Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99’ on Netflix, A Docuseries Look At the Disastrous Century’s End Music Festival

Woodstock ‘99, the “how it started, how it’s going” meme of music festivals, is revisited once again, this time for Netflix, with the three-episode docuseries Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99. What began as an ambitious attempt to revisit (and monetize) the peace and love vibe of the OG 1969 festival devolved into a morass of supply shortages, logistic snafus, rioting, sexual violence, and widespread property damage. And oh yeah, over 90 artists performed.   

TRAINWRECK: WOODSTOCK ’99: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Monday, July 26, 1999, and grainy VHS shot out of a car window as the wreckage of Woodstock ‘99 is surveyed. “Good God,” a man says. “Is this Bosnia?” asks another, lingering on the hulk of a burned-out car.

The Gist: The plan was simple. Convert the vast tarmac of a decommissioned air force base into a festival venue with the capacity for 400,000 ticket holders who can also camp onsite. Book a bunch of acts, to the tune of ten or eleven performances on the event’s two main stages across three days of music. Invite MTV, which in 1999 was still a relevant voice of youth, music, and culture. And then sell the whole thing as a pay-per-view package. Michael Lang, co-founder of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, partnered with concert promoter John Scher to revive the festival and convey counterculture vibes, peace, love and music to a generation of kids reeling from gun violence like that of the Columbine Massacre, which occured in April 1999. That was the aim, Lang says in Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99. But the key was profit, something Scher hadn’t seen in 1994, when Woodstock’s first revival was overrun by mud and gate-crashers. And according to former staff interviewed for Trainwreck, chasing profit meant cutting corners and outsourcing critical supply items. You know, like water.

“How the F**k Did This Happen?”, the first of this three-part docuseries, flips between interviews with Lang, Scher, and Joe Griffo, the former mayor of Rome, New York, who all swear their intentions were good. But all of that vibing on peace and love – and the colorful paintings splashed across the concert site’s impenetrable retaining walls – was quickly misunderstood. Ugly catcalls during Sheryl Crow’s midafternoon set on Friday tipped organizers to an “element in the crowd that were here for more than just great music,” and by Friday evening gripes about exorbitant water prices had risen to an angry pitch. (As the Woodstock ‘99 attendees who appear in contemporary interviews point out, festival security had also confiscated the water fans brought with them.) Even on Woodstock’s first day, euphoria was curdling into rage as logistics faltered and the heat index rose.

If they were searching bags for water, they weren’t frisking people’s socks or waistbands for marijuana and mushrooms, because as both organizers and attendees point out in Trainwreck, everybody at Woodstock ‘99 was “high as balls.” By Friday night, it was time for Korn to take the stage, and the nu metal outfit, riding high on aggressive Follow the Leader singles like “Got the Life” and “Freak on a Leash,” seemed primed to be the burning fuse on a riotous time bomb. “The crowd went ballistic,” a former Woodstock security guard says, and in the resulting swirl of mosh pits and churn of hundreds of thousands of fans, it was all anyone could do just to not fall down and be trampled. To everyone – festival security, the concertgoers themselves, MTV presenter Ananda Lewis  – it was abundantly clear that Woodstock ‘99’s promoters and planners had not prepared for this level of intensity, and it was only the first day.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In 2021, the HBO anthology series Music Box debuted with Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love and Rage, which covers much the same ground as Trainwreck and also includes interviews with the promoters, MTV personnel, and everyday fans who witnessed the festival firsthand. But Woodstock ‘99 isn’t the only disaster to receive the double doc treatment. While Netflix features Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, chronicling the most contemporary example of a festival fiasco, Hulu also gets into the act with FYRE FRAUD.

Our Take: With so much documentary footage being applied to the specific batch of crazy that Woodstock ‘99 became, the music festival has become a kind of meta-anthropological touchstone for the pervading forces of culture at the end of last century. Before a teetering speaker tower that blasts Limp Bizkit, Tyler Durden, Bill Clinton, Kenny from South Park, and the Taco Bell Chihuahua dance and ululate around a raging bonfire, wishing grim death on Y2K. But is that really what happened? Was Woodstock ‘99, despite all of its flaws and destruction, really the sublimation of an entire generation’s rotting core? Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99, like Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love and Rage before it, seems more willing to point out  the crazy – the shortages, the heat, the male toxicity, the vandalism – but then push on only with causal sketches. In Trainwreck, a journalist highlights Fight Club and American Pie as damaging nineties riffs on violence and sexuality from exclusively male points of view. But then the doc cuts back to Woodstock staffers who place a lot of the fest’s resulting bedlam on cost cuts, ignorance about the booking of largely male acts, and baseline issues of unpreparedness. It’s OK if Trainwreck just wants to chronicle the horror show. Some bad shit definitely popped off. But the answers to larger questions about the forces at work in American culture in the nineties aren’t necessarily to be found in the flames of Woodstock’s second revival.

Sex and Skin: Trainwreck emphasizes that the roaming camera crews of Woodstock ‘99’s pay-per-view feed encouraged wild behavior. (“Crazy footage was the goal,” says Aaron Sadovsky, the PPV producer.) But the employment here in supercut form of so many instances of nudity and body spraying – male and female genders are represented, but it’s mostly female – feels exploitative.

Parting Shot: “Woodstock ‘99 day one!” the stage announcer shouts as aerials play across the gathered thousands. “Pow!” And then a clip of Stephen Baldwin appears. Baldwin, who wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a recently-minted dot com and must have been at Woodstock to promote his 1999 film The Sex Monster, in which he played a toxic male yuppie, address the crowd. “I think we need to see a whole hell of a lot more!”

Sleeper Star: We’ll go with Tom and Keith here. These two were 16 when they attended Woodstock ‘99, and they retain a certain knuckleheaded charm in their present day interviews. They just wanted to claw their way to the front row for Korn’s set. Not because of some boiling desire to stoke mosh pit violence, but because the primal opening notes of “Blind” beckoned them. Give ‘em a break. It was their first concert ever.

Most Pilot-y Line: To frontman Jonathan Davis’ mind, the roiling throng that gathered for Korn’s set made the atmosphere electric, no matter what it portended for the days to come. “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.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s interesting to revisit 1999, to look at the crackly VHS footage and say “What did it all mean?”, especially in the context of the decade that came next. Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 doesn’t dig all the way into those larger questions. But it does offer a primer, and its share of insights.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges