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Documentary Review: 'Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage'

Powerhouse documentary shines a light on the actual human cost of a pop culture failure.

By Sean PatrickPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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Reliving the terrible memory I have of Woodstock 99 in the new HBO/Bill Simmons documentary, Woodstock Love, Peace, and Rage, made my skin crawl. It’s a memory I had apparently repressed all of these years. I wasn’t at Woodstock 99 but I recall laughing at the hubristic spectacle as it devolved beyond the simplistic metaphor of Lord of the Flies and into a genuine modern tragedy. I took dark comic pleasure, schadenfreude, while enjoying the spectacular failure of Woodstock 99 and remembering that now upsets me.

A great documentary has a significant effect on the people watching it. Whether the effect is instilling compassion or magnifying fear and dread, the best documentaries draw you into large emotional responses and Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage, brought out my ugliest memories of the event and my own ugly reaction to the event. It’s shocking and disturbing how different I feel today as compared to how I felt in 1999. Taking joy from the destruction and horrors enacted in the name of a good time makes me feel like a ghoul today.

Why? Because Woodstock 99 was far worse than I had imagined it to be. Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage lays out what happened at the festival in journalistic fashion offering the viewer the chance to examine the evidence and make your own conclusions about who was at fault. What is not in dispute is that people were at fault be they the drunken revelers in the crowd, the irresponsible artists on stage, or the conniving promoters so desperate for a buck that they cut every corner and caused a catastrophe in the name of their greedy self-interest.

Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage is directed by Garret Price and proceeds to tell the story of Woodstock 99 in a linear fashion. The story begins on the opening day, Friday, July 23rd, and proceeds through a slimy, urine and feces soaked Saturday and culminates on Sunday, the day most who remember Woodstock 99 will never forget. On the 3rd day of the supposed celebration of peace, the concert devolved into a fire fueled riot with a Red Hot Chilli Peppers soundtrack.

The documentary invites journalists who covered Woodstock 99, such as Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield, former MTV VJ Dave Holmes, and former Spin Magazine writer Maureen Callahan to share their recollections of the concert and analyze the history of Woodstock 99 from a journalistic perspective. That these stories paint a poor picture of the organizers is just something that happens organically in Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage. Opposite the people covering Woodstock 99 are organizers John Scher and Michael Lang who are given ample opportunity to hang themselves as they deny any fault in the fallout of Woodstock 99.

John Scher comes off as especially awful in Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage. Scher is given the chance to tell his side of the story and goes out of his way to take no blame whatsoever for what occurred. Instead, Scher blames MTV News for covering the festival and making it seem like a warzone. Then, Scher blames Limp Bizkit and frontman Fred Durst for inciting the crowd and then Scher blames the crowd for being rowdy and out of control. Lang, the only organizer who was actually at the original Woodstock in 1969 comes off as equally cowardly but has less to say, preferring not to directly obfuscate and by extension, hangs Scher out to dry as the face of the attempt to shift blame.

The most compelling accounts of Woodstock 99 however, come from those who attended the festival. Men and women now in their late 30s and early 40s look back on Woodstock 99 with a mixture of revulsion and regret. Poignantly, the documentary uses entries from a diary written by one festival attendee, the one festival attendee who ended up dead at the festival. Michael Derosia may have had an enlarged heart but he still died from hypothermia at a festival where the average outdoor temperature topped 100 degrees. One of Derosia’s closest friends shares the diary entries and their recollections of that day, searching for him, unaware that he’d died the night before, are very sad.

Members of the so-called ‘Peace Squad,’ the average Joes given the chance to act as security for Woodstock 99 offer yet another poignant and damning indictment of the organizers. Several members of the Peace Squad speak openly about being unprepared for the task, about being outnumbered at every turn by the massive crowd and how many of them simply took the job in order to get tickets and access passes. Though John Scher claimed that the Peace Squad were given training for security, members of the Peace Squad paint a picture of a single three hour training session during which the person in charge simply gave them all the answers and then a paper test which they easily passed.

These stories serve to underscore a part of the documentary that gets a bit of a short shrift, the many sexual assaults that occurred. Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage features a brief interview with a woman who attended the festival and left out of fear for her safety. Another female attendee briefly tells of how she started a website after Woodstock 99 in order to give fellow attendees a place to find anonymous support as many were far too afraid or traumatized by their experiences at Woodstock to report what happened to Police. These moments cry out for further exploration but the movie runs away from this topic without going into much depth. For their part, Rome, New York authorities ended up investigating four reported instances of rape at Woodstock 99, one that allegedly occurred near the stage as Limp Bizkit was performing.

Now you might understand why my skin crawls when I recall my own reaction to Woodstock 99. I thought the failure of the festival was funny. I wanted the money grubbing corporate elitists who organized a festival based on Peace and Love at, of all places, a military base, to fall on their faces so I could point and laugh. I wanted organizers who sold water for 4 dollars a bottle and invited corporate sponsors to freaking Woodstock to be humiliated on a worldwide scale and I got my wish. But I failed to understand what my schadenfreude actually entailed. I ignored the actual human cost of what I was laughing at and Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage forced me to confront an ugliness within myself I wasn’t prepared for.

That’s why I like Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage so much. It made me uncomfortable, it made me ask important questions about myself and it lends a perspective, a human dimension, to a topic that I’d dismissed as little more than a joke about corporate oldsters getting their comeuppance. The reality of that is that John Scher and Michael Lang received no comeuppance. I may have laughed at them, they may have temporarily been laughingstocks, but they’ve had the last laugh for years. In 2019, they damn near fooled everyone into letting them do Woodstock again. They continue to obfuscate and gaslight everyone over who was at fault at Woodstock 99 and that makes my own cavalier attitude at the time, all the more naïve, childish and upsetting.

Woodstock 99 Peace, Love, and Rage debuts on HBO on Friday, July 23rd.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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