FEATURE:
2 More Days of Peace and Music
Marking Thirty Years of Woodstock 94
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BETWEEN 12th and 14th August…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images/John Atashian
Woodstock 94 took place. I am going to end with a playlist of songs from artist who played the festival. Marking twenty-five years of the original Woodstock, the 1994 celebration took place amid a flurry of nostalgia and mud. There was a mix of some established artist and relative newcomers on the scene. Billed a ‘2 More Days of Peace and Music’, it is a festival whose thirtieth anniversary should be talked about. As is almost inevitable, a festival that could have done with constant good weather suffered somewhat. Things started hot and dry. By Saturday afternoon, festival-goers were subjected to storms, whereabout the fields became thick with mud. Held at Winston Farm, New York-around a hundred miles (160 km) north of New York City, over 350,000 people attended. 164,000 tickets were sold, so there was a lot of fence-hopping and people sneaking in. Because of the increased crowds and unexpected weight, and the fact that security could not cope, there was no difficulty for many attendees to enter with beer and other banned items. For a festival that was about peace and harmony, there saws a real threat to that. The quality of the music and the importance of the festival was undermined by the lack of respect from those who climbed the fences. You can learn about Woodstock 94 and those who played here. I am going to come to a few features. Before a couple of features from 1994, this from Louder Sound took us inside a clash of cultures. In a mad year for Metal, this music and spirit was brought to the surface at a huge festival:
“Mud was even more omnipresent for Woodstock ’94 than it had been in 1969. At the back of the fairgrounds, fans danced in dirty-brown, knee-deep puddles. In the moshpits, they slid into one another as if they were fighting on ice skates.
And other bands, especially Green Day, turned a potential disaster into a free-for-all party. When the crowd started throwing clumps of dirt at them, they embraced the chaos, flinging it back and triggering a giddy, chaotic mud fight.
By the end, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong had dropped his pants and a security guard had accidentally clocked bassist Mike Dirnt in the mouth, knocking out some of his front teeth.
The show did for Green Day what the mud costumes did for NIN; footage of the show was repeatedly splashed across MTV and three months later Green Day’s second album, Dookie, hit No.4 on the charts.
If there was a theme song for the festival, it’d be Primus’s My Name is Mud. But rather than trash the venue – as some fans did at Woodstock ’99 – or get mad and leave, the majority of crowd members revelled in it.
Motivated by recreational pharmaceuticals, primal lust or a combination of both, they spent as much time frolicking in the mud at the back of the festival grounds as they did in the audience.
“There was shit going on back there that had nothing to do with what was going on by the stage,” recalls Blind Melon guitarist Rogers Stevens. “It was like Lord Of The Flies. You could vaguely hear music and there were giant mud puddles with naked people writhing around. Some of them were dancing, some were, uhh, doing other things.”
The line-up for Woodstock ’94 included alumni from Woodstock ’69 (Santana, Joe Cocker, Country Joe McDonald) and old-schoolers who didn’t play the original festival (Jimmy Cliff, Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan).
But most of the highlights were newer, heavier and more contemporary bands. In addition to Nine Inch Nails and Green Day, the event featured Metallica, Aerosmith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jackyl, Porno For Pyros, the Rollins Band, Candlebox, Collective Soul, King’s X and Primus.
Alice In Chains were originally booked but had to pull out since vocalist Layne Staley was in drug rehab. As a consolation, guitarist Jerry Cantrell took the stage at the end of Primus’s set to join a jam redolent of Led Zeppelin’s Dazed And Confused.
“What was going on [for the original Woodstock] was the best contemporary bands for 1969,” Metallica’s Lars Ulrich told MTV before the group’s monster set.
“Now, we have the best contemporary bands for 1994. Music has evolved and society has evolved. Anyone expecting this to be a reprise of what went on 25 years ago should have their head examined.”
In 1993, the Woodstock team rented out the 840-acre Winston Farm in Saugerties, New York. It was the location where Woodstock 1969 was scheduled to take place, before the owners got cold feet, forcing promoters to move it southwest to Max Yasgur’s Dairy Farm.
The line-up was announced on June 14, just two months before the concert. Some celebrated the news. Some didn’t. Purists argued that the new acts – especially the heavier ones – tainted the legacy of the original Woodstock.
Others complained that the $135 ticket price and corporate sponsorship (including abundant Woodstock merch and a pay-per-view simulcast) killed the organic, grass roots vibe of the 1969 event.
Communities around Saugerties worried that local highways and roads weren’t large enough to accommodate street traffic from 200,000 expected attendees.
“The mainstream press was negative from the start,” recalls John Scher, then president of Polygram Diversified Entertainment, which co-promoted the event with Woodstock Ventures. “For months they said, ‘There’s gonna be riots and crime.’ That didn’t seem to stop anybody from buying tickets, but it made our lives pretty hellish.”
Originally, promoters planned a two-day weekend festival across August 13-14, but added Friday to the schedule when they realised there was a surplus of groups that wanted to play, and that they could entertain campers who arrived early.
