[man] Good God.
[woman] Oh, my Lord.
[man] Is this fucking Bosnia?
[somber music playing]
[woman] Look at this.
[Blaustein] Slow down, please.
Oh, boy.
[Blaustein] At that time, I was 26 years old.
I was a rookie journalist covering this high-profile festival.
I was spending a lot of time in the press compound,
reporting back to New York City.
And it was a lot of fun…
until this happened.
And I'm looking around at all of this damage.
Carnage, if you will.
And I'm thinking, how the fuck did this happen?
[stage announcer] Woodstock '99!
[crowd cheering]
Woodstock '99, baby! Yeah!
[Scott] It was amazing.
I'd never seen anything like it.
[crowd cheering]
It was a history-making moment. Like, I can't believe I'm part of this.
Whoo! Hi, guys.
[Sara] It really felt like it was flower power
and love and music and coming together in harmony.
[Heather] There was not a doubt in my mind.
This was gonna be an experience of a lifetime.
[Scott] In the beginning, everyone was happy.
The music was good.
Put your hands up in the air.
And of course, everyone just high as balls.
[girl] Yeah, baby!
[girl laughs]
[man] Woodstock. Woodstock.
Yeah!
There was this ominous feeling. There was no control.
[boos and jeers]
This was not a walk in the park. We'd completely underestimated this.
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Whoo!
It was like this perfect storm had started to form.
[man cackling]
These kids were getting pissed off.
Yeah!
[reporter] Things are just getting out of control.
[crowd shouting]
[Kyle] Holy shit.
Some very, very bad things could happen.
[man] It's not part of the show. It really is a problem.
-[Blaustein] And that's it. -[man] Shit!
Kerosene, match.
Boom.
Holy shit. What the fuck?
It's like a scene with zombies coming over the castle walls.
[emergency sirens wailing]
It spiraled deeper and deeper into the worst demons of human nature.
This is fucking… I don't know, Lord of The Flies, man, I guess.
[Blaustein] There is no other way to describe it.
[man] Yeah!
It became a total and complete trainwreck.
[woman] Oh, my God.
[birds tweeting]
[rooster caws]
[cows low]
[reporter] The Woodstock Music and Art Fair,
the three-day exposition at White Lake and Bethel, New York,
will give you uncomplicated, unhurried, calm days of peace and music.
There are over 600 acres to roam,
bazaars to browse. Heavy traffic is anticipated.
So leave early to arrive on time.
♪ I came upon a child of God ♪
♪ He was walking along the road ♪
♪ When I asked him where… ♪
[Lewis] Woodstock is the original counterculture music festival, right?
I mean, it's basically that, and maybe the moon landing
is what you think of first when you think of the '60s.
[crowd cheering]
[inaudible]
It was the ultimate gathering of the best musicians
during the best era of music.
♪ We are stardust ♪
♪ We are golden ♪
[Rossdale] Woodstock's one of those events
that's just part of culture and part of your DNA.
[reporter] Oh, boy.
I've never seen anything like this, man.
So, this whole Woodstock story really begins with one man.
Michael Lang.
Are you in charge of the whole thing?
Yeah.
[Lang] Woodstock was amazing.
Hate to use "vibes," but there was amazing vibes in The Valley. [chuckles]
Obviously, the Vietnam War was a big thing.
We were so against it.
-You think you're gonna do another one? -If it works.
You know, for years, I didn't want to revive it.
I mean, I never thought we could have the same impact
of peace and love and flower power.
But in the '90s, I started thinking about Woodstock for my kids' generation.
They were teenagers at the time.
When gun violence became an issue for all of us.
[reporter] Two teenagers went on a five-hour rampage
inside Columbine High School,
killing 12 fellow students and a teacher, and wounding some 30 other people.
[Lang] The idea was to engage people in the issue
and to give that generation an idea of what Woodstock was about.
Which is counterculture.
No violence.
Just peace and love and music.
That was it.
You know, let's do it.
["All the Small Things" by Blink-182 plays]
[radio announcer] Experience Woodstock '99 for three days.
Over 40 of today's top bands and 250,000 people.
