Police Intervention and Final Departure

From Luminary Media? And the ringer. This is break stuff. The story of Woodstock ninety nine. Right now I want you to go to your computer or phone and Google Woodstock ninety nine. If you're driving or at the gym, sit tight. You can do it later. Comes up. Photos of people crowd surfing. picks of Fred Durst also show up fairly high. But most of the images are of young shirtless men. Stomping gleefully around fires. Woodslack ninety nine is defined by these images taken from the riots on Sunday night. Many people have likened the festival to Lord of the Flies. The classic nineteen fifty four novel by William Golding. The book is about a group of boys stranded on an island who try to set up a new society. And wind up turning violently against each other. So far in this series, we've tried to explain how the festival got to that point. We've outlined problems with security, access to water. Extreme heat. in a macho environment that engendered violence. But explaining what happened at Woodstock ninety nine can't be the same as excusing bad behavior. Thousands of people still had to decide to act out in destructive ways. And no matter how miserable they might have felt. There were other choices. Pick up and leave. You're not being kept there against your will. You can go home. And take a shower and get some food in your stomach. That's Marine Callahan. Who wrote about Woodstock ninety nine for Spin Magazine? Her story outlines some of the worst abuses of festival attendees. Nevertheless, she doesn't sympathize with those who rioted. It just felt Three spoiled and entitled and gross and without regard for the safety of anybody else who was around. And uh Yeah, the whole thing was just A sad way to to end the decade. Culturally. When you look at the rioters as a group. It's easy to stereotype them as violent meatheads. And surely many of them probably deserve that classification. But not everybody who felt compelled to lash out against the festival as it wound down Sunday night. Fits that mold. Take Ken Heinley. You might remember him from episode five. He talked about having to wade through quote, mud and shit. In order to drink warm water from one of the festival's free fountains. Ten was a nineteen year old kid that summer. He traveled to Woodstock ninety nine from South Carolina with some buddies. It was his first big music festival experience. We were the small town kids that we saw we saw Woodstock 94. pay-per-view and we saw like Green Day. throwing mud around and nine inch nails and we just thought Man. They've announced this thing, it's gonna be just like that. We have to go. We're like we're of age where we can do things now. Unlike many attendees, Ken didn't use the weekend as an excuse to engage in all manner of decadence. He says he didn't drink or take drugs at Woodstock Nancy. He was just a big music fan who was excited to see a lot of the bands that he liked in one place. Back home, he would often take road trips to Atlanta to see concerts. But Woodstock ninety nine was a unique opportunity that frankly He didn't want to miss because he was too messed up. Some of this is embarrassing, but you gotta understand it was 1999, it was different times. Ken was a little self-conscious about sharing some of his totally 90s favorites. Jimiquai was a big one for me. I was really into Jimiroquai and he certainly wasn't ever gonna come near where I lived. Embarrassingly, I was I was really into our lady piece at the time. I don't know, the the girl that I was dating was a huge fan and I hated them, but then kinda came around on them. So I was pretty stoked to see our lady piece, believe it or not. As you can tell, Ken is a pretty easygoing guy. Like other attendees I spoke with, he encountered all the usual problems. Overheating, lack of sleep. Expensive food and water. But it's not like he spent Friday and Saturday in a rage. For a while at least, he took everything in stride. The mood shifted, but it it wasn't a sudden shift. It was just very gradual. And then by Sunday you're just Yeah. Angry, I guess. We're hot. We're dehydrated, we're hungry. People just start You know, acting like assholes. Looking back Hence still isn't sure why. By Sunday night. He was joining in on the melee that closed Woodstock ninety nine. It was almost as if he was picked up by a wave of psychic negativity and carried toward the madness. I mean, it's a little concerning that I could go from like a pretty mild mannered kid on day one to be like by day three, like borderline Lord of the Flies, like let's burn this place to the ground. It's not even a peer pressure thing. It's just I don't know, man. You you saw a Everybody doing something and suddenly you're doing it too. In this episode, we finally reached the fiery climax of Woodstock 99. We'll examine the festival's most dangerous day. Sunday july