his own safety. “There was adrenaline coming out of my ears. I did exactly what I was told and ran,” he remembers in the film.
The Peace Patrol selling their work shirts for $400 each
The Peace Patrol were the anti-establishment security of sorts, however it turned out they were just a bunch of local kids drafted in to help with the running of the festival. And what are kids going to do at a festival? What everyone else their age is doing: get drunk, get high and try to pull. However, one of the former Peace Patrol in the documentary revealed the festival brought out his entrepreneurial side, as he scammed punters into thinking the bright yellow branded t-shirt allowed VIP access and sold two of his shirts for $800. Just enough for a bottle of water and a slice of pizza at the food stands, then.
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Footage of the Monday morning after the festival
A charity group had the ill-advised idea of handing out 10,000 candles to the attendees (to wave aloft during Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Under The Bridge). It wasn't long before people started to use the open flames to set fire to everything in site, rampaging through the festival. “It looked like a war zone. Trash and smoking fires everywhere,” comments Pilar Law, when surveying the site with her mother, Lisa. There’s one scene in which twelve great big trailers literally burnt into shells, to which Lisa sums up: “That was Woodstock ‘99, burnt to the ground.”
The fact that several attendees still think of it as one of the greatest weekend of their life
When all is said and done, you’d expect the festival-goers to still be suffering from PTSD. Wrong! “Although I had a kind of scary experience, it was a blast!” says Heather, who attended as a 14-year-old teen. “It was an experience of a lifetime.” Two others agree: “It was the best time I’ve ever had and even 22 years later, it’s still the best time I’ve probably ever had… I had the time of my life!” Chalk that up to three happy punters out of 400,000.
Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 is streaming on Netflix now.
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