[man] Let's go!
Woodstock '99, the trip of your life.
[laughing]
[Tom] At the time, Keith and I, we were only 16.
-Love you, Mom. -[laughs]
[Tom] Never been to a concert before.
Whoa, I was like, "Korn's gonna be there, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine."
I was like, "Oh, my gosh. We gotta go."
Tom said, "You wanna go to Woodstock?" "Hell yeah, I wanna go to Woodstock."
Whoo-hoo! Tickets!
When I got my Woodstock ticket finally, I felt on top of the world.
Like, wow, this is gonna be probably the best time of my life.
We're going to see girls our own age and talk to them and possibly have sex.
[both laugh]
[car horn blares]
[Sara] I was very lucky that my parents didn't know anything about it.
I grew up in a very conservative, Christian home,
so I was not allowed to watch MTV.
So, it was kind of a rebellious move to actually have a ticket to Woodstock.
[man 1] Whoo!
[man 2] Whoo! We made it!
[Sara] My parents knew about 1969 peace and love,
and they're like, "That's a great opportunity for our kid,"
you know, just finding music and harmony.
My hope was to get as fucked up as possible.
[car horn blaring]
Orillia, Ontario! Fucking Ontario!
Whoo!
What's up?
[man whooping]
Woodstock '99!
So, that summer of '99, we were doing Isle of MTV,
and that was in Nassau, Bahamas, Paradise Island.
You're gonna get to see some of the famous faces
I got to hang out with, here on the Isle of MTV.
Lots of cool people…
But MTV said, "We're gonna send you back to New York for Woodstock '99."
And I was like, "Back to New York?" [laughs]
"I'm in the Bahamas. I don't wanna go back to New York."
[crowd cheers]
[Lewis] But it was gonna be the biggest party on the planet.
A quarter of a million young people,
for three days of incredible music and nonstop partying.
This was massive.
-[man 1] Right here? -[man 2] Yeah, just drop it.
[man 3] Have your tickets ready.
[guard] Once you get through, your bags will be checked, okay?
[Heather] I was 14. It was my freshman year of high school.
Um, and, you know, I was kind of a tomboy. I had like a bandanna on my head.
I had a full mouth of braces, right?
Like, I was young. I was a virgin, and then some.
I'd been to concerts before,
but never like an overnight… Never like, a festival of this scale.
It was huge.
[guard] Ladies and gentlemen, open your bags to speed up the process.
[Sara] Security went through my entire bag.
Any food was taken from us. Any drinks, actually, were taken from us.
[Heather] Most of the people that came,
they took their water,
which is so ridiculous, because it's freaking water.
[whooping and indistinct shouting]
[Scott] Obviously seeing footage from like, '69,
and peace and love, I was picturing like, a big open field.
Kind of undulating hills almost like Lord of the Rings,
hobbit-type stuff, and we get there, and I'm like,
"Oh shit."
This is a base.
[man] Ooh.
This is some shit.
[Scott] Like, now I'm wondering, like, are men in black gonna come out?
Is there a UFO in the hangar? I mean, what am I walking into here?
I mean, it literally couldn't be any further away from the original Woodstock.
What the hell happened?
[dramatic music plays]
So the elements that you need if you want to put on a festival
of this kind of scope and size are money, tens of millions of dollars,
a facility that can house that kind of event,
and a powerful partner.
And at that time, one of the biggest players
was John Scher from Metropolitan Entertainment.
You know, I was a pretty successful promoter.
Promoted a lot of big shows.
The Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, and The Who.
There's never been an event, ever,
in the history of the music business that's cost anything like this.
[Lang] John Scher is a very feisty guy.
Very tough, and to me, the right kind of partner.
So, I started discussing it with my team.
[phone ringing]
When I first learned of 1999, I burst out laughing.
"Come on. What is it, April Fool's Day?"
Surely we're not gonna do that again.
We had tried to revive Woodstock in 1994.
'94 Woodstock had its problems.
[man] How are things going?
Things are going well, except it's starting to rain a little bit.
It poured rain. The fence came down.
[announcer] Push down the fences and join the party.
At least half of the total audience got in for free.