twenty fifth. We'll take you inside the riots and give you a sense of the chaotic violence that finally overtook Woodstock 99. How did a segment of concertgoers, including otherwise mild-mannered attendees like Ken, find themselves banding together in order to destroy the festival? We'll try to figure out why, as Marine Callahan suggested, people didn't just leave. Were they still looking for that feeling of unity that the Woodstock myth has always promised? Is it possible that they found that togetheredness not with love, but with violence? This is Break Stuff. I'm your host Steven Haydn. Episode seven Sunday. By early Sunday morning. Many attendees were still trying to sleep off the previous night's partying. But the media people who were covering the festival were up with the sun. In the harsh light of day. Griffith Air Force Base looked like a wasteland. We got there. before anybody had you know started playing, before anybody had left their tents. That's Dave Holmes, who was an on-air host for MTV in 1999. I got a a photograph from the stage of the entire wan that would be like the main viewing area. And it is just a sea of trash and one single person face down asleep. Not on a sleeping bag, just on the grass. It's just him and a thousand, you know, hot dog wrappers and and red solo cups and napkins. for as far as the eye can see. And that is my enduring image of Woodstock Ninety Nine. Rob Sheffield, who covered the festival for Rolling Stone, was also up early that morning, surveying the damage. Everybody was really pretty used up and burned out by Sunday morning. I hadn't done a drug all weekend and and I felt like the wrath of God, so I could just imagine how people who are Literally hung over, we're feeling. A big reason why Rob felt terrible that morning had to do with his sleeping accommodations. I slept on a pile of pizza boxes. Pizza boxes were a very good surface to sleep on because pizza boxes are white. And uh because they're white you can tell if they've been urinated on or not. which makes them very, very useful if you're looking for something to sleep on, because every flat surface there had been so thoroughly urinated on. Rob was actually supposed to stay in one of the barracks designated for the media. But he ran into a problem when he got to his assigned room earlier that weekend. There was a guy and he was Sitting at his desk? I'm not sure what his rank was. I called him Sarge. Uh he was He was watching T V, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and he had a poster behind him of John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. This man didn't take kindly to his perceived intruder. It was like a cartoon. And he was like very upset that I had entered his barracks with a key. And he said, How did you get in here? And I said, I'm here with the rock festival that's happening this weekend. He had no idea there was a rock festival happen that weekend. This surreal scene was typical of a festival that made increasingly less sense as it wore on. The music on Saturday culminated with some of the loudest and most aggressive bands of the entire festival. Metallica. Rage against the machine and limp biscuit. Sunday, however, started on a much different foot musically. At least initially. Wearing sunglasses and his signature black hat. Willie Nelson attempted to bring a little mellowness back to the festival. River take my His set begins with Whiskey River. And that was one of the gr great musical moments of the weekend, because I just remember everybody just really kind of breathing a sigh of relief. Willie is going to take care of us. Willie is the smart, sane adult in the room at this point. Not the promoters, definitely not the security people. The Sunday afternoon acts weren't what you might expect as a prelude to a riot. It was an eclectic mix that included the swing revival act, the Brian Setzer Orchestra. Crunch group Collective Soul. And the jam band Rusted Root. And then there was one of the weekend's only female performers, Jewel. who did a loungy and frankly kind of weird version of one of her biggest hits. Mm-hmm. The laid back feeling these artists brought to Woodstock 99 was short-lived. Not long after Willie Nelson left the stage in clouds of marijuana smoke. Another smart sane adult. Elvis Castello. Vielen Dank Father Now, I love Elvis Costello. I am a rock critic after all. I think he's one of the great singer songwriters of the seventies and eighties. But Woodstock ninety nine wasn't exactly his crow. In the video, you can see people throwing water bottles at Elvis before he's even reached the chorus of his first song. Elvis Costello. He really tried, but he was with an acoustic guitar and was playing for the most part for a non-Evis Costello cultist kind of crowd and he began with a deep cut from Spike. And It was just a preposterously bad performance that was