Now Streaming: Trainwreck - Woodstock '99

Michael Lang, who co-created of the epochal Woodstock Music & Art Fair back in 1969, set out thirty years later to recapture the spirit of peace, love and understanding at Woodstock ‘99. Working in close partnership with John Scher, a leading concert promoter and all around no-nonsense guy, it would be hard to overstate how deeply Lang failed to deliver on that dream. Instead of an homage to the Age of Aquarius, with attendees coming together to build a provisional Utopia, Woodstock ’99 devolved into a riot, complete with violence, arson, looting and sexual assault.

So how did Lang and his team fall so short of the mark? The general consensus, as summarized in the new archive-rich, three-part docuseries Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99, streaming now on Netflix, is that Lang and Scher got greedy, cut too many corners and produced a sub-par event.

Services and facilities were lacking, the food was too expensive, the venue (a decommissioned military base in Rome, New York) was awful, depressing and fully exposed to the broiling summer heat, and there were too few security guards and emergency personnel to attend to the needs of a quarter million-plus attendees. Pretty soon, the kids started getting unruly and tearing the place apart.

Lots of eyewitnesses show up in the film to make the case that Lang and Scher were greedy and incompotent, from Woodstock ’99 event staff to performers like Jewel and Gavin Rossdale, the lead singer of Bush, to the journalists and MTV VJ’s who covered the event. And Lang and Scher don’t do themselves any favors by sitting for extensive interviews. Both come off as glib, defensive and dismissive.

But there was something else at work at Woodstock ‘99 that the film touches on only superficially. Something that hints at what will come in the new millennium. A toxic mix of entitlement, commercialism, exploitation and free-floating rage were on full display. You could argue that Lang and Scher were just two disconnected boomers, so cut off from youth culture that they thought booking Limp Bizkit as a headliner would somehow revive the groovy vibes of Jefferson Airplane and CSNY. But fans willing travel to Rome, NY to see Korn and Kid Rock are not, generally speaking, hippies, and they have a unique, and often uniquely scary, way of behaving at shows. Looking at crowd shots now, the vibe is more WWE than Woodstock, Coachella or even Lalapalooza.

So maybe Woodstock ‘99 does capture something generationally defining, just not in the way that Lang or anyone else might have hoped. And all that said, at least some people seemed to have a good time. Tom and Keith, two Woodstock ’99 attendees who appear in their adult form throughout the docuseries, speak for that contingent. As Keith says, “it was the best time I’ve ever had, and 22 years later it’s still probably the best time I’ve ever had.”