From the get-go there were problems with disorganization. The media and the bands themselves had a hard time finding out what was going on ahead of time. Credentials that were supposed to be mailed out weeks in advance simply weren't. Making plans was almost impossible since you had no idea what it would be like once you got to the actual site. According to one band’s manager, the folks running Woodstock ‘99 “..don’t know what’s going on. We haven’t even been able to find out when we're playing yet.” And if the insiders were kept in the dark, the public was stumbling around in pitch black.

A lot has been said in the past couple of weeks as to the what's and whys of the final outcome of the event, but I haven’t seen one piece written by someone that actual camped out and spent three days as part of the public. Kurt Loder was most surely not in the campgrounds. I’m sure he, and the promoters of Woodstock, were holed up in an air-conditioned hotel. Just like they watched the events on pay-per-view, or from the comfort of their climate-controlled booths. I jumped out of the frying pan, and directly into the fire, so to speak. For three excruciating days and two sultry, steamy nights, which seemed like a month, I camped out in the public area. Arriving in the middle of the night Thursday, my party of four, along with a few thousand other folks, found out that the will-call and Ticketmaster windows at a casino a few miles down the road from Griffis Base, had closed at 1:00 AM, and wouldn’t reopen until six. So, instead of these thousands of folks getting their tickets and trickling into the campgrounds to set up over a few hours period, we were forced into a massive traffic pileup at around 7:00 AM, after tickets had started being handed out again. At least a three mile back-up, it was obvious that there was not enough parking, or planning, to get us into the site comfortably. Cars stalled in line, engines overheated and kids collectively pushed cars (with their engines off), all the way to the campgrounds in 90+ degree heat. This was an omen, and a bad one at that, if ever there was one.

If anyone had thought that the promoters of this event, John Scher and Michael Lang, had done their homework and actually planned for the quarter of a million people expected, well, this should have told you otherwise. With only 225,000 tickets sold, sales estimates were not met by 25,000. One could only imagine what chaos would have ensued if they had actually sold out! Arriving at the sight... finally... the guards had no idea where the “Media Compound” I was supposed to be in was, so they threw us into the general population, having us park and camp in what was, I came to realize, comparatively, heaven.

Despite the years of planning, bathrooms had not been taken into consideration and as a result, none were built. Instead, we were offered portable johns, the closest Port-a-Potty being approximately a 3/4 mile walk from our tents. If the “Peace Wall” hadn’t been where it was, it would have been about 75 feet away from our campsite. But hey, what’s a three quarter mile walk in sweltering heat when you’re about to pass out? Or need to go to the bathroom? Well, to the folks who relieved themselves right behind our tent, leaving a lovely pile of crap and thousands of flies for us to deal with for the next three days, it was obviously too far a walk.

If you did decide to take the trek, and you did manage to discover the port-a-pottys, you saw that next to them, and I do mean right next to the toilets, was the ONLY shower setup for the almost quarter million ticket holders. With approximately 50 shower heads for the men, and a comparable number for the women, you had to wait on a line, at least 75 people long at any given time, to shower. Now, imagine the showers being built with no drains, save for overflow directly into the campgrounds, and you’ll start seeing signs of what would come within hours. Soapy, used water had no place to go but right into tents and campgrounds. Now let’s add some mud to the situation, since the only water spigots anywhere in sight, were also in the same U-shaped Port-A-Potty setup, right next to the showers, and you just might be able to imagine the disgusting situations that existed by the end of day one. Now multiply that by four. People returned to their tents the first night to find themselves wiped out by foul water and soap. Of course, if there was a place for them to move to, I’m sure they would have. Unfortunately, there wasn’t. One benefit was that you no longer had a hard time finding the bathrooms: you could just follow the smell. Pity the poor people who had camped nearby. Over the four day period, not one truck was seen emptying the johns, so by day two they had started overflowing, adding feces and urine to the mix flowing into campsites. Some folks came “home” to find that they now had riverfront property. How nice.

By Friday afternoon, most people had arrived and setup. Realizing that the campsite and parking spot they were assured when they bought their tickets was a pipe dream, they squeezed in wherever possible. The tent city was starting to resemble Calcutta on a bad day. Tents backed up to each other with nary an inch in between. Now let’s get onto the subject of food. The materials that came with ticket packages told people to “not bring any perishable foods” since the promoters were very concerned with spoilage. And of course, “food will be available at reasonable rates.” Yeah. Right. Reasonable prices? I’m sure you’ve heard about the $12 frozen bowling-alley pizzas, and the $4 waters and sodas. But did you know that a bag of ice was going for $15? A burrito was $7 (or $10, depending on the stand)? A bag of chips was $4! If the promoters were concerned with food spoilage, all they had to do was make ice available at the $1.40 you could get it for in Rome. Have you ever heard of camping out for three days without bringing food? Many young people had spent their allotted food funds by the end of Friday. That left them with two days and no food to speak of. Hungry, hot and loaded with drugs. Not your ideal situation

The promoters, while touting the hippie moniker for thirty years, proved themselves to be taught very well by their parents. They have slowly become the capitalist pigs their generation had fought so hard against as idealistic youth. Here they were - squeezing the youth of today dry to make a buck. Not quite the ‘60s personified, is it? If they could somehow manage to run electrical cables underground, to the many ATMs that were conveniently located in the middle of fields near the many shopping areas, tell me why they couldn’t have built some actual bathrooms or showers? Yes, “teach your children well,” all right... teach them to rip off, steal and rob your fellow man. Teach them to get ahead by any means necessary. Then teach them to turn a blind eye to the facts and the situation they have created. Real nice.