self indulgent in a rock star kind of way. It was just really kind of abrasive and and uh aggravating for people. The sort of like collective angst level of of the crowd got a little uglier. The bad feeling that Rob picked up on during Elvis Costello's set was also felt by Jake Hafner. was a twenty three year old Syracuse man hired to work for the festival's peace patrol. Jake and his fellow guards were already struggling to contend with a depleted security force. By Sunday, many of Jake's co workers had already been fired. Others simply quit once they were inside the base in order to join the party. So when Jake showed up for his shift on Sunday afternoon. The tension in the air was even sharper and more intense. It would get a little closer to the edge every night. By Sunday when we showed up for work, we all knew collectively that something was going to happen that night. It was just in the air, you could just feel it. The feeling in the air might have just been sheer exhaustion. Many people were operating on very little sleep by then. During the previous night, security guards had given up on policing the campgrounds where many attendees stayed. They had stopped. sending ambulances or cops into that area because as soon as they would enter in there, they would just get pelted with like rocks and mud and everything. It was kind of like a no man zone. So they stopped sending people in there altogether. And I believe that was where a lot of the really bad stuff happened. One member of Woodstock's medical team who did venture into the campgrounds on Sunday was Dave Coney, an EMT. when you went through the campgrounds, it was sort of like a little bit it reminded you of like a refugee camp from the movies. that there had been some sort of big battle with There's just trash all over. There was Things burnt all over. from the night before, from whatever camp fires had gone on. So you just saw that breakdown of both the the structure and civility. Amongst people. You it was definitely palpable Sunday morning. people still went to the stages. While most attendees were still able to maintain some semblance of sanity. Dave does remember encountering a man in the campgrounds who had clearly gone off the deep end. I say clearly because the man was completely naked and seemed like he was hopped up on some combination of drugs. He was so out of it that he was destroying every tent and sight. Finally, one of Dave's co workers decided to intervene. I remember this guy stepped up to to Snake man. Gave this guy a right hook like Muhammad Ali. He just hooked him so hard. The guy's head snaps. To the the right. And then He was like the terminator. It just slowly turned back. And then he looked at the guy who just hit him and was just like R Everybody just tackled them. Point. tackled them. We got them restrained. sedated and and brought him in. The rising tension was getting to MTV's Dave Holmes. Festival attendees have been abusive to the music channel's hosts and camera crew since Friday. Someone even threw a bottle of urine at TRL host Carson Daly. By Sunday, the MTV contingent was thoroughly rattled. Even before the rioting. a fun way to start a sentence. Even before the rioting, it it seemed like this was not going to be uh remembered as a successful festival. Like when it got back to the air force base the next day. All anybody was talking about was how scared they were the night before. a lot of the the cameramen and the production people were up in this tower. That could have been brought down like a scene from Game of Thrones in the middle of the show. People were Understandably a little, a little nervous that Sunday. The tension boiled over during a press conference in the afternoon. Someone from MTV confronted Woodstock 99 promoter John Cher over the festival's failure to control the most violent attendees. MTV News was forced to get off of Home Base. We felt it was too dangerous. There were people throwing glass bottles everywhere. We had a MTV Tower people had to be evacuated. It was in all of the concerts. It was violent, it was dangerous, it was hostile. And I don't my question for you is why did no one from either security or the organization walk out to Fred Durst and say, man, can you ask these kids to chill? There were kids I talked to kids later who were petrified out there. And I and I'm sorry, I'm not trying to. Excuse me, do you have a question? Please come up here and editorialize to everybody, or let me answer the question. Either one. The confrontation was a rare sour note for Cher at that point in the festival. As far as he and other organizers were concerned. Woodstock ninety nine was going along swimmingly. All the tensions that seemed obvious to those on the ground weren't apparent to the people actually running the festival. About four o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday. There's