Worst Band To Play Woodstock 99

I'm not saying it's 100% negative. Just like, it's a fucking bro-fest, if left to their own devices and without stuff to offset that - free potable water, better infrastructure, (including security) - they are going to do shit like that. Even if the burritos were reasonably priced! Even if there was grass and not tarmac!

Like, one of the few events I've been to in the past year was Mosswood Meltdown (formerly Burger Boogaloo) and it was pretty fucking chill and respectful. Part of it was organization, including who was booked to play, but a lot of it, tbh, was the fact that a significant amount of the crowd was like 40+, there were a lot of women/female identified people, there were people there with their little kids (it was super cute btw).

I know you will clown me for this, Whiney, but when they were showing the fires and destruction and hand-wringing about property damage, I was like, yeah, yeah, that's like, what the aftermath of large protests look like where I live.

i mean there *was* fire

― Mr Haaland's Opus (Neanderthal), Friday, September 9, 2022 2:06 PM (twelve minutes ago)

^ gets it

You're right for, like, Metallica and Korn, but it would take a time machine or fan-fiction to know what B&B would think of Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock

― Histoire de BradNelson (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, September 9, 2022 2:01 PM (twenty-five minutes ago)

uh, B&B's tastes were fairly predictable ... I think we can safely place LB and Kid Rock in the Beavis & Butthead genre

idk if I ever detailed my experience as a young teenage nerd wrt Woodstock's 94 and 99, but

I was 14 when Woodstock 94 happened and I basically stayed home all weekend and watched it on pay-per-view. I obviously would have killed to go, but I lived like 1,300 miles away and couldn't drive, so I had to settle for TV. A lot of my faves were there (Primus, NIN, Chili Peps, Porno for Pyros) and looking back, it's really wild to see how the collective understanding of "alternative" culture really was somehow wrapped up in this huge monster festival. Like at the time — to me at least — Sheryl Crow and Blues Traveler felt "alternative" somehow, Salt-N-Pepa and Cypress Hill were in their boho stages, they could have even retconned Dylan at that point and I wouldn't have blinked. Imagine how my life could have been changed if I stumbled across the WOMAD stage or Aphex Twin? The big headliner was PETER GABRIEL!

So Woodstock 1999 rolls around and I'm 19, in college, I had a little red truck and I could hypothetically drive to NY if I wanted, and the lineup is all bands I hated and all really represented the slow creep of commercial interests into so-called "alternative" music. In retrospect, it's a little funny to think that the Spin Doctors was somehow more "pure" than, like, Limp Biz, but at least in 1994 it felt like the horse was actually pulling the cart. My thought was basically "why would I go to this?"

I think the HBO doc (which I hope I never watch) points to "the zeitgeist" or some shit, but I just think it was just a completely different audience.

Like what do all three Woodstocks have in common: Loud music, copious drugs, lots of nudity and a playground-like atmosphere thanks to mud (or shit). The crowd that attended 94 saw the music and mud and drugs and nudity and fitted this utopic countercultural idea to their own (mainstream-abetted) counterculture of the time. A lot of the crowd that attended 99 saw the music and mud and drugs and nudity and came wanting to get shitfaced and grab women.

The Chili Peppers (who played 94 *and* 99) are a great example of a band that — in the '90s — appealed to both sensitive alterna-types AND jock douchebags. It's not the Peppers' fault that one brought nice kids and the other brought pricks. I think the sensitive nu-metal kids who liked Korn and Limp Biz from TRL (all of whom were in jr high or high school aka younger than me and were probably watching on MTV or pay per view like I did) were probably pretty cool and probably turned out great. But I think a lot of the 20-somethings in 1999 really just took the wrong messages from the music and we're still feeling the repercussions. Like at it's core Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock and DMX really does represent a full fruition of the pan-racial Rick Rubin 1986 dream of hip-hop and rock music coalescing into the pop music of alienated youth. Korn played a song that legit has the screaming coda "I'm a faggot!" I think a crowd of 100,000 people screaming "I'm a faggot" is more utopic than people give it credit for — not to mention DMX getting all 100,000 white kids to defang the dreaded n-word by turning it into a chant of brotherly love.

