Woodstock '94 - Wikipedia

Woodstock '94 was an American music festival held in 1994 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the original Woodstock festival of 1969.[1][2] It was promoted as "2 More Days of Peace and Music". The poster used to promote the first concert was revised to feature two doves perched on the neck of an electric guitar, instead of the original one dove on an acoustic guitar.
The 1994 concert was scheduled for the weekend of August 13–14,[3] with a third day (Friday, August 12) added later. Tickets to the festival cost $135 each.[4] The weather was hot and dry on Friday but by early Saturday afternoon storms rolled in. The rains turned much of the field into mud.[1][2]
The event took place on Winston Farm, just west of Saugerties, New York-about 100 miles (160 km) north of New York City and 70 miles (110 km) northeast of the original 1969 festival site near Bethel, which had 12,000 on hand to celebrate the silver anniversary.[5]
Though only 164,000 tickets were sold,[6] the crowd at Woodstock '94 was estimated at 350,000.[7] The size of the crowd was larger than concert organizers had planned for and by the second night many of the event policies were logistically unenforceable. The major issues related to security, when attendees arrived, left or returned to the site, and the official concert food and beverage vendor policy which initially restricted attendees from entering with supplies of food, drinks, and above all alcohol. With the concert site mostly enclosed by simple chain link fences, there was hardly any difficulty for many attendees to enter freely with beer and other banned items. The security staff, along with the entrance and exit staff, could not continue reasonable monitoring of the increasing number of people entering and exiting while at the same time maintaining safety, security, and a peaceful atmosphere.
Three deaths at the festival were confirmed. An unidentified 45-year-old male died on Saturday of suspected diabetes complications. On Sunday, 20-year-old Edward Chatfield died of a ruptured spleen. Organizers also confirmed 5,000 were treated at medical tents and 800 were taken to hospitals.[8]
Jackyl took the stage early on Friday. Lead singer Jesse James Dupree took the stage with a bottle of whiskey and poured alcohol onto the crowd. He then started smoking marijuana and on a close up he shotgunned the joint into the camera, with copious amounts of smoke filling the screens and the stage, at which point the crowd cheered. Dupree then lit a stool on fire onstage and cut it up with a chainsaw. He also pulled out a rifle and started firing into the air but cut his hand, which started bleeding. As Dupree wiped his forehead, a streak of blood was left across his head.[13]
Aphex Twin's performance was cut short when promoters "disconnected" him mid-show for signing a fake name on a contract, which would forfeit PolyGram's rights to his performance.[14]
Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon took the stage in his girlfriend's dress and appeared to be tripping on acid during the band's performance and post-show interview with MTV.[16][17]
Nine Inch Nails had the largest crowd density at the event, overshadowing many of the other performers. Just before going on stage, they wrestled each other in the mud and went on to perform completely wet and covered in mud.[18] In the post-performance interview, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor claimed he thought his band's performance was "terrible" due to technical difficulties on stage.[19] Reznor admitted that while he disliked playing at such a large show, it was done for the money: "To be quite frank, it's basically to offset the cost of the tour we're doing right now."[20] Their performance of "Happiness in Slavery" at the festival won the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1996.[21]
Aerosmith's Joey Kramer, Joe Perry, and Steven Tyler were all attendees at the original Woodstock festival in 1969.[22][23] Aerosmith performed around 3 to 4 a.m., right after an extensive fireworks display from Metallica. Tyler said on the liner notes for the album during their set: "It rained like a cow pissing on a flat rock".
During Primus' performance of the song "My Name Is Mud", the audience responded by pelting the band with mud, which singer and bassist Les Claypool ended by telling the crowd that "when you throw things on stage, it's a sign of small and insignificant genitalia". Twenty years after the show, Claypool claimed to still have some of the mud stuck in the bass cabinets he used at the event.[24] Another memorable moment from Primus' set at Woodstock '94 was when Jerry Cantrell, the guitarist and vocalist of Alice in Chains, joined Primus onstage during their performance of the song "Harold of the Rocks".
Woodstock '94 has also been referred to as Mudstock or Mudstock '94, partly due to the rainy weather that resulted in mud pits and the aforementioned performances of Nine Inch Nails and Primus. This culminated with Green Day's performance, during which guitarist and lead vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong started a mudfight with the crowd during their song "Paper Lanterns". In the documentary VH1 Behind the Music: Green Day, bassist Mike Dirnt was mistaken for one of the fans jumping on stage and was spear-tackled by a security guard, knocking out one of his teeth. It was this incident that caused Dirnt to need emergency orthodontia. A gag order was put in place regarding this incident. Due to the now-infamous mudfight and Dirnt's injury, Woodstock quickly propelled Green Day's then recently released album Dookie into success.