nothing going on. It's very mellow. And uh journalists from Newsweek that was there asked if they could see me. And we did I think a final press conference. Well what we thought was gonna be a final press conference right around that time. At which time the mayor of Rome stood up and said, this has been a wonderful weekend. We'd love to have you back. Fantastic, etc. etc. If Cher sounds a little wistful, maybe it's because the media would never be so kind to Woodstock 99 ever again. Right after that I took a walk from the press tent to the stage and this uh woman journalist, uh I can't remember her name, but she walked on, she kind of c tag on, can we talk? And she said, Yeah. And at one point we stopped and she said This is unbelievable. This is the greatest thing. If you put this many people at any other kind of event, it never would have gone that well. She said, it was just amazing. And then it all blew up over the next couple of hours. This is your latest idea. It's unique. It's game changing. It's huge. But you can go even bigger with AI-powered PDF spaces in Acrobat Studio, turning your files and links into actionable insights and content. Plus share projects and collaborate seamlessly, while keeping everything private and secure. So, your excellent idea. Day's yours. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more and try it out on Adobe.com. Organs had been teasing a big surprise for its climax. People were speculating on what it was. Pearl Jam show up? Could it actually be a Led Zapwin reunion? It turns out that the expectations were way out of whack. What was actually in the works was a candlelight vigil organized by an anti-gun group. By Sunday. They were handing out candles to attendees. piece candles became the kindling uh for the The fires that became part of the riot. Brian Hyatt. A journalist who covered Woodstock ninety nine and later did a year long investigation into the festival. In his reporting, Hyatt discovered that attendees had been setting fires all over the grounds throughout the weekend. And yet nobody ever seemed to get in trouble for it. As they The attendees were already threatening To to make more fire. They said, We'll burn anything. The threats were you can't stop us. If you stop us, it'll start somewhere else. Then it just kept going on. There were there were a bunch of fires and then it was kind of like a prologue. You know. What As late afternoon turned into early evening. The crowd grew increasingly disgruntled and unruly. And then one of the most popular rock bands of the era showed up on stage. The original Woodstock launched the career of Santana. Woodstock ninety four helped to launch. And Creed was the band that got a serious bump in ninety nine. That summer. Creed was coming up the multi-platinum success of their debut, My Own Prison. put out their second album. Human clay. Which went on to sell more than eleven milyen copies. People really, really like this band once upon a time. And at Woodstock ninety nine. They were received like rock royalty. However. Pre guitarist Mark Tremonty remembers Woodstock ninety nine as kind of a terrifying experience. then in ninety nine, we'd only been kind of a professional touring band for about two years, so I I didn't have the the stage confidence that I have now. So it was I just remember it being such a large and intimidating type of setting. We've talked about how the musicians were far removed from the audience. Soon after Creed left the stage, Woodstock ninety nine would descend into riots. But Tremonty can't recall feeling any premonitions. He was too worried about learning how to play Roadhouse Blues with a member of the doors. This is Robbie Krieger from the Doors, man. By the way. Doors never played the original Woodstock. But Creed was still trying to evoke the festival's old sixties mythology, right? As everything was about to fall apart. Half hour before the show it got throwing on our laps, like, hey, let's do this too and so thank God it came off without being a disaster. It was time for the night's big headliner. The red hot chili peppers. The ban was riding high again that summer after years of inaction. The album Californication, which became the band's best selling record, came out the previous month. Their performance was supposed to mark the festival's triumphant climax. And the band was prime for the decadent atmosphere. No one more than Flea, who came out wearing his bass guitar. And no clothes. It seemed like they were playing very well. It was it was really a beautiful chili pepper set. That's Rob Sheffield again. They were coming off California occasion. They had the best songs. of their career and they were playing at the peak of their career. So it's it's it's weirdly incongruous, but that's when the you know, the violence in the crowd got really, really ugly. After playing for about an