It's not these bands' fault that some people just liked the anger and the nihilism, but the bookers should have been able to figure it out

ha i def identified as a sensitive nu-metal kid at the time. i did not watch woodstock 99 on ppv, had no interest, not sure why

At the time I pretty much thought that anyone my age (19) who liked this stuff was a total dumbass, and it's pretty funny that it would be the lil Brads of the world who were best absorbing its emotional layers. I'm sure there were a lot of Jane's Addiction fans who were throwing Birkenstocks and whatever when I was too young to see em

I went to Woodstock '94. I was reviewing it for a magazine of some sort so we managed to get a hotel nearby and I went up with a photographer friend of mine.

I went up very cynical - I remember asking every band in the interview tent how much they were being paid to play or why they didn't play Bethel '94, the competing fest that was supposed to be the more organic, One of the guys in Aerosmith answered me by smashing his thumb and forefinger together and smiling so I was not entirely off bas, but maybe I didn't need to be so boorish about it all.

My attitude kind of changed when I saw King's X play. Here was a band I had followed since I read about them when their debut album came out and loved. I enjoyed watching them attain whatever successes they had, contributing to it somewhat in my own way by writing about them, and seeing them play to so many people was just amazing to me. I really felt the band's spiritual approach connect with hundreds of thousands of people and it was beautiful and changed my whole mind about things.

I wound up borrowing my photographer's camera one night and when he went back into the hotel, I stayed behind to roam the grounds and take pictures. I love those shots - people at tents, people caked in mud, all kinds of faces, girls lifting their shirts for my pictures was a trip! Walking around all night I had numerous people offering me drinks that they snuck in. Or maybe they were allowed, but that doesn't seem right. Regardless I got nice and toasted and had no place to sleep it off.

I wound up befriending a girl who let me crash with her. We had sex while Metallica played, I can still recall the sound of the band in the distance and the low chatter from people walking around her tent. It was really surreal for me, a metal geek getting laid at Woodstock. And I never saw her again and do not even recall her name.

I didn't go in 1999. I don't think I could have topped the event five years earlier so even without the anarchy, it was for the best.

It's not these bands' fault that some people just liked the anger and the nihilism, but the bookers should have been able to figure it out

that's what I meant about it being a bro-fest and the organizers should have figured this out and planned for it better. Idk, I was a college alt-rock DJ in 1994, and I thought the line-up was a bit underwhelming, mostly stuff that I had to play because BRU was a commercial station and we had to follow the playlist. I went to Lollapalooza that year (the year it was at some old air force base with shitty freeway access, as opposed to the typical stadium-type venue, so we sat in traffic for like 5 hours and I missed Nick Cave, but I did get to see the Breeders, who were cool, though I really wanted to see Nick Cave. Anyway, the Woodstock 94 line-up was even less exciting to me. ...

By 1999 I was no longer working in radio, I was 24 years old and living on the other side of the country, and the Woodstock 99 bands/aesthetic were so divorced from anything I liked ... except for maybe like, Willie Nelson (lol) and maaaayyyybee Metallica because that was like imprinted in my brain from high school.

I was hanging out with a friend who is my age the other night and mentioned I was watching this documentary, and he had basically the same aesthetic disregard as I did, though, James Brown he had to say was legit cool because he's the dude that put on the last show James Chance played in SF lol.

my friend put on the James Chance show, not James Brown ... but repping James Chance and not liking James Brown's music is like ... very suspect (total side note; my friend is down for James Brown).

I felt a very buried sense of embarrassment and sadness awaken watching both of these docs. I was 15-16 in ‘99 and seeing those clothes, those bands, and the general “aura” of the kids from that era just brought back so many memories of feeling entirely out of place.

All respect to people who dug the music and found a way to fit in, but that cultural moment was the absolute worst for kids of a certain sensitive bent in a small town.

I mean adolescence sucks in general, not unique, but the specifics totally reignited some kinda PTSD.

my friend put on the James Chance show, not James Brown ... but repping James Chance and not liking James Brown's music is like ... very suspect (total side note; my friend is down for James Brown).