It's not a free concert. It's a paid concert.
[cheering]
The music was absolutely amazing, but it didn't make any money.
[laughing] And then along comes Woodstock '99.
I mean, we absolutely had to make a profit.
[Rowland] Michael had found a decommissioned 350-acre Air Force base.
And he thought that meant we could make money.
They had housing for 15,000 people. They had all the roads.
They had security, they had a hospital.
They had all the stuff that we'd spent millions of dollars to build in '94.
John got totally enthused and energized about doing it again.
Quite honestly, I thought that, you know, it would make a lot of profit.
[laughing]
And I think everybody was excited.
Everyone said, "No fucking way."
"That's a bad idea."
But John stepped in to overrule the entire board
and saying, "Well, I'm the CEO. We're doing this."
So, we were left doing Woodstock again.
[reporter] History is going to repeat itself,
this time at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome.
[Lang] I know what we're going to bring to this area
is going to be the greatest show that anybody has ever experienced.
This wasn't as tough a decision for me.
Like, a lot of people think,
"Well, why would you put everything at risk politically?"
I thought it was a good thing for the community at the time,
particularly after what had happened with the closure of the base.
So I said, "If we could pull this off, this is gonna be remarkable."
This will be something that is long remembered in the area.
I know for sure that Rome, New York,
will be known around the world after this summer.
[Scher] To make sure we could sell the tickets,
we booked some of the biggest acts in the world.
Red Hot Chili Peppers,
Sheryl Crow, Korn,
Limp Bizkit.
So everybody felt, I don't want to exaggerate too much,
but that it was maybe gonna be historical.
-Come on, let's go. -You've been working out for a reason.
[Griffo] I remember we decided we were gonna christen the stage
in a traditional way.
So, we got a tie-dye shirt and a champagne bottle.
One, two, three.
-[loud clang] -[woman laughs]
The bottle would just not break.
[man 1] You can do it.
-Harder! -[man 2] That's it.
[man 3] Smash it!
-[man 4] It's gonna go! -[man 5] Here it goes!
Why don't you just pop the damn thing?
-[glass shatters] -[crowd cheers]
[Griffo] Looking back on that champagne bottle,
I now realize, uh,
maybe in a lot of ways, it was foreshadowing.
[stage announcer] Woodstock '99!
[crowd cheers]
[stage announcer] There you go! Ha-ha!
Holy shit!
Let's get ready to have a good time.
Have fun, party, and go fucking wild!
[crowd cheers]
I was like, "Wow, we're at Woodstock."
"This is happening, don't pinch me."
"I don't want to wake up. This is awesome."
[stage announcer] Woodstock '99 proudly presents
James Brown.
[crowd cheers]
[Scher] So James Brown was supposed to open the festival,
but I didn't have a signed contract.
It's the only act that I didn't have.
His agent kept calling me.
James was very insistent
on getting paid full before he went on for most shows.
"Mr. Brown's not going on stage unless you pay the rest of the money."
"Mr. Brown's not going on stage. Believe me."
You know, "You're gonna have big trouble here."
So I said to him, "There's 200,000 people here."
"They're not gonna go home if James doesn't play."
"I'd love him to play."
"I'm not giving you any more money."
So this guy's screaming at me, saying,
"This is your last chance. Either pay him, or he's not going on."
[man 1] James Brown! James Brown! James Brown!
[man 2] Boo!
And I said,
"Do me a favor."
"Just hold on just a minute. I want you to hear something."
"One, two, three."
[band plays]
-♪ Get up ♪ -♪ Get-get-get-get ♪
-♪ Get up ♪ -♪ Get on up ♪
I said, "Go fuck yourself."
[laughs]
-♪ Get up ♪ -♪ Get-get-get-get ♪
-♪ Ge up ♪ -♪ Get on up ♪
♪ Stay on the scene Get on up ♪
♪ Get-get-get-get Get on up ♪
♪ Get up ♪
[Scher] James realized the moment.
He knew this wasn't most shows.
This was Woodstock.
-[song ends] -[crowd cheers]
Yeah!