hour, the chili peppers left the stage. Before they could come back for their planned encore. The chasm between the stage and the audience suddenly collapsed. John Cher himself came out to warn the audience. As you can see if you look behind you We have a bit of a problem. The problem was a bonfire raging on the horizon. Actually the word bonfire doesn't do justice to this wild inferno. In a video posted on YouTube, it looks like a small cabin that's been totally engulfed in flames. In the chaotic context of Woodstock Ninety nine. It didn't seem out of place at first. John Sher strained to make this clear from the stage. As you can see, it's not part of the show. Really is a problem. Even with part of the festival now on fire. The show didn't immediately end. When the chili peppers came back out, Singer Anthony Kiedis commented sardonically on the situation. Holy shit, it's uh apocalypse. And then they proceeded to play a cover of fire. By Jimi Hendrix. I think that this was supposed to be part of the festival's grand finale. A callback to one of the biggest stars of the original festival. coupled with a candlelight vigil that was now a full on blaze. The chili peppers were actually really, really good. At a certain point Nikita said, wow, looks like apocalypse now out there because of people setting things on fire. And there was really no way for him to know that people were actually setting things on fire. That these candles that had been handed out for people to use as a sort of like peaceful hippie moment where being used to set things on fire. And uh Red hot chili pepper is doing Jimi Hendrix's fire. Which certainly could not have been planned by them as a, you know, as an incitement to arson. No matter the band's intentions, it does seem like this was the point of no return. moment when the festival flipped from lawless and scary to the The full fledged out of control anarchy. Like a lot of riots, Woodstock ninety nine was kicked off with a flipped car. There was this car that had been parked. This was like sort of like by the um food tents. And uh it was a car that was just on display, I assume it was some dealership. This car had been sitting there all weekend. It was during the Chili Pepper set that I saw like a bunch of like goons standing around it chanting flip the car. Flip the car. And Just thought, wow, that's a really bad idea. And I thought, well, clearly, you know, the Peace Patrol will come and break this scene up. And as sadly so often during the weekend, the Pea Patrol had totally bailed. They did not come to prevent people from flipping the car, the car got flipped. Brian Hyatt witnessed another incident of vehicular related mayhem. I saw kids pushing over like a truck. Like sort of a a TV type truck. Uh someone got their leg pinned under it. I saw kids like covering their faces and like burning shit. It was uh it it was qu it was quite intense. It was for music journalists it's probably the closest you can get to covering a war. Escaping this craziness was easier said than done. I was walking back and the ground had turned into a mix of like mud and sewage. And my shoes were ruined. W I washed my feet with with like uh water bottles on the ground that were had a little bit of water in them. Then found like abandoned plastic bags, wrapped my feet in them, walked to the vendor area and bought boots, then got out they accepted credit cards and I like bought new shoes and I came back. And I remember one of my editors is like, Where were you? I was like I you know, I lost my shoes. Anyone with a spare moment to think amid the senseless destruction must have wondered. Where in the hell is the peace patrol? Security guards like Jake Hafner were trying their best to keep things under control. Inserting security into the mix at Woods like ninety nine was like turning on a radar gun at the N T five hundred. though Heifner tried to help where he could. There was a big tent and there were a bunch of people climbing onto the tent. And I was kind of close to it, so we started to head down that way. And as we got to it, we could see that there were a bunch of people getting onto this big white canvas tent. And before we knew it. Gave way in probably Thirty people fell through this tent. I think um They ended up setting that 10 on fire shortly after that. And it just kinda devolved. Hefner, who, let's remember, was twenty three years old, had no prior security experience, and was thrust into the role of supervisor against his will. quickly that he had to protect his own people. The first order of business was making sure they couldn't be identified as security. I told everybody to put their credentials inside their shirts and to turn their shirts inside out. We ended up being safe. Then they tried to steer people away from the worst of the action. We're trying to stop people because everybody now is rushing. into