Festivals - Part 17

Woodstock 99

Woodstock 99 was another attempt to recreate the Woodstock festival, 30 years after the original.  It was held on July 22-25, 1999 in upstate Rome, NY, about 100 miles from the original Woodstock site.

The concert site was the former Griffiss Air Force Base, which had been closed a few years earlier.  As a military base, it was surrounded by a 12-foot plywood and steel fence, which the concert promoters liked, because people couldn't sneak in without paying, as happened at previous rock festivals.

Because it had been an Air Force base, much of it was paved with concrete runways.The weather was hot, and the extensive pavement, combined with a lack of trees for shade (airports don't have trees near the runways), made it even hotter.  Some accounts said it got over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Of course, the time-honored rock festival solution to excessive heat was for attendees to get naked.

The festival had a host of problems, not the least of which was that people were not allowed to bring food and drink into the site and had to buy it from vendors who ridiculously overcharged.  A bottle of water cost $4.  There was insufficient grassy area for campers' tents, and people had to set up tents on the concrete runways.  Toilets were insufficient for the crowd of 220,000.  By the end of the festival, angry crowds started fires and broke into ATMs, and vendor booths were broken into and set afire.

But the music was good, and from the Unashamed Male standpoint, one band was outstanding.  The Red Hot Chili Peppers had been known to play naked except for "socks on cocks."  At Woodstock 99, the band was clothed except for bassist Michael Balzary, better known as Flea.  He played stark naked the entire time.  Above is his entrance onstage.  Definitely an unashamed male!

Another view of Flea playing with the other band members.

The video above is an extract that I made from a complete video of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' performance at Woodstock 99.  From over an hour of performance, I selected clips showing the best views of Flea.  Note: this video is rather long (8 minutes; there were a lot of naked views), and the audio is choppy, containing short bits of different songs.  Don't watch it for the music; watch it for the visuals.

A  peace group had distributed candles to the crowd, intending them for a candlelight vigil for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song Under the Bridge.  However, the crowd began using them to start bonfires (above).  At the end of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' performance, they played Jimi Hendrix's song Fire to honor Hendrix and his performance at the original Woodstock, but this seems to have encouraged the crowd, already angry at the festival organizers, to start burning the place down.

Despite all that, when a documentary of the festival was made 22 years later called Peace, Love and Rage, people who were there called it one of the best weekends of their lives.