Dad’s Guide To Life: Three Days of Peace, Love, and Fire 1999

Let’s take a step back in time. We just talked about September 11th, 2001, and I said it was the definitive moment in time that made me stop focusing on myself, so much so, that I lost who I was, and went falling down a rabbit hole so deep, that even still today, there are residual thoughts and habits from diving down there that, sometimes, engulfs me in an overnight google search-a-thon trying to prove 9–11 was an inside job, and the government is run by mega rich billionaires, pulling the strings of our government, making them, make us believe that we’re “free”. Woodstock 99, This was the defining moment that two things happened:

1. I realized how big and small the world was all at once in a whirlwind of horror, fear, and the 24 hours news cycle for years.
2. I lost myself, I lost everything I ever cared about, I got flung into turmoil, because I stopped caring about everything I had control over, and started caring about a picture so big, that if I had just stopped to think, I would have realized, that it had very little impact on who I was and wanted to be, because there was nothing I could do to control it, so I might as well move on.

Now, let’s talk about another defining moment, that went down 3 years earlier, in the year 1999. This HUGE piece of history, is the defining moment, we’re going to discuss how WOODSTOCK 99, laid a path that would help me find the strength to recreate myself, rebuild my dreams, and light the fire inside me after I had given up some years later.

Remember, this was the year I took off from school. I was heading to Baystate College in January of 2000. At the time, I was working as a printer ink manufacturer with a friend of mine who played in a band with me back in Brockton. It’s what it sounds like, we took a bunch of gooey stuff, and we made it into colored ink for printing presses on giant rolling machines. It was a good gig until I got pissed at the supervisor and threw a coke bottle at the ink mill. But I digress, I was young and foolish….

We were there making ink, I had brought in a Silverchair cassette for Josh and I to listen to. A cassette is a little plastic device that played music back in the day on a radio with a tape player. I think the radio ate the tape so we had to listen to the radio. We heard an add for the 30th anniversary of woodstock, 3 days of peace, love and music, that was happening in Rome,NY and Metallica was headlining one of the nights. Josh said, “We’re going to that.” I said I wanted to, it would be so cool, blah blah blah, and he said, “No, we’re going to that.” I had no idea how we were going to figure that out, but we put it in our heads, that somehow, we were going to get to woodstock 99. 5 years prior to that, some of my friends made it to woodstock 94, and I was so jealous. I wanted my own experience to talk about someday. Boy oh boy, did I get what I wished for. Weeks passed, we worked our little jobby job like good little boys, and Woodstock crept closer and closer, and we still had no way of getting there, until June twenty something, Josh walked in, and had borrowed a credit card, and we all decided we would buy the $250 dollar tickets for 3 days, and a bus ride to and from the venue. OH MY GOD!!! WE WERE GOING TO WOODSTOCK 99!!!!!!! Just before we had to go, Josh got his vacation approved from work, my girlfriend, Michelle, had secured time for her to go, and I frankly threw a coke bottle into an ink mixing mill and got myself fired so I could go too! Hooray!

It seemed like years until July 22nd. The day of the bus ride. We drove over to Foxboro Stadium, at the crack of dawn, the bus left at 6 am. You’d probably know it now as Gillette Stadium, the home of the best football team in American History, and parked the car, grabbed our bags, and waited in the blistering heat of a summer July day in an unshaded parking lot for the bus. This is foreshadowing of things to come.

We boarded the bus excitedly from Foxboro that morning, on a six hour or so trek to Rome, NY. We were thrilled to not have to drive. Traffic was horrible, and alot of people wanted to stop and get McDonalds on the way, so we lost about a half hour when we stopped, happily at least. I was living on fast food back then.

So far, the excitement was overwhelming. I had gone to see aerosmith in 1994 on New Years Eve, my first rock concert, I saw metallica in 1994 and 1998. This was, by far, the biggest event of my life. I was 21 years old, and I was full of energy, angst, and pure energy created from a pure desire to be a rock star. This concert was the biggest moment of my life, with all my favorite bands of all time, together in one weekend full of music so I could FEED off it’s energy.

We arrived on Friday, and we were in complete awe at the size of Griffith’s airforce base, which was converted into this MASSIVE musical heaven for the 30th anniversary of the original wood stock festival. We unpacked our stuff, and found a nice spot to set up base camp, and quickly realized our tent was only big enough for two people and a cooler with water and cheez its.

It took no time at all, to realize, once we left the tent, that we were about to just be assaulted by the sun, heat, and lack of clean water and bathrooms, with just over 250,000 people clammoring for a small 10x10 block of shade under some trucks, lining up at the water fountains because water was $4 dollars a bottle, and in 1999, that may as well have been $30 dollars a bottle.

Day one went well, with the exception of a full body sun burn, and we were out of money within six hours of arriving. The second day, we woke up early and hit the cement running, making sure we had decent spots of alot of the bands that day. It was very much oppressive and horrible again, but relatively uneventful. We saw some of my favorite bands, Lit, Buckcherry, ICP, Offspring, Bush, and Korn that night, was absolutely incredible.

