I'm not sure how I got my love for documentaries, but I have to admit that I have a morbid fascination with things that have gone terribly wrong. It can be interesting in fiction...one can easily recall the feelings that are invoked by early scenes in movies like the Towering Inferno or Jaws where Paul Newman and Roy Scheider appear in scenes that depict pristine happiness while making dire predictions to arrogant, greedy and indifferent businessmen and politicians. You and the protagonist know things will get bad, very bad, but everybody who can do anything about it is oblivious and the die has already been cast. It is something altogether more captivating when it happens in reality and since the documentary is one of the best ways to handle these subjects, I'm always interested. So while I don't know exactly when I became a fan, a program that aired on VH1 in April of 2000 pulled me in and haunted me for days, weeks even. And every so often, I'm drawn back to anything that reminds me of it.
All packed into one hour of commercial television was some of the most engrossing programming my 26 year old self could get into. I'd graduated college 4 years before, got married and started my first real job 3 years before, started my first real career 2 years before, became a father 1 year before and had my second daughter on the way. I had been too busy since college ended to keep up with what the #kidsthesedays were doing. The music artists that I came of age with were fading and some of them had already gone to a way too early grave. Others had checked out from the commercial scene or at least stepped away from the spotlight. Plenty of garbage came in to fill in the gap and take over MTV. I guess I liked to think that I'd outgrown what 17-22 year olds were doing...but it could just as easily be less flatteringly described by saying what was "in" had passed me by.
That was fine with me. My mind was on other things, and the younger part of my generation looked silly to me. They had no taste in good music if they couldn't tell the difference between Alice In Chains (the Layne Staley version) and Bush. You can't teach a blind person what good looks like. So while I was sleeping, Limp Bizkit came in like a thief in the night and took everything. They took MTV away and had my junior Gen Xers saying "Kurt who bro?" while they fought with Millennials to block their attempts to flood the medium with boy bands and Brittany Spears (the pre-conservatorship version). "Who the hell is Limp Bizkit...and anybody that listens to a band with a name like that has to be stupid as fuck" I told myself as I watched the evening news and got to bed early because I had a job and also might need to get up in the middle of the night to rock my daughter back to sleep. I'd never heard their music and I didn't want to.
More on that later, back to April of 2000. I was too young to know anything about Altamont, barely old enough to have heard about The Who's tragic Cincinnati incident, and too distracted to know what happened at Woodstock 99 when VH1 presented an episode of their RockStory series called Concerts Gone Bad which covered all three events. These events are man-made disasters that are tragic not only in their outcomes but in:
- how preventable it all was before the die was cast, and
- how inevitable it was after.
Woodstock 99 is getting more attention than it has since the riot fires in Rome NY stopped smoldering thanks to a perfect storm of media: a podcast published in 2019, an HBO documentary out last month, and the return of Limp Bizkit to the festival scene last week. So back to those guys. I hated them before I knew them, which probably wasn't fair. The first time I heard them was by chance when Rearranged played on the radio. It's such a surreal thing to put myself back in that moment because at the time, I liked the mood of the song and how the vocals flowed so well with with the vibe and rhythm, I respected the guitar playing and found the lyrics to be thoughtful and interesting.
"Life is overwhelming, heavy is the head that wears the crown
I'd love to be the one to disappoint you when I don't fall down"
I thought I hated them and now I was thinking about buying the album. That would have made me like so many people who bought a Smith's album after hearing How Soon is Now or those who ran out to by Everlast after hearing What It's Like only to find out that said songs do not at all represent the catalog. I was spared that fate in this case and for the record, I like a lot of The Smiths music that doesn't sound like How Soon. In 2003 I watched MTV's Icon special dedicated to Metallica where Limp Bizkit performed a cover of Welcome Home (Sanitarium). Nobody plays that song better than Metallica, but LB's performance was pretty frickin' lit. And since this was my first time seeing what their performances are like live, I also got a little taste of how douchey frontman Fred Durst could be. The media had a bunch of narratives out there that leveled accusations on Fred for inciting riots at their shows. I didn't know it at the time, but this Fred was subdued compared to what he could usually be like, and I took his enthusiasm as a show of respect for Metallica. Plus it would be a pretty stupid move to try and ruin Metallica's TV show. Ultimately, they didn't seem like my cup of tea, but I appreciated their appreciation for a great band and a great song.
