'There are a lot of stupid humans around here'
I always thought Woodstock 99 was the world's worst music festival. Then I met someone who was there. Turns out it's far more complicated than that...
Woodstock 99 was supposed to pay tribute to its peaceful, loved-up, hippy-fest 69 origins, but erupted in a rage-ball of anger, harassment and arson. It’s infamy has become the stuff of legend. How bad was it? I always wanted to know, so, with two different docos on the way, I finally got to ask someone who was there. Let’s go…
Last Thursday, I woke up to anger, fire and rage. Fences were knocked over. Art work was destroyed. Shirtless, muscled-up bro-dudes ran amok, crowd surfing on broken walls and pushing a huge towers to the ground. Fires broke out as nu-metal lunkhead Fred Durst told people to “break stuff”. The apocalyptic vibe was strong.
Honestly, waking up and watching the trailer for Woodstock '99: Peace, Love and Rage, a new HBO documentary about the ill-fated Woodstock festival reboot, is not a good start to your day. Think Fyre Fest, with more singlets and sexual harassment.
Wait a bit. Maybe have a coffee first. Do some stretches. Don’t open your eyes and dive head first into this level of mayhem. Your day won’t recover from it…
Madness, right? I’ve heard so much about Woodstock 99. I remember news of its awfulness filtering all the way down to pre-internet Auckland at the time. I remember looking at the line-up of Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Chemical Brothers and DMX and thinking: “Fuck yes.” I remember hearing news of riots, arson and assault and thinking: “Fuck no.” I remember wishing I could meet someone who’d been there, to ask them all about it, to find out what it was really like. Was it really that bad?
As I watched the trailer again, then again, I realised that, in amongst all of that insanity, a voice of reason can be heard. It’s the few moments of calm everyone so desperately needs. One minute and 12 seconds in, just after the revelation that Woodstock punters rolled around in unfiltered portaloo sewage for fun, a man with short hair, a white T-shirt and yellow jacket arrives on screen.
As a smirk of disgust spreads across his face, he says: “There are a lot of stupid humans around here.”
That man is Aaron Pacy, a 46-year-old sales manager, dad and Dungeons & Dragons fan who lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. “I would be happy to talk about Woodstock 99 with you,” he told me when I messaged him on Twitter. “Do you use Discord?”
I don’t. Instead, we went old school with an international phone call to finally, more than 20 years later, discuss the eternal amazement surrounding Woodstock 99. I wanted to find out what it was really like, and why, in 2021, when a podcast has already been made about it, and two different documentaries are in the works, we’re all still fascinated by it.
Needless to say, I loved this chat. Let’s go…
Interview: Aaron Pacy, Woodstock festival-goer
(Edited for clarity)
Hi Aaron, thanks for talking to me. I can’t wait to get into this with you. Why were you at Woodstock? Were you a big festival-goer back in the ‘90s?
Yeah. I went to Lollapalooza. I went to Ozzfest. I like those kinds of things. The Woodstock 99 bill had so many amazing bands. It was in New York State. It wasn’t that far. I was like, ‘I’ve gotta go to this thing.’ I worked in a little coffee shop at the time. I put a little sign in the tip jar saying, ‘Woodstock 99 fund’ with a thermometer bar going up as people put money in it. It didn’t take me long, $125, $150, whatever it was, to get the three-day pass. I was like, ‘Alright! I’m going to Woodstock!’
What was the vibe like when you got there? Was it different to all those other festivals you’d been to?
There was probably an omen I should have seen. In the trailer I’m wearing a T-shirt that I bought as I was driving into the base. I was like, ‘I’ve gotta get a T-shirt.’ So I bought a T-shirt. It had this cool tribal design. But it had this green alien guy on it and he’s got this sharp pointed stick in his hand raised up above his head with an angry look on his face. It was the only shirt around. I got it for 10 bucks or something. As I look back over time, the first piece of merch I got was this fucking angry alien with a sharp stick ready to stab somebody. I should have seen, right then, that there was going to be some bad stuff.
Were you staying on site? Did you set up a tent? What was going on there?