Day two sort of blended into day 3. We took a nap when the sun went down, and woke up before the sun came up. Today was my big day, Metallica was headlining the main stage. It was eerily quiet that morning. One thing I noticed, that was different then the first day, was that things weren’t really clean anymore. Trash was starting to pile up all over the place, and the portable toilets were getting really disgusting. It also seemed in the middle of the night, people destroyed alot of the water fountains, because they were just leaking all over, making huge puddles of mud. This particular day we spent walking between stages, and this time, we had no water, and it was over 100 degrees. It seemed alot of people felt the same frustration we did, and it was clear when Kid Rock came on the main stage, plastic bottles started flying above the massive crowd. It looked fun from where we were, but we saw people getting hit in the face, taking cover, and it just got ugly fast.

Things calmed down significantly when Dave Matthews and Alanis Morrisette came on, and we took to opportunity to take a nap in the shade under some tractor trailers. Then…Limp Bizkit came on. We woke up just in time for it and ran back to the main stage. 200,000 people came to the main stage to see the next three acts. It was absolutely breath taking. During the show, fans started to rip plywood of the delay towers scattered across the grounds. People began surfing on the plywood sheets being carried around by the crowd. Then Limp Bizkit played a song called “Break Stuff”. People started using tarps as trampolines, flinging each other into the air. Then Limp Bizkit walked off stage…Then a voice came over the speakers that I’ll never forget.

It said “woodstock 99 was getting a little scary. Hurt people are amongst you, we have to chill a little bit”. I was one of them, I took a full bottle of poweraide off the face during ICP the day before. I didn’t realize that the hurt people being mentioned, were way worse off then I was. Next band on was Rage Against the Machine. Rage, to my surprise, did not go crazy like Limp Bizkit did, and luckily, nothing happened. Metallica went on, the greatest Metallica show of all time, and it went off with little to no incident.

Sunday, the last day, everyone woke up sluggish. Saturday was an all out rock and roll metal fest all night long with in your face thrash metal, and heavy everything. Sunday started slow, calm, peaceful. The music had even changed to Jewel, Creed, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, a calmed version of the bands the day before…then it happened. The CATALYST.

A group called PAX, sometime on Sunday, handed out candles to fans. The group was an anti violence group, who wanted to hold a candle light vigil against youth violence.

People were supposed to have a vigil during a certain song from Red Hot Chili Peppers, but what happened instead was, some people lit a few small fires. As Woodstock 99 started to end, the small fires began to turn into bon fires, and then suddenly, one of the towers went up in flames. Right after megadeth left the second state, and the chili peppers ended their set, the festival was now burning, trash everywhere, FIRES raging with angry concert goers throwing tables into fires, burning atms, looting, and all the scariest things in the world, happening all around us. We hurried back to our tent to collect whatever belongings we could, and as we were walking toward the parking lot, recognizing that our concern was burning down, we witnessed an ARMY of state troopers in riot gear filling the park, one of which even yelled at me, as I inadvertently walked over a line he didn’t like.

It was a perfect storm they called it. Nu-Metal inflaming our emotions, sanitation and price issues, lax security, intense, unrelenting heat, and the bright idea of candles, it all boiled over by frustrated gen-xers into a full blown riot.

Your generation may never see a Woodstock festival, and its not likely lack of interest, but more likely, because my generation burnt down the 30th anniversary. 2019 was supposed to have the 50th anniversary, a chance for me to see another woodstock, and it all fell apart before our very eyes, mostly because of 1999.

But for me…despite the concert of a life time, despite the reputation I carried as a person in the group that destroyed woodstock, woodstock 99 pushed my view to the future. Thrusted me into my motive of getting into the future and out of the past as fast as possible. It inspired me so much, that I missed my past completely. That is the lesson here, Enjoy the moments, don’t miss them. I completely missed many years to follow, because Woodstock 99 turned my gaze to only the future….I wanted it all. Rock stardom, and I would sacrifice everything to get it. And I did. I sacrificed everything for the rock start lifestyle, and the funny thing is, I never became a rock star. I did however, miss alot of my life, sacrificed my time and family, and partied like I would live forever, and I missed over a decade of my life that I can never get back, and I regret every second of not living in the moment, now that I had hind sight.

Enjoy the present. The past does not exist. The future does not exist. The only time is NOW. Worry about today.

See, we didnt have cell phones in 99. Information barely moved. I had a digital camera. The internet used a phone line. And there was no social media. None of us had our face buried in a phone taking pics and video, we LIVED woodstock 99. We saw it all, in person, we saw it in the world.

Music is everything. Don’t follow the crowd. Live in the present.

There isnt just one message in this story. I had a great time, and it’s a historical thing you may get taught about in school, well, I was there and I wanted to share it with you.