Jackyl were the first metal band to play on Friday. Vocalist Jesse James Dupree took the stage in an Uncle Sam hat and a mirror shard jacket that weighed 40 pounds. He started by pouring whisky over the crowd. Then someone tossed a joint onstage and he sparked up, unconcerned about the area’s strict drug laws.
“They were being a little heavy-handed about drugs and alcohol, but how can you have a Woodstock without people smoking a little dope?” he asks.
“We were having fun in the spirit of rock’n’roll and we woke everybody the fuck up because our adrenaline was spiking.”
Metallica burned through 15 songs in two hours, opening with their cover of Budgie’s Breadfan, then ensnaring the masses with a pyrotechnic barrage of hits, including Master Of Puppets, For Whom The Bell Tolls and Enter Sandman. During One, two minutes of machine-gun fire and flashpot bursts illustrated both the celebratory vibe of the event and the pre-millennial angst of the era.
After Metallica, Aerosmith took over for a post-midnight set, and the mood shifted from stark and explosive to fun-loving and oh-so sleazy.
A glance at the tracklist of the Woodstock ’94 live album is a reminder of how solid the event’s line-up and performances were for metal fans. NIN’s Happiness in Slavery won a 1995 Grammy award for Best Metal Performance and Metallica’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was also nominated.
In addition, tracks by the Rollins Band, Jackyl, Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Primus stood strong alongside classic rock numbers by Dylan, Peter Gabriel and Joe Cocker.
Like its predecessor, Woodstock ’94 was a celebration of cultural diversity and musical innovation. Significantly, it was also a snapshot of a moment when metal groups and loud alternative bands influenced by metal, punk and classic rock brought the spirited sounds of the counterculture into the mainstream. Two days of rain, mud and overcrowding couldn’t stop the (r)evolution”.
There are features that were written around the time of the festival. It must have been quite a strange and intoxicating environment. In a year when Grunge was dying or changing radically, there was this shift in terms of influence and tastes. I wonder whether a festival that harked back to the peace and love of the original Woodstock was doomed and ill-fated in 1994 – a time when that very much wasn’t the spirit. This feature from The New York Times talked about some minor discord among a festival that was largely harmonious:
“Saturday's late-night lineup had emphasized the anger and alienation of current rock. Nine Inch Nails snarled its bitterness, followed by Metallica's hard-riffing songs -- some grinding, some jet-propelled -- about death, dismemberment and other apocalyptic fears. Metallica was both streamlined and weighty, an efficient machine that generated sing-alongs and waving hands in the audience as far as the eye could see. A Song Without a War
Aerosmith, which followed, seemed supercharged by competition. Its songs are part blues-rock, part arena-rock, poised between the Rolling Stones and later heavy metal. In a set that stretched two hours, to about 3:30 A.M., Aerosmith's blues roots and cartoonish humor were amply displayed.
Today, much of the music was similarly kindly. The morning opened with Country Joe MacDonald reprising, from the 1969 festival, his "Fish" cheer and "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixing-to-Die Rag," which seemed marooned without the Vietnam War it protested. Shirley Caesar, Phoebe Snow, Thelma Houston, Cece Peniston and Lois Walden then sang classic gospel songs with fervent virtuosity. Arrested Development's songs were determinedly positive, urging unity, tolerance and respect for history, but on stage its bass riffs and catchy melody phrases overwhelm any didacticism.
The Neville Brothers, whose experience dates back through three decades of New Orleans rock, could have been Arrested Development's elder relatives, generating all their rhythms from live instruments and meshing in buoyant New Orleans and island-hopping rhythms. Santana, which appeared at the 1969 festival, brought its own galaxy of Latin rhythms and searing guitar solos, while Jimmy Cliff used reggae songs to urge one-world love.
Both baby boomers and younger fans of so-called "classic rock" savored brand names like Traffic and the Allman Brothers Band. Paul Rodgers, formerly the lead singer with Free and Bad Company, sang chest-heaving arena-rock versions of old and new songs; Slash, the guitarist from Guns 'n' Roses, sat in.
The Spin Doctors offered a tepid version of grooves learned from the Allmans and the Grateful Dead; not wasting time, they have already recorded a new version of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock”.
I am going to end with another feature from The New York Times. An overview of a huge and populous festival from 1994, they highlighted how the music faded and there was the start of this muddy trek. Starting sunny and perhaps positive, there was something of a bitter edge that came in. The bad weather and some unrest. Even so, the importance and scale of Woodstock 94 cannot be overstated:
“Thousands of people, hauling rain-sodden bedding and wearing garbage-bag ponchos, found themselves forced to stand in a mile-long line for hours before they were able to board shuttle buses that took them to parking lots as far as 30 miles away. Many set out on foot. Some found their cars stuck in the mud at the parking lots and paid local residents as much as $100 to pull them out with tractors.
But through it all, the three-day concert rolled toward its finale with remarkable precision -- on two vast stages, four huge video screens and pay-per-view television. In the end, hundreds of thousands of people had gotten what they came for, a mega-concert by some 50 scheduled bands and numerous special guests, executed for the most part without a visible hitch.
