Growing up, I heard various stories about the infamous Woodstock ‘99 music festival. I was born only a few months after the event in Rome, New York, where the festival was held. My father attended the festival and has occasionally told me about his experiences as both a resident and an attendee. Leaving halfway through Saturday’s offerings and deciding not to return for the tumultuous Sunday, he has always described it as “a frat party gone horribly wrong.”
Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage, the first documentary in HBO Max’s Music Box series, might consider this opinion to be an understatement. It posits the events of the festival as the dangerous combination of Gen X anxiety and violent misogyny. The scary thing is that this hypothesis is far from wrong. In what is perhaps the longest-lasting opening disclaimer I’ve seen attached to a documentary, it warns you that sexual abuse and other upsetting topics are covered. If there is one piece of advice I’d like to give you, it’s to take that disclaimer as seriously as you can, as it is certainly not exaggerating. We’ll get to that a bit later, however.
Here is where the audience finds themselves when the documentary begins. After the success of 1994’s revival of the Woodstock Music Festival in Saugerties, New York, organizers Michael Lang and John Scher expressed plans to hold the festival every five years. The duo chose the 3,500-acre Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome as its newest campground for its size. As one of the doc’s many talking heads pointed out, it was ironic that a festival based on peace and love was poised to take place on a decommissioned military base. Perhaps this decision was cruel foreshadowing into just how chaotic the event would eventually become.
Speaking of talking heads, these were unfortunately the film’s biggest setback. The information provided by attendees and journalists, such as Maureen Callahan of New York Post and Wesley Morris of The New York Times, proved insightful when discussing the culture surrounding the festival. What was surprising was that the least interesting participants were the festival’s performers, who actually had little to say. Of course, their participation was not completely useless; Dexter Holland and Kevin Wasserman of the Offspring handled their conversations with surprising grace, and Dave Mustaine of Megadeth got a jab in towards Metallica’s Lars Ulrich that was very much deserved. However, Moby had absolutely no place talking about the toxic misogyny permeating the event and seemed more annoyed that he was left off a wooden lineup sign than anything else.
This brings up another sour note in the documentary, and that was the participation of Scher. The promoter seemed desperate to shift the blame for the festival’s chaos to anyone else besides him and his team, as well as belittling the tragedies that occurred. It is clear that the documentary wanted viewers to not believe Scher’s excuses, as his interviews are often cut in between chaotic footage and counterpoints. However, the question of whether or not such vileness should even be platformed might come to mind. After all, this was the man who not only blamed women for their experiences at his festival but also left the town it was held in a state of shock.
While many of my father’s stories about the festival were comical (he recounted seeing Dave Matthews Band next to a nearly-naked man holding a Bob Marley flag), he always made it clear that it was an uncomfortable experience for him. However, there was one story that he only recently disclosed to me that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. While keeping to himself and his small circle of family and friends, he heard drunken and distant yells of “show us your tits, don’t you know where you are?” Needless to say, he decided to leave the festival once and for all before Sunday.
It’s no wonder that it stuck with him for so long, and I also understand why he only just divulged this to me now. He had attended the festival mere months before I was born. He told me that Woodstock made him nervous for the misogynistic reality he feared I was about to be born into. Knowing how nervous he was about this explains how I was raised; how I was able to develop both traditionally feminine and masculine interests and how he always reminded me how strong I was. No wonder he tried to shield me as much as possible from the misogyny so ingrained in early 2000s rhetoric and culture.
This was not an issue ignored in Rage. It holds little back in terms of the abuses that took place on the premises to the point where it might seem excessive. After all, why should discussions about assault be accompanied by such distressing imagery? On the other hand, it almost seems necessary. These recordings of women having their breasts fondled and behinds grabbed were broadcast for everyone paying for the MTV pay-per-view to see. They’ve been posted numerous times on YouTube. We have seen this same exact footage before and thought of it as normal festival behavior. What the documentary does with these scenes is force viewers to look inside themselves. It wants you to question how you have normalized violence against women in seemingly safe environments. Those who find themselves distressed by such imagery should adhere to the aforementioned trigger warning, but if you can handle it, it’s an inner journey necessary to take.
There is a lot to process in Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage. There is so much, in fact, that it rarely gives the audience the time to actually sit with it. If presented as a miniseries, perhaps the documentary would have carried more weight. From the varying quality of its talking heads to its murky ethics, it is a documentary ill-suited for those who had no prior knowledge of the event.
However, watching it alongside my father was an eye-opening and anxiety-inducing experience. He sat up on the edge of his chair for the majority of the documentary, hands propped underneath his chin in contemplation. It is a form I’ve seen him take multiple times. However, I had never seen it with this much tension before. He and I had been preparing for Woodstock ‘99’s cultural reevaluation for what seems like forever. Now that it’s arrived, neither of us knows how to feel.
