Woodstock revisited: the demise of the hippy dream

Mark Beaumont asks if the legendary music festival was a 'blueprint for a new society' or as 'shambolic, profit-driven and violence-marred' as the attempt to do it all again in 1999

- Mark Beaumont

In 1969, with flowers in their hair, the children of Woodstock made love, danced naked and braved the elements with a communal spirit of peace and protection. In 1999, with baseball caps on backwards, they attacked audio towers, torched kerosene tankers, looted, rioted and raped.

Whatever happened to the teenage dream? How had the Aquarian utopia of the “three days of peace and music” on a dairy farm in New York 55 years ago this week become, 30 years later at the notorious Woodstock ’99 event, a Lord of the Flies nightmare?

The immediate conditions behind both events are well documented. The 460,000 hippies who tore down the fences on Max Yasgur’s farm at Woodstock ’69 and instigated a state of emergency across Sullivan County endured a weekend of rain, mud and food shortages, all liable to induce a group survival instinct. They swayed late into the night to bands that went well with a hefty spliff – Grateful Dead; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Joan Baez – many espousing anti-war, pro-love messages from the stage.

The similar number of attendees at the ’99 event, documented in the horrifying 2022 Netflix series Trainwreck and dubbed “Profitstock” by those who were there, faced more rageinducing conditions. Forty-degree heat on an asphalt air force base with little shade. Vendors scalping them for overpriced food and water. Scarce free water supplies contaminated with human waste. And a line-up dominated by aggressive nu-metal and rock acts like Korn, Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit, some literally playing songs called “Fist of Rage” and “Break Stuff”.

But with both events equally chaotic and challenging, there’s clearly far more to a countercultural volte-face as drastic as Russell Brand’s shift in political outlook. What was it that made rebellion in 1969 all about free love and harmony and, in 1999, about blood, lust and destruction?