foraneggman-fallingoffawall:

I love my Adam Duritz, and if he says Woodstock of 1999 sucked, then it did. I can’t believe that the one in the sixties was all about love and just being chill and coming together to just become one with each other… and yet this one involved rape and fire and rioting. How could something that should be so great end up being so horrible? I wish I’d lived in the sixties and could’ve experienced the actual Woodstock concert.

fyeahcountingcrows:

Of course, as it turns out, Woodstock was sort of a disaster.

“i am ashamed to have been involved in any way with woodstock. people were raped there and they have taken practically no responsibility. the vibe sucked, the army base sucked, it all sucked. well, not everything. we were great.” -Adam

I can tell you a little bit about what went wrong at Woodstock 99. Let’s start by saying that you can’t find “peace and love” on an airforce base no matter how you try to dress it up. It was oppressively hot, over 100 degrees and that is before you factor in the 200 thousand people and the tarmac, with absolutely no chance of finding shade. Imagine how many small $4 bottles of water you would have to buy to prevent heat exhaustion over a 3 day period. The prices for the things you absolutely had to have to survive were outrageous. But despite that, the people I saw those first days were nothing but nice. Helping strangers, sharing whatever they could, looking out for one another. Do you want to know who wasn’t nice? The so called “peace patrol”. Nothing more than a bunch of volunteers who let the authority go to their heads. What started as them being generally unhelpful turned into them bullying and abusing festival go-ers. Of all the personal experiences I could tell you of, the worst was the night we had to rush out of our tent to save a girl from being raped by a man in a yellow “peace patrol” shirt. Apparently he thought she deserved it because she was drunk. We left early on the last day of the festival because you could literally feel the change in the air. The port-a-potties were overflowing into the camping area, trash was piled up everywhere, the people who came looking for peace, love, and music were now broke, dirty, sunburned, exhausted, and abused. I was disappointed when I got home and turned on the news to see the place up in flames, but I wasn’t surprised. I am not saying the riots were excusable, but I am saying that I believe they could have been avoided. People can only put up with so much… 


,