‘It would’ve made so much more sense if it’d been called, like, Army Base Rock ’99 Featuring Limp Bizkit...’
I was 12 in 1999 and just beginning my brief obsession with KoRn, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson and all the rest. This came hot on the heels of a more permanent love for Nirvana, Green Day and the Foo Fighters. In my adolescent mind, all of these bands represented the same thing. Teenage rebellion. Angst. Anger. All the usual stuff that young men indulge in during their formative years. Garret Price’s excellent documentary Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage is a deep dive not just into the doomed festival itself but also what it represented. A passing of the torch from the progressive rock bands of the grunge era to the aggressive acts that made up nu-metal. And it is utterly fascinating…
Following the moderate success of Woodstock 94, an event intended to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Woodstock festival that defined the counter culture movement in the 60s, the event organisers decided to go again in 1999 to celebrate 30 years of hippy culture. The problem was that the college age kids in the late 90s didn’t give a shit about hippy culture or peace and love. They cared about breaking shit, both literally and metaphorically, and eventually the festival collapsed into riots, sexual assaults and huge fires burning through the night. Woodstock 99 tells this story in a way that is both captivating and, at times, genuinely shocking.
Just two years after Woodstock 99, I attended Leeds Festival 2001, another festival that ended in ignominy as fans rioted and large parts of the festival were set on fire. This made national news across the UK and resulted in the festival moving site permanently to somewhere that was easier to control. As I sat atop a hill watching the fires burn, I felt a mixture of excitement, awe and genuine fear. And yet, this pales into insignificance when compared to what went down at Woodstock 99. A mixture of extreme weather, aggressive music provided by Kid Rock, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Limp Bizkit et al and a lack of basic human rights (bottles of water were priced at $4 and the toilets became unusable on the first day of a three day festival) led to unprecedented riots to an extent never seen before or since at any other mainstream festival.
Despite featuring extensive interviews with journalists, promoters and a handful of musicians, the lack of the former does harm Price’s film. Nobody needs to hear this much from Moby, from example. A wider range of musical artists that featured at the festival would have been helpful, but that slight criticism aside, this is an engrossing work that captures a feeling, or a number of feelings, and bottles them in a way that is unique. There hasn’t yet been enough distance to fully reflect on the ascent of nu-metal at the turn of the century but this documentary is the first attempt to do so. Essential viewing for anyone who came of age in the mid to late 90s.