Thousands of young people are locked inside a 24-hour wonderland of musical commerce filled with beauty salons, morning yoga, barber shops, VIP areas, record stores, merchandise vendors, and bars. However, by learning from Woodstock's mistakes, in particular with regards to logistics, Coachella built upon the imagined dream of the original Woodstock promoters. The first Coachella took place just months after the horrors of Woodstock ‘99. This film examines the grim outcome of the infamous festival, where misguided ambition, cost-cutting. Woodstock 99 began as a three-day festival that promised to echo the countercultural unity and idealism of the original 1969 Woodstock, but instead descended into mayhem. This is perhaps best illustrated in the example of Coachella, which was an evolution of the Woodstock model. Watch Music Box: Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage (HBO) and more new movie premieres on Max. However, this growing historical distance makes it easier for us to see the festival’s real legacy, not as a cultural turning point but rather as the template for the iconic (and profitable) music festivals of today. Officially, the reason was production issues and artists backing out, but presale numbers were low. An attempt to revive the Woodstock brand in 2019 for the 50th anniversary failed. Music Box is a 30 for 30-style strand for HBO that encompasses a number of movies about bands and artists. Perhaps then the selection of a military base, a manifestation of American imperialism, was a fitting location after all.ĭespite its once legendary status, today, Woodstock’s cache and relevance are increasingly restricted to the geriatric. The promoters’ purpose was to lock you in a small city-sized location for three days and engage you in continuous commerce from which there was no escape. However, there was also a prison-like aspect: This was the business end to music festivals. This was an infrastructure that could handle the people, the acts, potable water, power, camping, and even parking. Hence, the organizers opted to hold the event at an abandoned air force base in Rome, NY, an ominous background for a festival of “peace and love.” But this venue made sense as it was believed it would solve many of the logistic problems that plagued the promoters in ‘69 and ‘94. The Woodstock brand had become iconic, but it had not been profitable. Despite the attempts of documentary makers to locate the roots of the chaos in ‘99 in the music, past problems were never with the music or the messaging it was usually infrastructure related.
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