I’ll never forget this. It was the first overwhelming feeling I had. We got there on Thursday night. We were setting up our tents. There weren’t supposed to be any live bands that night. We could hear this roar way off in the distance. I don’t know what it is. It sounded like a train just getting louder and louder. I realised it’s a wave of people screaming. You could feel, not just the sound, but the energy, building up. That really bouyed me. I was like, ‘Oh this is great, this is so much fun, everyone’s smiling and having a good time.’ It didn’t take long, in that heat and that atmosphere, for it to change pretty quickly.
That’s one of the startling things about the Woodstock documentary trailer: there wasn’t much water, or shade. It doesn’t look like punters were being looked after. How long did it take for basic things like that to become an issue?
It was being held at an old air force base. There was no shade other than the aeroplane hangers themselves. It was black tarmac, there’s not a tree in sight. You could go into these aeroplane hangers. I spent much of the first day in one because they were showing old movies and it was one of the only shady places to get out of the sun. I remember they were showing Blue Velvet, I’m laying on my sleeping bag trying to cool down. It was probably the second day, on Saturday, where the vibe just really felt weird. You couldn’t use the portaloos anymore without it being disgusting. The water was $4 a bottle. That was insane. No one could believe that. We were baking in the heat. It’s a really odd thing. Of course there’s music there that is … chaos. Limp Bizkit want to break stuff. That’s all there, that’s part of the zeitgeist of the time, that’s going to fuel people. At the same time, it was this rebellion. Everyone paid $125, $150 bucks. Now they’re being gouged for water, the portaloos are overflowing. There was an element of ‘Fuck the man’. People lost their minds a little bit and no one was around to stop them.
When did things take a turn for the worse? When did the fires and riots start?
It was the last day. That’s when everything went crazy. I saw it as it developed. There was some anti-war group there. They were giving everyone a bunch of candles. They told us, ‘When the Red Hot Chili Peppers play Under the Bridge, light this candle.’ I’m serious. When they handed it to me, I immediately thought, ‘This is probably gonna be a bad idea.’ After that song, everyone has a lit candle. What are they going to do with it? Well, they start throwing them in piles with garbage, empty Coke cups and shit, and make little bonfires across the whole area. Some guy stops the Chili Peppers and comes out on stage and makes an announcement to us. He says: ‘If you don’t stop those fires, we’re going to have to call in the state police and the fire trucks.’ The audience is like, ‘That sounds fucking awesome. I love fire trucks.’ Immediately it was exponential hell. These fires start going straight up. At the same moment, the Chili Peppers go into Fire, from Jimi Hendrix. It was this confluence of events. I watched them go one domino at a time. ‘Oh that’s bad. Oh that’s not good.’ I was like, ‘I have to start moving. I need to be in a safe place.’
Were you having a good time up until that Red Hot Chili Peppers performance? What was good about Woodstock 99?
Well, the music was phenomenal. I was blown away by so many bands. I got to see George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars. Rage Against the Machine was another highlight for me. Sevendust. I’m a metal guy so I like a lot of the metal bands. It was my first chance to see Metallica play something. That was cool. I was having a lot of fun.
How about the bad stuff? Woodstock is known for high levels of sexual harassment and assault. Did you see any evidence of that?
I heard the reports after of sexual assaults, rapes, that kind of thing. Although I never saw any of that, I saw misogyny left and right. I saw guys being fucking dickheads. There’s a whole bunch of guys standing there, one group are just throwing plastic water bottles at each other. There’s another group of guys on a bunch of benches, screaming at everyone walking by: ‘Show us your tits!’ I’m walking with my two friends, one of them was a girl, they were yelling it at her. I was like, ‘Fuck you, show us your brains!’ All of a sudden there’s a tap on my shoulder. It’s a woman … with a cameraman behind her. She said, ‘I love your mantra. Do you want to be on TV?’ I said, ‘Fuck yeah I do.’
(Here’s the full interview with Aaron being interviewed that aired a few days after the festival as part of a special being hosted by That ‘70s Show stars Wilder Valderrama and Danny Masterson. Aaron and Tamera can be seen at the 1.48m mark…)
Why do you think was there so much misogyny and sexual harassment at this festival?
