Netflix presented some shocking truths in its recent documentary-series Trainwreck: Woodstock '99, but some people are arguing the 1969 event was somehow even worse.
Though frequently muddy and often chaotic, festivals are typically fun and carefree places for people to chill out, enjoy music and hang out with friends.
However, Netflix has revealed that in 1999, the Woodstock festival was far from carefree with far too many attendees finding themselves boiling alive on the hot tarmac of Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, with tents piled on top of one another and a lack of toilets leading to an actual poo overflow, which some poor, unsuspecting attendees ended up ingesting and smearing themselves in, thinking it was mud.
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It's hard to imagine it could get much worse than that, but the 1969 event provides good competition:
The year marked the first-ever Woodstock festival, and as such organisers had no prior experience to build off. According to History, so many people flooded the event grounds that promoters simply had to stop checking tickets because they were too overwhelmed.
As a result, some of the nearly half a million people who attended the festival managed to do so for free, after making it through traffic so bad that even some of the performers ended up running late, and many attendees abandoned their cars.
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Those who did make it to the stage weren't well-protected from the rain; there were electrical wires running under the mud and 'everyone was praying that [the light towers] weren’t going to fall because they just weren’t well-tethered'. The situation even prompted the the chief electrician to warn of ‘mass electrocution'.
One person who attended the 1969 festival was Nancy Eisenstein, who recalled thinking there would be food and water at the event. Technically there was, but unfortunately the six official food vendors ran out of supplies on the first night. Eisenstein recalled sandwiches being airdropped in at one point, and people who had brought picnic baskets ended up sharing their food with other attendees.
The festival started out on a bright and sunny Friday, but by Sunday an intense thunderstorm rolled in.
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Another attendee, Carl Porter, commented: "I had a view of the field and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Waves and waves of torrential water hitting hundreds of thousands of people who had nowhere to go. It was pathetic. ‘Drowned rats’ doesn’t even come close to describing it.”
Eisenstein recalled being reluctant to move due to the mud and cow manure that caked the ground like 'chocolate syrup', and The Who’s lead singer Roger Daltrey said seeing the 'mud-caked' crowd was a 'nightmare come true'.
Two people actually lost their lives at Woodstock '69, including one 17-year-old boy named Raymond Mizsak, who was run over by a tractor while asleep, and an 18-year-old named Richard Bieler, who is rumoured to have died by a drug overdose.
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The event proved so disastrous that thousands of people decided to leave before Jimi Hendrix gave his iconic performance of the 'Star-Spangled Banner', and the government even declared it an official disaster zone.
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Emily Brown