“There were some aspects the promoters felt were incredibly positive, and they stand by that,” adds Thornton. Photograph: Frank Micelotta Archive/Getty They’d rather they said something than just have other people shape the story.”īreaking bad … Limp Bizkit fans storm the stage. “And they’re keen to have a say in their legacy. “On one level they know it went awry, but they also don’t think it was a total disaster,” says Wardle. They don’t acquit themselves particularly well – Scher is keen to blame anyone but himself for the debacle, while Lang is slippery and evasive – which makes you wonder why they agreed to take part at all. Incredibly the festival’s two main organisers, John Scher and Michael Lang, both agreed to extensive interviews in the series. You couldn’t write a more perfectly sequenced disaster. This collided with the Chili Peppers’ attempt to revisit the spirit of 69 by performing Jimi Hendrix’s Fire. Inevitably, the furious crowd decided it would be better to use it for the purposes of arson. Towards the end of the set, the Woodstock organisers – in a truly idiotic attempt to revisit the spirit of 1969 – handed out thousands of lit candles, for a planned vigil against gun violence. The audience were exhausted, dehydrated, on drugs and – thanks to the festival’s insufficient sanitation plan – had spent much of the previous 48 hours splashing around in pools of human effluent. On the Sunday night, Red Hot Chili Peppers performed to a crowd at the absolute end of their tether. But the final performance of the festival comes close. This is purely because so many bad decisions were made with such frequency that it’s hard for anything to stand out. There isn’t a single moment in Trainwreck that will transcend everything else, in the way that Fyre festival had that poor organiser who was prepared to perform oral sex on a stranger for bottled water. But, you know, human behaviour goes to dark places.”įiddling about while Rome burns … Woodstock 99. Being deprived of access to water, shade, food and being ripped off. There were physical conditions that contributed to this. Back then, it was more or less a Lord of the Flies thing. But with the more recent situation, it’s been about the breakdown of the norms of political discourse. “And definitely it’s a predominantly – almost exclusively – white, male crowd that’s reacting in this way. “You can definitely see, certainly visually, parallels between the two,” says Wardle. Forget Fyre festival the closest equivalent I can think of is Four Hours at the Capitol, the recent anxiety-inducing documentary about the 6 January insurrection. When things get really dark – an attendee steals a van and drives it through the middle of the rave tent during Fatboy Slim’s DJ set, or the crowd start tearing down the sound tower – it is genuinely terrifying. A kind of collective frenzy takes hold from the middle of the second day, and the show demonstrates how dangerous a large group of people can be when they start acting as one. This one was a celebration of mindlessly aggressive nu-metal. The original Woodstock’s lineup included Ravi Shankar and Joan Baez. This one sold plastic water bottles at $4 a pop. The original Woodstock had free food kitchens. The original Woodstock? Held on a dairy farm. Held to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the original Woodstock, which has come to be seen as a benign force of positivity, Woodstock 99 became renowned for the consequences of its spectacularly bad decision-making. Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, as it is aptly titled, is a three-part, chronologically told series about one of the most appallingly assembled music festivals in history. But something tells me that Fyre festival is going to be superseded, because Netflix is about to release a series about Woodstock 99. A film about a woefully organised festival that spiralled out of control with alarming ferocity, it was the sort of thing you had to watch through the cracks in your fingers. N etflix’s Fyre festival documentary was one of those out-of-the-blue hits that seemed to dominate conversation for months when it was released in 2019.
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