that far end where the main stage was. Everybody just wanted to head down that way. And we were trying to stop as many people as we could. Especially a lot of women. I remember women specifically that we were trying to stop and tell them to turn around that they don't want to go down there. that you know stuff's on fire and it's just you know they're rioting down there. You don't want to go down there. And you know some people turn around and went back. Woodstock's medical staff also went into self-preservation mode. EMTs like Dave Conan were told to stay out of the eye of the storm. We're gonna maintain presence on the perimeter. Don't go into the crowd. Obviously if you see something going on, call it in and we'll relay it to Everyone who can actually do something about it. They were very specific in that they didn't want any of us to to get into the crowd and and possibly get hurt or injured. Medical staff also had another priority. I got a call on the radio. From the command and they were Basically telling me and my partner at the time they were like Turn around, take the truck, go to the main stage, you need to evacuate the narcotics. The control of substances. So We got these two nurses who basically had all of the control substances. It was Seriously something out of like missile command or something. Because They were in briefcases, they were handcuffed to their wrists. They get in the back, they're crying, they're like Oh my God, like this is so bad. As if escorting two nurses handcuffed to a case of narcotics through a scenario straight out of escape from New York. Wasn't stressful enough. Woodsak ninety nine decided to play a cosmic joke on Koenig and his co workers. Just to go and show you, right how Well thought out or or how Well, I guess. The the promoters paid for stuff. The show was supposed to end at eleven PM, eleven thirty. Literally at 1201 AM. And we're all out on the perimeters and at the satellites and You know, the crowding stuff and they're they're just You know. Going crazy. Твоан Ар радіо з репетors. Get shut off. Because the promoter only paid for it till midnight Sunday. So we lost all communication with the command. By then? Most people wanted to get as far away from the riot as possible. A few people, however, actually got closer to it. They were drawn in by the flames. One of those people was Ken Heinley. I just saw people burning stuff and like taking the wood off of the defenses and you know, I'm a nineteen year old kid. I like fire, sure. So like Yeah, let's let's have fun and and throw some stuff in the fire. Pen paints a different picture of the riot than what emerge in the media afterward. He doesn't defend his actions. He knows it was stupid. He was, after all, a nineteen year old kid. But in the moment. All those years ago. It felt communal. Perhaps the only time Woodstock ninety nine ever felt communal. People weren't hurting each other. They all had a common enemy. The festival. It didn't feel dangerous to be a part of it. So like we went into the trucks that had the water and had like the you know, frozen pretzel so People are stealing water but then kinda giving it to each other and throwing the bottles around, so I had more water Sunday night during the riots than I probably had the rest of the weekend combined. We finally had access to all this stuff. building tension through the day, but when the riot happened. It was as good natured, I guess, as the riot could be. Like we were we felt like we were fucking over the organizers, I think. And having fun at the same time. None of this should downplay how dangerous it was to be in the middle of all that. For instance, Ken almost got caught inside of an exploding refrigeration truck. the truck had caught fire and someone, it may have even been my friend Jason that was with me was like, dude, this truck's refrigerated. And it's on fire. We we should get out of here. Like everybody get out. So like everybody made sure everybody was out of this truck and away from it before it the little refrigerator area in the top, I guess, exploded. You could hear those explosions. People were were legitimately looking out for each other. was my experience while all this was going on. The mix of camaraderie and frustration seemed to have put the rioters In a kind of trance. The ultimate dream of the Woodstock Nation. The one about forming a new kind of society inside the festival. Had finally been achieved. For a few stolen moments, they must have felt like they could set fires. Steel frozen pretzels. And blow stuff up. With impunity. Finally. Reality set in. So so we get away from the vendor trucks after the fires kinda got too close to those, and we're going back onto the main festival grounds, like where the hangar is. And where the uh the vendors are selling like the T shirts. Uh there's an ATM. When I saw people stealing like all