[band playing]
♪ Make it ♪
It's the biggest party ever. Like, I've never seen this many people.
[all] Whoo!
[Heather] I was super excited. Bouncing off the walls.
Just head-banging, getting pumped.
Day one, man. Day one.
[man] It's time to find some beer.
They had this big beer garden.
[all cheering]
[Lewis] People had, like, three or four beers by like, 11:00.
I was like, "You're probably not even old enough to drink."
[man] Woodstock Beer Garden. Everyone's wasted.
Whoo!
[man] What's up, Woodstock?
It was pretty free spirit for the drugs.
People are just selling them out in the open.
They're just holding up bags of whatever
and shouting out what they have.
[Keith] I noticed this dude, like, hunched over,
he got a backpack on, and he's like,
"I got these mushrooms." I'm like, "Well, I'll try them."
I don't know, I've never done them before.
And so, I'm laying on my back, tripping balls on these mushrooms,
and I look up to the sky, I'm like, "Is that a fucking UFO up there?"
[laughs]
I called my mom because she says, "Call me when everything's settled
and let me know that you're okay." But I had just dropped acid.
I'm like, "Hey, Mom, this is such a great time."
"I am having the best time." And she goes, "Yeah? What's there?"
I go, "Naked people, everywhere. It's so great."
And she goes, "What'd you say?" And I said, "Oh, I gotta go."
[busy line]
And I clicked.
[busy line fades]
The nudity. Yeah, it was everywhere.
-Boobs. -Pretty cheerleader.
There were women with notes on their breasts.
Looks good, right? Feels good.
Big, fat, naked dudes. Don't wanna see that.
Nudity is definitely unity.
[all cheer]
[stage announcer] Ten dollars, you can get the Woodstock '99 airbrush tattoo
anywhere you like on your body.
[Sara] I think that everybody wants to feel part of something,
and seeing so many women get naked
and having such a good time was liberating.
It was just kind of this free moment
for everybody to just be who they wanted to be.
At that point, it reeked of possibility and optimism.
And we, as the production crew, were just super excited.
I mean, we were young kids in our 20s
trying to pull together something extraordinary.
It was the end of the millennium,
so it felt like it was gonna be this enormous event,
and I didn't really care, really, what I was doing
as long as it wasn't cleaning the porta-potties.
Can you see everybody in the back row?
[Rosenblatt] For me, it was like a dream come true.
I was working with what seemed to be an unlimited budget
and many of the top people in their field.
[Speir] It was amazing to be able to work with Michael Lang,
the OG organizer of the original Woodstock.
[Law] I was Michael Lang's assistant.
I just was fascinated about how his mind worked, you know?
He's always super calm.
There's always this feeling that Michael has it all under control.
Back row, hands up.
[crowd cheers]
[camera shutters click]
[Law] I wanted to capture my experience.
So, I brought a video camera, and, um, I documented as much as I could.
[woman] What are you doing there?
I was just displaying the site à la the shopping channel.
[man] This is a picnic area here in front of us.
The first impression I had was, "Oh my God, there is a lot of asphalt."
[Speir] It definitely was not what I expected.
Here was this military, industrial complex
that was being converted into a Woodstock site.
It was these massive airplane hangars
and this incredibly long tarmac landing strip.
It didn't really feel like…
This is Woodstock.
We've developed the master plan of the site here.
We've got about 5,000 acres on the map.
[Rosenblat] Looking down on the site, kind of looks like a big triangle.
On this side of the tarmac is the second stage.
Over here was the main stage.
Um, up here was the camping area, and down here was the rave hangar
and where our offices were,
and it was pretty much just all tarmac in between,
with this impenetrable eight-mile wall around the entire site
so that no one could get in for free.
And the whole plan was to, like, turn it into a Woodstock dreamland.
["What I Got" by Sublime plays]
Ready?
This is the drum. It's called a lollipop drum.
There were a lot of people coming in with a lot of great ideas.
And it's a communal, interactive event,
it's the kind of thing we need around here, I think.
[Rosenblatt] The plans were just amazing.
They had this just beautiful drawings of what they'd do throughout the site.
Man, it was like a dream come true.