At the concert's peak, officials estimated that 300,000 to 350,000 people were living in a space the size of Central Park and that medical personnel were treating a new patient every 20 seconds. There were countless bad reactions to drugs, broken bones and cases of exhaustion and dehydration.
Some among the over-stimulated, sleep-deprived diehard fans who remained here today said they were angry and disappointed by what the concert had become. But most appeared to accept and even embrace the conditions, as though they figured that their survival would one day become a badge of honor.
"I want to make it through," said Rich Campone, 33, a social worker from the Bronx, who said he was having fun "in a weird way" even though he was afraid to eat or drink anything for fear of then having to use one of the portable toilets. "Maybe if I could do this, I could do a lot of things."
Officials reported a second death since the festival began Friday. Lieut. Col. James O'Donnell of the New York State Police said Edward R. Chatfield, 20, of Grove City, Ohio, died on Saturday from a ruptured spleen, a pre-existent condition for which he had been taking antibiotics. Earlier, a Long Island man had died of complications of diabetes.
The police also said that two women heading home to the Chicago area were killed this morning in a car accident on the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway in Schuyler, N.Y. The driver of the car fell asleep, the police said.
Some 1,600 people had been treated in the festival's hospital, said John J. Clair of the State Department of Emergency Medical Services. Thousands more had been treated at 13 first aid tents. Dr. Ferdinand Anderson, the festival's medical director, said that during the peak period, "I would much rather have been in the Korean War or the Vietnam War in that time period."
During that time, late Saturday and early today, ambulances roared incessantly along the festival roadways, through the eerie glow of flood lights, moving patients, some in restraints, to hospitals on and off the site. Emergency medical technicians tore out of the first-aid tents and plunged into the crowd, hauling out the sick and injured, many of them covered in mud.
Yet Dr. Anderson and others said the casualties were no greater than expected, based on statistics from past events. Dr. Robert Strauss, a medical-command director, said, "It's a very peaceful crowd, remarkably peaceful." Nearby a young man with a black eye and fresh stitches in his forehead stood quivering. An 11-year-old girl, who Dr. Strauss described as "very drunk," had been treated. And Still They Came
Throughout the day, the line of departing people grew while a string of empty buses, stretching for miles, waited to pick up passengers. One driver, Dan Lail, said he waited nearly two hours to get one load. At one point, he leaned out and took a snapshot of the line of people: "I'm going to put it in the scrapbook," he said. "You know what I mean?"
At the same time, new arrivals continued to straggle into the festival on foot and in taxis, wandering out into the sprawling fields of mud and settling down near the two stages. Some had driven all night, abandoning their cars on lawns as far as 11 miles away because the state police had blocked roads into Saugerties.
People sprawled on blankets and cardboard atop the glistening mud, surrounded by brand-name trash bearing the logos of the festival's corporate sponsors like Pepsi and Haagen-Dazs. T-shirts were selling briskly. In some areas, the stench of treated human waste was in the air. "Good morning, Woodstock," an announcer called from the stage. "The sun is in our hearts."
"In this one little area, you experience everything," marveled Keith Mancini, 24, a 24-year-old waiter who had left his home in Warwick, R.I., at midnight and arrived here at dawn. "There's all this mud, there's all this discomfort and a gospel band at 10:30 on a Sunday morning. You don't even have to miss church here."
At a news briefing, the organizers seemed exhilarated by the concert, praising the people who came and how they had behaved. "If there is anything that comes out of this, it's a reaffirmation of the human spirit," said John Scher, the president of Polygram Diversified Entertainment, which promoted the event with Woodstock Ventures. "The spirit seems to be great. The kids are wonderful. The music is wonderful." Garbage Bags as Umbrellas
As the concert moved toward closing and intermittent rain continued, medical officials converted a hospitality tent, set up by Pepsico for V.I.P. guests, into a heated facility for hypothermia victims who might come in during the night. Tens of thousands of garbage bags were being given to people waiting in line to leave.
On one bus leaving, strangers argued about whether they were glad to have come. Many were; Jeff Poirier was not. Mr. Poirier, 31, a graphic artist from Bay City, Mich., had won four tickets, tents, sleeping bags and a cellular telephone from a Michigan radio station that had asked him to call in reports.
"I learned the wrong lesson at Woodstock," said Mr. Poirier. "I learned I love my meaningless little life and all my materialistic things -- my car with air conditioning, my bed, running water." He said he had enjoyed himself until the rain started. But what upset him most were announcements over the public address system that small children were lost. "My wife cried," he said.
Asked about his radio reports back to the station, Mr. Poirier said, "I candy-coated it. I made it sound like I was having a better time than I was. I didn't want to make it sound like hell. I wanted to sound grateful to the station”.
I wonder whether there will be anything planned or released to mark Woodstock 94 and its thirtieth anniversary. A significant festival that took place in one of music’s best and most interesting years, it must have been amazing and sense-altering being there! It was an amazing atmosphere and wonderful celebration…
DESPITE the weather.