![]() ![]() Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh, became a major hit in 1970. This mythology stems, in part, from the eponymous documentary released after the festival. I think it obscured the reality of a festival that, in many ways, was just as troubled and rife with problems as Woodstock ’99. I want to talk about the mythology of the original Woodstock. And, in the years since Woodstock, the mass electrocution story has been all but written out of history, papered over by countless feel-good vibes. “John looked at me and said, ‘We had decided we would commit suicide if that happened. Bob says the organizers made a pact during the long wait to hear if someone had died. I first read about this story in Bob Spitz’s Barefoot in Babylon, a book of investigative journalism first published in 1979. He said, ‘I did it, I did it, everything is fine!’” The phone rang, and it was the chief electrician again. And I think it probably took a hundred years for those 20 minutes to pass. “I guess we were waiting, like in the movies, for the lights to dim a little bit, the way they do when they throw the switch in the electric chair chamber. “For the next 20 minutes, John and I sat there looking at each other,” Rosenman said. So when an electrician suggested that he could maybe reroute the power while the concert continued uninterrupted, the organizers decided to roll the dice. Organizers feared that without constant entertainment, the festival’s three days of peace, love, and music would descend into riots. Up until that moment, music had been going on at Woodstock almost around the clock. Getty Imagesīut in spite of the danger, Rosenman and Roberts did not want to cut the power until electricity could safely be rerouted to unexposed cables. ![]() “But he came up with ‘mass electrocution.’ ” ![]() “He paused for a moment, and I couldn’t believe that he was searching for the words that he came up with,” Rosenman said. And additional abrasion from these sneakers and sandals may wear away the insulation on these cables.”īasically, the electrician was outlining a potential disaster of cataclysmic proportions. He said with the rain and all of those hundreds of thousands of feet scuffling over the performance area, the main feeder cable supplying electricity to the stage-the musicians, the amplifiers, whatever-have been unearthed. He sounded pretty shaky at the time, even for a man who was going through what he was going through. It probably was the bleakest moment of the festival for me.” -Joel Rosenman, Woodstock ’69 organizer And on top of it all, the phone rang-the chief electrician was calling from backstage. We were sprouting walkie talkies from every ear at that point and dealing with a dozen problems every minute or two. “It probably was the bleakest moment of the festival for me. Roberts and Rosenman explained what happened on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2009. They were about to get some terrible news, as rain storms drenched the festival. The story begins on Sunday afternoon, Woodstock’s third day, with two of the organizers, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman. When I was reporting for this podcast, I came across a piece of Woodstock lore so incredible that I was surprised I hadn’t heard it before. Once you get up close, the romance fades, revealing something darker, scarier, and more like Woodstock ’99. Perhaps it was always easier to love the original Woodstock from a distance. She didn’t go to Woodstock she watched it on TV. It’s worth noting that the song “ Woodstock,” Joni Mitchell’s classic anthem about a generation trying to get back to the garden, was written about a festival that was declared a disaster area. When you step back, you start to see that the problems at Woodstock ’99 were set in motion decades earlier, back at the original Woodstock. Woodstock ’99 was a series of seemingly random events, miscues, and twists of fate that, in retrospect, have a kind of terrible logic. ![]() Subscribe here and check back each Tuesday through August 27 for new episodes. In Episode 2, Hyden looks back at the original Woodstock festival, which nearly ended in a tragedy that would’ve far surpassed the riots 30 years later.īelow is an excerpt from the second episode of Break Stuff. Episode 1 looked at whether Limp Bizkit were chiefly responsible for the rioting and chaos. But Woodstock ’99 revealed some hard truths behind the myths of the 1960s and the danger that nostalgia can engender.īreak Stuff, an eight-part documentary podcast series available exclusively on Luminary, investigates what went wrong at Woodstock ’99 and the legacy of the event as host Steven Hyden interviews promoters, attendees, journalists, and musicians. Incredibly, this was the third iteration of Woodstock, a festival originally known for peace, love, and hippie idealism. There were riots, looting, and numerous assaults, all set to a soundtrack of the era’s most aggressive rock bands. In 1999, a music festival in upstate New York became a social experiment. ![]()
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