Because the perimeter wall was gonna be profoundly ugly,
we decided to create a peace wall so that it could be beautiful.
I photographed every inch of it.
Yeah, it was gorgeous.
[laughing]
Despite the challenges, uh, we crammed a bunch of amazing things
into that festival, from having the Tibetan monks,
to having the action park, to the movie hangar,
to the giant rave hangar.
[Law] We had high hopes for being able to integrate
some of the original values of '69 into '99.
I think that was kind of naive.
[laughs]
[crowd cheering]
[stage announcer] Ladies and gentlemen,
this year's candidate for the heart and soul of Woodstock,
please welcome Miss Sheryl Crow!
[crowd cheering]
How you doing, all you beautiful naked people?
So, Sheryl Crow, she was booked for the softer rock people.
[band playing]
♪ I think a change ♪
♪ Would do you good ♪
♪ Change ♪
♪ Oh, I think a change ♪
♪ Change ♪
♪ Would do me good Would do me good ♪
♪ Hey ♪
[crowd cheering]
[Scher] Sheryl's set was fabulous.
But, you know, there were more than a few catcalls.
"Show us your tits!"
Show my tits?
You'd have to pay way more than you paid to get in to see my tits.
She's a beautiful woman, and these guys thought they'd get lucky.
[crowd cheering]
But it was completely inappropriate.
-And it's a pretty cool… -[man] Nice rack, Sheryl!
[both laugh]
-What? -Have you made your peace with the mud?
As soon as I leave, I'm gonna haul my ass out there to the middle of that crowd
and introduce myself to a couple of those f****.
[drunken shouting]
[Scher] And it was sort of the very beginning of us saying,
"Hmm, there's an element in this crowd
that is here for more than just great music."
♪ And all the girlies say I'm pretty fly For a white guy ♪
[Holland] Noodles, would you look at all the people out here.
All these goddamn kids being drunk and unruly.
Are you guys proud of yourselves?
[all cheer]
What's up '99, man! Whoo!
The environment was just very male ego, like, beat on your chest.
White college dudes with their shirts off, screaming, "Show me your tits!"
[yelling]
[drunken shouting]
-[chimes dinging] -[spiritual chanting]
[Speir] On that first day, we had the Tibetan monks
blessing the event, just providing a sense of peace and calm.
[indistinct shouting]
But there were these frat boy types destroying the peacefulness of it,
who are just there to be dicks.
Peace, brother!
[all] Whoo!
♪ Let's get some more wannabes ♪
♪ Oh, hey, hey Do that brand-new thing ♪
[all shouting]
You know, the '90s, especially the late '90s,
were a very different time.
We're talking about the Bill Clinton scandal.
We're talking about…
American Pie was the most successful R-rated comedy that we had ever had.
It is brimming with sexuality
from a male perspective.
Then you have Fight Club
with a very interesting take on masculinity, consumerism.
We've all been raised on television to believe one day,
we'd all be movie gods and rock stars, but we won't.
But most importantly, violence.
It's a good snapshot of where the psychology may have been
of a lot of the kids who attended Woodstock '99.
[Scher] We want everybody to try to remember it's gonna be hot.
It's gonna be near 90 today.
Very important to keep drinking and try to keep cool.
It was so insanely hot. It was like, 100 degrees.
So obviously, you're dying of thirst
and feeling kind of crazy.
-Whoo! -Yeah!
[Sara] It was so hot that you literally needed to drink a gallon of water an hour
yourself to stay hydrated.
There were definitely fountains there.
But there was at least a 25-minute wait,
because they didn't let us bring anything in.
So, we went to get just a simple bottle of water.
Nobody could afford that water.
Back then, a bottle of water was probably 65 cents.
But at Woodstock, a bottle of water was a stupid four dollars,
and it pissed people off.
-Is it more expensive than you thought? -Big, fat rip-off.
Between this and this was nine bucks.
And I was like, "Why the hell is everything,
everything so ridiculously expensive?"
[man] Hey, lady.
[Speir] Initially, we all felt we were pulling the same direction,
putting together this amazing festival no matter the cost.
Why don't you just give me a list of the things you need?