As for the concertgoers this time around? Well, let’s just say, Limp Bizkit’s “Break Things”, or a typical quote from Creed: “I feel angry, I feel helpless... I feel violent, don’t try to change my mind” are far cries from CSNY’s “Helplessly Hoping.” The acts booked this time around were mostly from the same school of music; rap influenced rock, with plenty of teenage angst being doled out to boot. And while this has always been the case in rock and roll, things just might be getting a little out of hand these days. Past generations might have been filled with similar teen angst, yet we didn’t necessarily believe that simply “breaking things” was the ideal solution. We may have failed, but we at least had loftier goals than simply tearing shit up. From the reported rape in the mosh pit during Limp Bizkit’s set, to the final acts of violence that this festival will always be remembered for, this generation seems to have shown their true colors. At one point during Everlast’s set, after bottles had started flying, he asked the crowd to “act like your mothers taught you to.” The sad realization then congealed: this is exactly how their parents have taught them to behave.

The Woodstock generation, and those of us that just missed out on being able to rightfully bear that name, don’t seem to have been the best role models to our kids. My peers, the kids of the ‘70s that really wanted to be born earlier, and hippies... we certainly ran full force into hallucinogens and chemically induced stupors, and partied like it was 1969; it was just too bad that no-one bothered telling us that it was all over by 1974, when we were just getting started. We are a generation that grew up with the catch phrase, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” and we obviously don’t want to cop to being it now. This is the generation that refused to grow up; that did every drug under the sun and then ended up in rehab (again and again); that had some kids early on and let them do just about anything they wanted to, cause, well, hey, that’s what we wanted our parents to do when we were kids. But apparently hedonism only goes so far when reality sets in. The kids at Woodstock ‘99 were toppling speaker towers and then climbing them and, proudly, somehow heroically, waving flags with peace symbols from their summits. Talk about irony. Add to that the fact that all during the riots, the crowd’s chant was “USA, USA, USA...”. Bluntly, I don’t get it.

So, what caused the riots, looting and fires the final night? At its peak, at least a dozen blazes could be seen. Handfuls of tractor trailers were lit afire, as was an Art Gallery, and numerous vending booths. The angst towards the vendors can certainly be understood... but torching an Art Gallery? And looting merchandise? From the vantage point of the backstage entrance, where the remaining security force had kept a handful of us lucky enough to be around there at the start of the riots, we had a slightly different perspective than many others. Listening in on the reports, over security walkie-talkies, of gangs of youths marauding, was like being in a war zone. “...There’s approximately 200-250 of them... they just took everything from the West merchandise stand and destroyed it. It looks like they’re headed towards the North Stand.” “Quick, everyone out of the North stand... we don’t care about the merchandise, or the tents, just save yourselves...”). Or seeing the guy whose legs were “...gone... they were just crushed... he got a tractor pushed over him...”, wheeled right past me, well... it was all pretty damn scary. This generation is most certainly one of the angriest we’ve seen in a long time. But why?

There may not be any simple answers, but there was an incendiary condition brewing for days and you could have seen it building if you were watching. The 90+ degrees temperature, for four days, didn’t help at all, and while the promoters couldn’t have changed that, the lack of shade on the airfields the concert was staged on, could have been. Shaded areas could have been created if they had just used their brilliant “peace wall” correctly, as opposed to as a barricade (which came down by Sunday morning anyway). They could have lined up the walls in rows on one of the fields, thereby creating an entire shaded area. Or even gotten some big tents. By Saturday afternoon it was clear that the heat situation was bad and getting worse. It was deadly, with thousands having passed out, or been severely sunburned on Friday, many ending up seeking aid, only to find the medical tents weren’t even stocked with sunburn ointment. You could conveniently, (well, actually, not so conveniently, the walk was about a mile to the one store I saw it at) buy it for $8 or so, though.

The promoters had to have seen what was going on and could have done something about it, of course at a great financial loss to them... if they had truly cared to. Ever since first hearing of the planned setup: an airfield with no shade at all, one was reminded of a notoriously bad concert situation from the late ‘70s: The Grateful Dead at Englishtown, New Jersey. There, the promoters had used railroad boxcars instead of a “peace wall” to create the perimeter around an open space, and the lack of shade and similarly hot day turned it into a muddy, unpleasant fiasco as well. But attendees to that show just packed up and left early if they were uncomfortable. I remember doing it myself. Rioting? Looting? It didn’t seem to be an option back then. So what’s changed that it is now?

A lot of questions have been raised in the aftermath of “Woodstock ‘99”. Not many answers are truly forthcoming, but one thing is pretty sure: don’t hold your breath for Woodstock ‘04. We should have learned long ago that, as Tom Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” The true Woodstock was a glorious event that happened at a particular moment in time, with all things positive converging on that tiny upstate NY burg. Chances are it will never happen again. If some promoter has the balls to try and arrange a major event like this, let’s be honest and call it “Romestock” or “Laughingstock” for that matter. But “Woodstock”? At an air force base hundreds of miles away from the namesake town itself? With malls and ATMs? Let’s not even try, ok? Look at the consequences.