After being injured in a traffic accident in 1966 and his subsequent disappearance from the popular music scene, Bob Dylan declined to go to the original Woodstock Festival of 1969, even though he lived in the area at the time. He set off for the Isle of Wight Festival the day the Woodstock festival started and performed at Woodside Bay on August 31, 1969. Dylan, however, did accept an invitation to perform at Woodstock '94 and was introduced with the phrase: "We waited twenty-five years to hear this. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Bob Dylan".[25] Although he was an hour and a half late to his performance,[26] his set was considered one of the greater moments of the festival by various critics and represented the beginning of another new phase in his lengthy career.[citation needed] Uncharacteristically for the time, Dylan played lead guitar in a more rock-oriented electric set.
Guns N' Roses were asked to appear at the festival but the band declined due to internal problems, as well as feeling the concert was too "commercial." However, lead guitarist Slash made an appearance with Paul Rodgers.
The Woodstock '94 festival was shot using the early analog HD 1125-line Hi-Vision system in a 16:9 aspect ratio. The footage would be used for later home packages and a planned theatrical documentary about the event. The HD footage was mixed live into standard definition 4:3 NTSC for cable TV broadcast.[36]
The Woodstock '94 festival was broadcast live on MTV via pay-per-view in the U.S. and Canada. In the UK, audio from the event was broadcast on BBC Radio 1.
Highlights from the concert were later released as a double album set on November 4, 1994 on CD and cassette. The film about the event, directed by Bruce Gowers, was also released direct-to-video the same year on VHS and Laserdisc. Currently, there is no DVD, Blu-ray, or digital media release.
Since the release of the official album, various recordings of songs performed have been released officially; however, complete performances of entire sets have only been released unofficially as bootlegs. In 2019, a limited edition vinyl-only release of Green Day's performance was released for Record Store Day, making this one of the first official releases of an entire Woodstock '94 set.
^Cultice, Joseph (March 5, 2019). "MUD, PISS, CATHARSIS: INSIDE NINE INCH NAILS' ICONIC PERFORMANCE AT WOODSTOCK '94". revolver.com. Retrieved June 26, 2021. I remember saying to the guys, it would be great if you guys were like the mud men, like all the crazy kids out there covered in mud. So time passes, and then the stage manager was like, How do we get these guys muddy? They started getting these [ice buckets] and filling them up with mud from around the dressing room trailers. Sitting right across from us while they were doing that were like Henry Rollins and the guys from Alice in Chains. And [Nine Inch Nails] were all like, "Those guys are gonna totally know what we are doing." So in between all that someone found a mud pit at the edge of the stage. So we all got in a sixteen-passenger van and went down to the stage and the band jumped in the mud. It was this big cathartic thing, and then they went onstage.
^Harrington, Richard (August 26, 1994). "AEROSMITH DREAMS ON". washingtonpost.com. Retrieved June 26, 2021. Aerosmith was still a year away -- Tyler was still in Top 40 New York City club bands like the Chain Reaction and William Proud -- and it's at Woodstock he met Joey Kramer, who would become the band's drummer.
^Fisher, Marc (August 14, 1994). "CHAOS RAINS AT WOODSTOCK". washingtonpost.com. Retrieved June 26, 2021. State police spokesman Lt. James O'Donnell said it will take at least 20 to 25 hours to clear the site after Peter Gabriel's last song sometime after midnight Monday morning.
^Goggin, David; Stone, Chris (November 1, 2012). "Epilogue: Woodstock '94—A Major Pro Audio Case History". Audio Recording for Profit. Burlington, Massachusetts: Focal Press. ISBN9780240803869. Friday morning, everybody got up shaking because the downbeat of the festival was at 11 AM. It was like going into battle—very detailed preparations had been made, and now we had to do it. All working personnel were delivered early to the site because the first act was due to start that morning on the North Stage. Twenty acts followed, including unsigned local bands and a "rave" that began at midnight and continued until 6:30 AM the next morning.
^Spevak, Jeff (August 12, 1994). "Revolving stage set to rock 'n' roll". Democrat and Chronicle. Rochester, New York – via newspapers.com. Mostly unsigned, unknown bands from the Saugerties area open at 11 a.m., bearing names such as Lunch Meat and Futu Futu.
^Leopold, Jason (August 11, 1994). "Local band to be part of Woodstock '94". The Daily Item. Port Chester, New York. p. 3 – via Newspapers.com. The ignored: Six unsigned bands - one of them from Westchester. They call themselves Straight Wired, and they're a group of unknowns who only last week played for 100 people in a Hoboken bar.
^Associated Press (August 7, 1994). "Johnny Cash Says He's Out". The New York Times (Press release). The New York Times. Retrieved July 12, 2021. Johnny Cash, the country and western singer, says he has decided to withdraw from Woodstock '94 next weekend because of disagreements with the festival's promoters.
^"Philips Media celebrates music and multimedia at Woodstock '94" (Press release). PR Newswire. July 20, 1994. Retrieved June 26, 2021 – via trconnection.com. The Philips Multimedia Village will feature a variety of interactive experiences, including a multiple-screen, multimedia show that highlights Philips Media's hot new software titles; a 90-station CD-i play tent where visitors can experience those titles hands-on, guided by cyberpunk arcade "gamers"; and the "Todd Pod," where multimedia musician Todd Rundgren will perform five live shows daily.