[man, over phone] What I need is at least $250,000.
But then, we all started to get the feeling
that corners were being cut.
So, sincerely as I could possibly be, I really want to thank everybody.
I mean, you guys have been unbelievable.
You've done a fantastic job.
You know, this is an extraordinary experience.
There is nothing like this that happens anywhere in the world.
That being said, um, this is a money-making venture, all right?
And that was the moment for me where it stopped becoming
about the concert-goer or the festival-goer experience.
It was just cutting budgets, cutting budgets.
We need to make changes. We're not making profits.
Their goal was to make money.
And what they ended up doing was selling the food rights.
Well, wonderful. Coca-Cola.
[Rosenblatt] And unfortunately, when they did that deal,
the group that ran that for them had complete control over the pricing,
and we could do nothing about it.
All hopes and dreams of Peace, Love, and Understanding 1969
went out the window.
[Rowland] The underpinning reason of why there was '99 was to make money.
So, I think absolutely some of the sensibilities fell away
for the big, you know… the big payday.
-You're watching Woodstock '99! -You're watching Woodstock '99!
[crowd] Whoo!
Rolling four.
I mean, we also wanted to do pay-per-view.
So people who weren't there could still participate.
[announcer] Stay home for the trip of your life on pay-per-view.
It was a package price of $59.95 for all three days.
And that yielded a lot of money.
Whoo! What's up?
My name is Aaron Sadovsky, the segment producer with pay-per-view.
I was given, essentially, no rules or limits or definitions.
I'm shooting the people who came here to screw,
the people who came here to do drugs,
and the people who came here to live the life of Woodstock.
[man] Show him some nipple!
[Sadovsky] So, crazy footage was the goal.
[woman] Whoo! Yeah!
I would just push the crew
and keep coming back with beta tapes full of stuff.
[crowd cheering]
Traditionally, the TV coverage of a festival is all about the music,
but the pay-per-view element really turned that on its head.
[man] There you go!
[Blaustein] The presence of the pay-per-view cameras
encouraged festival-goers to show off
with increasingly wild behavior.
[laughs]
It just became like this crazy human zoo.
Pay-per-view! Whoo!
I told you I'd get on TV, motherfuckers!
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! You want some of this?
-Yeah! -[all cheer]
Yeah!
[stage announcer] Whoa baby, how about this fucking show,
and it's only Friday!
[crowd cheers]
I remember the kids on the floor saying,
"I'm here for…" and the answer was usually…
-Korn. -Korn.
"I'm here for Korn."
[stage announcer] How many motherfucking Korn fans
are in the house tonight?
[all cheer]
At the time, most of the biggest bands, current biggest bands, were hard rock.
Limp Bizkit, Korn, Rage Against the Machine.
I mean, this was not the hippie-dippie Woodstock '69 lineup.
This music has a lot of rage.
[band playing]
These acts were part of the nü-metal scene.
[heavy metal music playing]
The aggressiveness of the audience really embodied the rock-and-roll spirit.
We'd seen mosh pits, but now we were talking about mosh pits
on a whole 'nother level.
You had no idea how the crowd was possibly gonna stay in control.
So a couple of days before the festival starts,
we're in a meeting, you know, with all the department heads,
and the 22-year-old me raises my hand,
and I try to bring to everybody's attention
that they need to really look at this lineup of artists.
The bands that John booked, at least the more intense bands,
were not bands I was familiar with.
I had no idea who these people were.
You know, for the most part, although I ran everything by Michael,
we never booked an act that he didn't agree with.
So, I was the, you know, the young kid trying to bring some sense
to a room full of adults that had really no idea
of, I think, the lineup that they put together.
And Michael Lang and everyone just looked at me
like I should not open my mouth.
[stage announcer] There you go! Ha-ha!
Holy shit!
In all the shows I have worked, I don't think I have ever seen
the intensity of the crowd before a band came on
like I did with Korn.
We're all sort of looking at each other, saying,
"Holy shit, what is about to happen here?"
[man] Little more high-hat left in the ears.
The atmosphere backstage was just kind of electric. I was excited.
