Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage

In the summer of 1999 the thirtieth anniversary of Woodstock was staged on a decommissioned air base at Rome, in upstate New York. Four hundred thousand people came. Three days later the site was on fire, trucks were overturned, and there were multiple reports of sexual assault. Garret Price directs. The documentary is the first entry in HBO's Music Box series, produced by Bill Simmons. Its most interesting move is refusing to blame one thing. The asphalt ground, the total absence of shade, four dollar water, failed sanitation, thin security: all of it is on the table at once. But Price argues this was not merely an operational failure, and puts the male anger of the moment, the radio culture of those years and the tone MTV manufactured on the charge sheet too. There is a second account of the same weekend told from a different angle: Netflix's 2022 series Trainwreck: Woodstock '99, in three parts. The two are easily confused. Organisers Michael Lang and John Scher speak for themselves here, and Scher's remarks about the women became the most argued over passage in the film. Who it is for: viewers curious about the cultural weather of the late nineties and about the economics of the mega festival. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a music documentary. This is about a crowd collapsing, not about the sets.