the band T shirts and the Woodstock shirts, for a moment I was like, Yeah, I'll get it I'll get a souvenir from this thing, sure. But then there were T V cameras there. I guess the media had had gotten onto the grounds by the end. When I saw cameras immediately I was like well That's it for me. I'm not uh I'm not I'm not throwing any more pretzels through a fire, I'm not stealing any T shirts because We saw the T V cameras there, we thought, uh If this let's let's go ahead and get out and go get our tent before that gets burned. As the riders grew weary of the cameras or simply got tired of wreaking havoc. The Riot police finally showed up. Koenig remembers them descending at around two AM. Is she like A line of lights. And probably about a hundred, a hundred and fifty state troopers. Their cars. They get out and pop their trunks and they put their right gear on and they form a line. sort of like a a crescent and they start a cadence. And so they're hitting the baton against the shield. Yeah, every five hits or ten hits, they would take a step forward. Koenig and his fellow medics followed the cops into the breach. partner and I and uh a couple of the other ambulance crews, we we kind of stretched out a little bit behind them. and moved with them as they were going. They We're pushing the crowd back and would end up having to climb over people who had been injured in the fighting, who were like still laying on the ground. There was one guy with a with a fractured leg. You know the state trooper kind of stepped stepped over 'em, stepped past them. And we were able to get in there and get him out. There were other people like that too who just Needed to Get evacuated off that field, and that went on until easily Six, seven a.m. at daybreak. Police slowly retook control of the festival. Rob Sheffield carefully prowled the grounds in search of an escape route. It's not like I, you know, went to the exit and call an Uber or a Lyft or something like that. There was a house where the Rolling Stone photography staff was staying. That was a few miles from the place. So I didn't have a car or anything like that. So I walked from the festival. I got back before the sun came up. Well Violet and ugly scene? As for Ken Heinling. He and his friends decided it would be a bad idea to stay in the campgrounds that night. So we we packed up our tent. even though we brought it home to be honest, but we think we got our bags and our gear and whatnot. and went and just hung out on the uh on the runway where the buses were supposed to come the next day because we thought, well, we won't get burned if we hang out here. The next morning, a bus picked up Heinley and his friends and took them to New York City. where they boarded a flight back to South Carolina. I asked Ken if his Woodstock ninety nine experience taught him anything about himself. I I did learn a little about myself and Maybe not to get so roped into things. I also didn't think I did anything terribly wrong either. You know, I wasn't hurting anyone. Um see anything like that going down. It was just It was fun. Uh In a way, un until it got too out of control and then it wasn't fun anymore. On Monday morning, Americans would wake up to news reports about what had happened at Woodstock ninety nine. And there was a lot of talk about what we could all learn from the festival. What all really happened this weekend at Woodstock? Commercialism, that's what some people say led to the fall of Woodstock 99. Concertgoers set fires and tore down tents and speaker towers late Sunday. And one thing I don't have to tell you about that's the smell because we've told you about it, and it does smell thousands of people were treated for heat exhaustion. Just a few minutes ago I took a walk through this grass where all and fires were, and they're still burning. Some people were quick to blame new metal bands. Others pointed the finger at the low morals of Generation X. Plenty of blame also landed on the organizers. Twenty years later. A lot of this talk no longer seems all that relevant. New metal bands have either broken up or faded away. Gen Xers are now fully enmeshed in middle age. And the organizers have since moved on to other projects. And even other woodstocks. The world has moved on. Before I can move on. I need to answer one more question. Music festivals are supposed to be celebrations of the human spirit. So why did this particular festival seem to bring out the worst in so many people? What can this teach us about human nature? Next week in our series finale. We'll try to see what, if anything, we can learn from Woodstock ninety nine twenty years later. We also finally tracked down a man we tried for months to interview. As is his habit. Michael Lang Managed to come through. The very last minute. Break stuff. The story of Woodstock 99. is presented by Luminary Media and The Ringer.