I remember going right to my dressing room
and looking in the mirror, going, "Oh my God, holy fuck."
[all cheering]
This is massive.
Me and Tom are like, "We gotta get up to the front of this Korn show."
We're getting up there, and then we hear the guitar.
[chords being played]
There's that guitar riff, that like, dun-nan-nan.
The song starts to build up, build up, and people are starting to go more crazy.
I remembered the intro. We're walking out.
I come walking out and I see that fucking crowd.
I'm like, "What the flying fuck?"
[firecrackers popping]
When you see it with your own eyes,
it's just ten times more shocking.
He came out and was like, "Are…"
"…you ready?"
[band playing]
The crowd went ballistic.
And I look over, and I see just waves
as the sound traveled all the way to the back.
It was like this unleashing…
[grunts] …of all this energy.
[grunting]
There's no drug. There's no nothing on this planet
that can give you that fucking feeling of having a crowd in your hand like that.
[singing indistinctly]
[Katsis] Korn had them whipped up into a frenzy.
You kept thinking to yourself,
something's gonna go wrong. What is it? When is it?
They need to calm down.
Come on, Woodstock!
♪ I can see I can see I've gone blind ♪
♪ I can see, I can see… ♪
I saw things happen that are unexplainable.
I mean, an entire section of the crowd
just instantly moved about six feet to the right.
You can't fall down. Just don't fall down.
Like, you're gonna be forgotten about.
[crowd shouting]
[Kyle] The number of people just coming over the barricade.
It was, you know, a waterfall of bodies.
We needed way more security than we actually had.
It's like the scene from Jaws. I think we need a bigger boat.
Come on!
[crowd cheering]
Jeff, I understand you got knocked in your head getting passed.
-You're a big guy. Did they drop you? -Yeah.
-And you lost your camera. -Yeah.
-Would you do it again? -Yeah.
People were breaking their arms, like, "Woodstock '99 is the greatest."
[singing indistinctly]
I felt like I did something really incredible.
We kicked that ass.
[wailing]
[Lewis] Korn has just tore up the stage. They were amazing. Bush is next.
And that's only a problem, because where's all this energy gonna go?
[all cheering]
I felt bad for Bush, going on after that, because shit was crazy.
[stage announcer] Let's hear it for Korn one more time.
I saw the Korn set from video monitors.
And it was quite scary down there.
I mean, it's a potential runaway train.
[all shouting]
Once the crowd gets that amped up, winding them down is very difficult.
[stage announcer] It's Friday, one more band.
Bush.
[crowd boos]
[Rossdale] This is like, "Now show us what you've got," and…
and that, um, makes you nervous.
I'm fully aware that half the people,
maybe, were kind of more enamored by watching Korn.
You don't know what's going to happen.
If you can imagine, like,
just jumping off a ship into the darkest ocean.
You know, that's it.
And when that happens, you got to change people's emotion
♪ Warm sun feed me up ♪
♪ And I'm leery ♪
♪ Loaded up ♪
♪ Loathing… ♪
[Rossdale] We were rather more arm-in-arm than bashing the shit out of each other.
That's what we promote. It's what we like, you know.
♪ Swallowed ♪
♪ Sorrowed ♪
♪ Heavy about everything but my love ♪
He was, you know, like, peace and love and, "I love you, and I love everybody."
He was like the heartthrob.
[Rossdale] Is everybody happy?
[crowd cheers]
[Scher] Gavin understood the folklore
associated with Woodstock.
They sort of brought it back to, you know,
the hippies versus the hard rock fans.
[Kyle] The crowd was still very lively,
but compared to what had just happened,
it was a little bit calmer.
♪ You're the wave, you're the wave You're the wave ♪
[crowd cheers]
[Rossdale] I'm proud of that fact we were bringing the crowd back around
to what maybe everyone hoped the event to be,
you know, as opposed to what it deteriorated into.
I think we need to see a whole hell of a lot more!
[crowd yelling]
Woodstock! Whoo!
Woodstock, baby!
[sirens wailing]
[drunken screaming]
[stage announcer] Woodstock '99 day one!
Pow!
[closing theme music plays]