Most of the time, they didn’t find it. The pizza boxes contained lousy pizza with crust that tasted like paper. Too often the bands played as if it were just another arena rock show, with lots of guitar histrionics. Porta Potties overflowed by the end of the first night, prompting one desperate emcee to announce, “There’s a lot of people over-pooping the poopers.” The mosh pit got a bit heavy at times, with injured patrons being passed back to the soundboard. Shortly after midnight on Friday, a 45-year-old Long Island man died of cardiac arrest. At noon on Saturday the rains came, dumping a brief thunderstorm on the mostly unprotected throng. And the acid: crisis centers handled loads of bad trips.
By late Saturday the crowd was estimated to be well over 250,000; even though the producers downplayed reports of gate- crashing, they admitted that only about 200,000 tickets had actually been sold. The bottom line was, Woodstock ‘94 felt full. Multicolored, bubble-shaped tents popped up across acres of meadows, in groves of trees, on gravel roads and dirt pathways – anywhere with a free patch of ground – until it seemed you couldn’t get from the scrip-currency booth to a sausage stand without running into a roadblock. At noon on Saturday, when Joe Cocker opened the day’s festivities, the crowd was packed so tight you could hardly get within view of the building-size main stage.
The kids didn’t care. As hoped for, most of the concertgoers seemed to be in their late teens to early 20s: frat boys in muddy shorts, girls with pierced navels, folks with hemp wreaths in their hair, purchased from Headcase Hemp Hats, a store in the arts-and-crafts village. There were bikers and a few leftover hippies, some of whom brought their peers’ bad vibes with them. A 40-year-old woman from Harrisburg, Pa., who attended the original festival and chose to remain nameless, had friends at home write slogans on her tent: “The Yuppie commercialization of rock and roll,” read one. “I’m about to write “not’ on some of these,” she said. “I think my friends took the negative press too seriously.”
Suzanne and Valerie Martyn, sisters from Toronto, 23 and 20, didn’t take the negatives too seriously. They knew about the well-publicized commercialization, as well as strict rules that forbade bringing drugs or alcohol on site. They decided to have their own fun, pouring vodka into a two-liter bottle of Price Chopper Tropical Punch. They had already bonded with a camping neighbor, Brad Elder, 18, from Belleville, Canada, who brought along 13 hits of acid. “I smuggled it in in the sole of my sandal,” he said. “My foot was feeling really weird for a while, and I wondered if the sweat was seeping in.”
Goat Mednes, 23, who hitchhiked from Boise, Idaho, took the Woodstock dream seriously enough that when he arrived, he took off all his clothes. Bystanders snickered, and the trend never exactly caught on. “You know how much drugs he must be on?” giggled a female. But Goat wasn’t on any drugs. Yet. “I came for the people, knowing for a few days I could be free and go naked,” he said, flashing peace signs at oglers. “Get some drugs, hang out with people and get laid. That’s what it’s all about.”
In the audience in front of the main stage, a new race of love children sprang up: the mud people. Mist machines had been set up to cool off the crowd, and as the sun went down a giant mud bog formed. Kids danced ecstatically and flung mud around in the violet moonlight. Every once in a while they gave a collective howl and charged in a loose, yucky line toward the stage.
Meanwhile, over in Bethel, some 20,000 people got back to the original garden at the site of Max Yasgur’s Farm. The competing festival, which was canceled because of poor ticket sales, wound up drawing people who did pretty much the same thing they were doing over in Saugerties: dancing with little or no clothes, camping in tents. Only instead of Arrested Development and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they got Melanie and Arlo Guthrie performing on a rickety stage. Bethel was meant as an alternative, “purer” event. But with all the energy in Saugerties, the idea that Woodstock ‘94 was just a nasty corporate ripoff seemed to lose some of its weight. When thousands of kids jump up and down in unison to the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” or the Rollins Band’s “Disconnect,” problems with shuttle buses and parking lots diminish. That’s not to say some of the acts didn’t try hard to conjure that mythical spirit: MTV bands like Candlebox seemed a little insincere when they asked the kids if they had enough food and shelter (what was Candlebox going to do if they didn’t?). Melissa Etheridge did her Janis Joplin tribute; Joe Cocker did his Joe Cocker tribute; harmonica player John Popper from Blues Traveller did a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that basically begged for Jimi Hendrix to return from the dead. Some bands, like James and Cypress Hill, knew that the best approach was to play hard and simply get people dancing.
In the end, what Woodstock ‘94 proved had nothing to do with myth-making or generations or defining cultural moments. All it showed was that if you put a load of mostly middle-class kids on a field with a bunch of bands they love, they’ll be patient and well behaved despite rain, stink and bad pizza. Kids have weathered fierce conditions at Lollapaloozas; on Aug. 5 this year in New York City, it rained for hours and nobody rioted. They just sat and shivered and waited for a Tribe Called Quest.