And then at some point, the VH1 documentary crawled back into my brain and I started reading up about Woodstock 99. I didn't have to look very hard to learn that Bizkit was at the forefront of a lot of the controversy surrounding that event that ended with festival goers burning trailers and vendor booths to the ground. The absolutely terrible things that happened to some festival goers are well documented and like with Altamont, the speculation about who is to blame is well explored to the point that I won't attempt to solve it here. So why do I keep returning to Woodstock 99 and Altamont? There's a portion of The Towering Inferno that depicts a party where everyone is having a great time, but the fire that will destroy the building has already begun and nobody knows that they need to get out. Most escape unharmed, but many don't. And for a lot of it, many people aren't aware that anything is wrong, and a few nefarious types are well aware of it and would rather ignore or perpetuate the problem.
Well that describes the feeling that I get when I watch LB perform at Woodstock 99. I find myself rocking out to the performance while terrible things are happening. The whole scene is bizarre. Fred and most of his band rock their bro outfits, and Wes Borland (in one of his trademark costumes with crazy face paint and solid black contact lenses) puts on a hell of a show in 90+ degree heat with a heavy coat on. The sound of Wes's riffs with the thundering bass at the beginning of Counterfeit sounds ominous and pregnant with the potential for menace. And when the band explodes, I want to explode too.
Fred's ability to work a crowd is on full display and the scene is awesome and terrifying in the response that he elicits. And of course there's the notorious performance of Break Stuff where most narratives will tell you things really came to a head. Perhaps. Judge for yourself I suppose. When the crowd complies with Fred's commands to actually start breaking shit, you see a lot of stuff that looks pretty scary, and a few brief glimpses of females being criminally mistreated as male attendees grope and fondle with absolute disregard their humanity. That had been happening for over 36 hours before Limp Bizkit took the stage though.
Who should be blamed when a festival goes wrong? Festival organizers, promoters, vendors, performers? The attendees themselves? Ultimately everyone is responsible for their own choices, yet those who plan an event own a certain amount of responsibility for the environment. I meant it when I said that I'm not trying to solve who is to blame, but a few lessons learned are appropriate if anyone wants to build a festival from scratch on a site not made to house half a million people. If people are sleeping in shit from overflowing port-o-jons in the campground and there isn't anybody to attend to it, is it unfair to blame the folks who planned the festival? The planners say it is but I don't buy it. Sure attendees can leave, but they spent a lot of money to be there and were sold on an experience that wasn't as advertised, especially when the flimsy last minute infrastructure failed almost instantly. A disaster isn't caused by any one thing, but people do become who they really are when they are only governed by their own conscience. Woodstock promoters sell an environment of total freedom where people police themselves and whatever the people do in that environment is on them. Except there are rules. You have to pay exorbitant costs for food and water while baking in the sun with no shade. When there are no rules, than people who only follow rules for self preservation will be playing by their own rules. They will learn things about themselves in those circumstances, and when they're hot, exhausted, dehydrated, bilked, and in unsanitary conditions, they'll learn these things when they are already more stressed than they've probably ever been in their young lives. Can you really say everything would have been fine if Fred Durst was more subdued or if the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn't end their set by playing a cover of Jimi Hendrix' Fire? The festival organizers made little effort to clear the metaphorical forest of kindling, and in some cases doused it in lighter fluid before any concert attendees arrived to light a match. Maybe they didn't know that, but ignorance does not inoculate you from charges of negligence.
So the organizers are responsible for the environment, but the people are responsible for themselves. Is it fair to blame the environment on the choices people make? Ideally, the attendees could have become a community that worked together to restore decent conditions and help each other. Human history does little to inspire confidence in this. The festival has been described by more than one journalist or attendee as something out of Lord of the Flies. And that story is basically an exploration of what happens when any community descends below the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
For his part, Durst is still haunted by Woodstock in the sense that the disaster can't be discussed without mentioning him... all for just doing exactly what Limp Bizkit was brought there to do. And he's still affected by it. One can't help but think that his "Dad Vibes" costume at Lollapolooza last week was at least partially inspired by the narrative he's been linked to. He wore the hell out of an upper middle aged used car salesman outfit and toyed with the audience by politely saying "thank you very much for inviting us into your home" before proceeding to perform exactly the way he always has, then retreating back into his Dad persona in between songs. Wes, crazily costumed as ever did what he's always done, and so did the rest of the band. And the crowd jumped like crazy just like they always have at LB concerts when they were told to. For many of them, it was their first time ever seeing them live. What was different this time? Are the Dad Vibes the only difference maker from the bad vibes of Woodstock 99? Doubtful. And just to make the troll even more epic, after a rousing intro, "Dad" Durst opens the set with Break Stuff.
Epilogue: I was very pleasantly surprised today to find that someone had uploaded a VHS recording from a broadcast of the VH1 RockStory documentary that started me down this path so long ago. So this is my appreciation post for the brief documentary that set me on the path that leads to a significant portion of the content on this blog.
