Is there going to be another Woodstock festival? There were protests by the National Organisation of Women against the sexual violence women endured at the festival, and then the official site, posted topless pictures of attendees without their consent, captioning them with quotes like “nice pair” or “show us your tits.” VH1 reported news that the promoters were being sued several times for “distress and dehydration.”Īs San Francisco Examiner journalist Jane Ganahl wrote at the time, it was “the day the music died”. After the set, the crowd were told not to panic, but there was a “bit of problem” – one of the audio towers had been torched and was set alight. The candles were used to start bonfires and empty bottles were set alight. The Red Hot Chili Peppers followed Limp Bizkit, and a nice idea by the anti-gun violence organisation PAX to get everyone to light candles they had distributed during the song Under The Bridge instead added to the terrible situation. When you're looking out on a sea of people and the stage is twenty feet in the air and you're performing, and you're feeling your music, how do they expect us to see something bad going on?” The mosh pit was out of control, but afterwards in an interview, Durst denied encouraging it: “I didn't see anybody getting hurt. During their set, Durst said: “It's time to let yourself go right now, 'cause there are no motherfucking rules out there”. By the time Limp Bizkit hit the stage on Saturday night – egged on by lead singer, Fred Durst – some of the audience began tearing wooden panels from the walls during their song Break Things. The chaosĪs the temperatures rose, so did the aggression in the bro-heavy festival line-up (as The New Yorker noted, only three solo female musicians performed over the whole weekend). Burritos cost $10, a pizza $12 and most importantly, while customers baked in the searing heat, bottled water was being shilled at $4 – the equivalent of $7/£6 in today’s money.Ī McEnroe Doc? About Failure?! You Cannot Be. The four-day party was covered by many corporate sponsors and on site there were pop-up shopping malls and ATMs all over, which would have been handy as punters would be losing money faster than Lehman Brothers in the banking crash. MTV sponsored the whole festival, running a pay-per-view of the whole weekend for $60. The organisers hadn’t made enough facilities available for their guests, and the toilets and showers were soon overflowing in the heat.ĭespite the festival arising from the peace and love ethos of the ‘70s, this ‘90s event was commercialised to the hilt. There was serious fencing all around the site, not only stopping people from breaking in, but later on, from escaping. There were very few trees or areas of shade, and campers were forced to put up tents on the tarmac. The weekend of July 22 to 25 was set to welcome a heatwave, too.

The mainly concrete and asphalt space was the worst location for a music festival, especially when the two main stages were a two-mile walk from each other. Woodstock ‘99 was held at a former air force base in Rome, upstate New York.

The two towers mud