In the video, they ask someone why they’re doing it. One says, ‘Because I’m bored.’ There are multiple stages, with the biggest bands in the world. There are movies to watch, people to hang out with, there’s beer to drink, there’s drugs to do, there’s sex to have, hopefully consensually. You’re telling me you’re bored? There’s nothing to do? So you’re going to burn stuff and rip shit up? It blew my mind that people were doing these stupid things. I am on my way to go watch The Brian Setzer Orchestra and you guys are standing around screaming ‘Show us your tits’ for hours. That’s why I said, ‘There’s a lot of stupid humans around here.’ It was disappointing.
Did you think you’d still be discussing that festival, and your TV interview, to a journalist in New Zealand more than 20 years later?
As time’s gone on, it’s seemed like a real bellwether. When you compare it to the inception of Woodstock 69, Woodstock 99 is the polar opposite of it. Now we’re into two decades of division and strife. What happened in 99, and this documentary looks like it has the same idea, is much more impactful to society and culture as a whole than we may have thought at the time.
Overall, are your memories positive ones? Or negative?
It was a great experience overall. I really had some great fun with my friends, made some great memories. The music was phenomenal. It almost seems like what happened was inevitable. The cards were laid out for this kind of thing to happen somewhere, sometime, at one of these festivals. For people to lose their minds. The music and culture encourage chaos, and they were being exploited to get their money. The thing that really gets to me is, two days later, my car was stolen out of my driveway. I had a backpack in it with all my photos. I had hundreds of photos of all the stuff I saw and did, and photos of the riot too. I got my car back. Not the backpack.
So you stayed as everyone was rioting and the place was burning down?
I wanted to watch. I wanted to see what was happening. This was before social media. I didn’t want to be told what happened. I saw how it started, how it all went on, I wanted to see how it progressed. The authorities didn’t really do much. They pushed everyone away from the stage into the vendor and tent areas. People were just destroying the vendors. There was a whole line of tractor-trailer rigs - someone started a fire in one of those. Throughout the night, every 15 minutes you’d hear a big boom. Some of them were refrigerated, it was some kind of gas. One would catch on fire, to the next truck, to the next truck. I had to watch.
Just lastly Aaron, do you still go to music festivals these days?
With Covid I haven’t been to many lately. I go to a few concerts, but I don’t do the big festivals. I have kids now. It’s enough money for one person to go, if I have to pay for the kids it gets kind of crazy. We have a small hippy festival that happens around our town coming up in a couple of weeks. It’s my first festival in many years. I’m excited to do that. I make sure when I go to places I can sniff out the crowd pretty quickly. Like, ‘Oh yeah, this one’s going to end much better than the last one.’
Everything else you need to worry about this week…
Tonight’s the night that Loki comes to an end. It’s been a bit of an all-over-the-place season of superhero madness that totally wasn’t what I was expecting from a Loki television show. But I’m not mad at it, bring on season two.
Lena Headey’s action-comedy caper Gunpowder Milkshake is in theatres now. It’s also hitting Netflix in some countries. I can’t find out if New Zealand is getting it but you should totally go support cinemas anyway. They’re struggling…
Here’s the heavy-as-hell new Shihad single Tear Down Those Names, from an album called Old Gods due later this year. Jon Toogood is mad, and it’s great.
This Amazon Prime Video documentary Val compiles decades of home video footage that actor Val Kilmer shot throughout his career. It looks super wistful…
I am absolutely loving the second season of Tim Robinson’s abstract comedy show I Think You Should Leave. It’s on Netflix now, and it is weird…
I’m also loving Vince Staples’ self-titled new record. It’s morose and moody and self-reflective and like nothing that the Long Beach rapper’s done before.
Finally, I am obsessed with The White Lotus, a six-part HBO show that examines hellishly dysfunctional rich people holidaying at a Hawaiian resort. It should be on Neon soon, and it’s going to be one of my shows of the year. I can just tell…