during the summer of 2012 didn’t stop more than 55,000 people from trying to attend this three-day festival that featured Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen – but it did impede their trips via car and boat across to and from the island. Nearly every aspect of the festival – a program seething with angry-young-male rage, its location on a former nuclear-weapons storage site, the crass omnipresence of commercial opportunism masquerading as rebellion, the widespread program of alcoholic and narcotic self-obliteration, the Lord Of The Flies-ish final hours of flaming, drum-driven anarchy – was as emblematic of the ’90s as love beads and long beards were of the ’60s.” “Is it entirely surprising that Woodstock ’99 dissolved into senseless, directionless violence?” asked Toronto Star columnist Ben Rayer in his postmortem. The festival was capped off by some showgoers taking it upon themselves to hear Red Hot Chili Peppers’ cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” as a call for actual flames. It was, as Jenny Eliscu wrote in Rolling Stone, emblematic of “a generation that might answer the question, ‘What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?’ with a punch in the nose.” But the lengthy list of problems with the three-day festival was almost as long as the porta-potties’ queue: Soaring temperatures on the Griffiss Air Force Base tarmac led to water being even more of a necessity, and those concertgoers who hadn’t brought supplies from home experienced sticker shock when they were told that bottles of water cost four bucks a pop horrorcore duo Insane Clown Posse (who no doubt learned how not to run their own Gathering of the Juggalos during this experience) tossed $100 bills into the crowd, causing a minor stampede pre-RFID era fake wristbands meant the grounds were packed beyond what organizers expected and male attendees were generally gross toward their female counterparts, with sexual assaults reported on the grounds. Woodstock ’99 was, from the start, more aggro than both its 1969 forbearer and the 1994 anniversary edition – it rode the growing hard rock trend and featured a bill that included thrash titans Metallica, nu-metal upstarts like Korn and Limp Bizkit, and the politically charged Rage Against the Machine. Image Credit: Joe Traver/Newsmakers/Getty Their dumpster-diving eventually led to a clash with security that would later be referred to as the “Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge.” It was a nasty, violent scrape that, according to one observer, “looked a bit like the old Wild West meets Mad Max.” Glastonbury skipped its next year in order to reconfigure its security setup, and the travelers were gradually pushed out of the Glastonbury picture. After the official show came to a close, they hung around the site in order to forage through the grounds’ plentiful trash supply. A group of travelers, roving citizens who had been a constant presence at the festival since its inception in the 1970s, had been given their own adjacent field that year to host free music by the likes of Ozric Tentacles and Hawkwind. But the festival’s immediate aftermath was the real disaster. The 1990 installment of Britain’s best-known music festival, wrote James Delingpole of the London Telegraph, amounted to “three days of mud, rain, putrid latrines and near-asphyxiation,” thanks to soaked grounds and a then-record-setting crush of people in attendance to hear The Cure, Sinéad O’Connor, and acid-house guru Adamski.
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