We didn't have a blog at the time, and so we don't remember the initial purpose or intention of these beyond "killing time," but these were written in December 1999.
For context, at the time, our top 5 albums of 1999 were
Blur's 13,
Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile,
Fiona Apple's When The Pawn,
The Chemical Brothers' Surrender, and
Moby's Play,
and our top 5 songs from 1999 not from these albums were
Underworld's "Jumbo,"
Lofidelity Allstars' "Battleflag,"
Atari Teenage Riot's "Revolution Action,"
Buckcherry's "Lit Up," and
Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker."
Our opinion has changed over the past 20 years...
Worst Singles of 1999 [December '99 Version]
1. Offspring - "Why Don't You Get A Job?"
2. Shania Twain - "That Don't Impress Me Much"
3. Sporty Thievz - "No Pigeons"
4. 1000 Clowns - "Not The Greatest Rapper"
5. Kid Rock - "Only God Knows Why"
6. Geri Haliwell - "Look At Me"
7. Blessed Union Of Souls - "Hey Leonardo"
8. Cher - "Believe"
9. Ricky Martin - "Shake Your Bon-Bon"
10. Backstreet Boys - "I Want It That Way"
11. Will Smith - "Will2K"
12. Lenny Kravitz - "American Woman"
13. Nas - "Hate Me Now"
14. Michael Fredo - "No More Tears"
15. Christina Aguilera - "The Christmas Song"
16. Weird Al Yankovic - "The Saga Begins"
17. Tal Bachman - "She's So High"
18. Sixpence None The Richer - "There She Goes"
19. Santana featuring Everlast - "Put Your Lights On"
20. Goo Goo Dolls - "Dizzy"
Worst Albums of 1999 [December '99 Version]
1. Blessed Union Of Souls Walking Off The Buzz
2. Bloodhound Gang Hooray For Boobies
3. Melanie C Northern Star
4. Insane Clown Posse The Amazing Jeckel Brothers
5. Offspring Americana
6. Will Smith Willenium
7. Cher Believe
8. Puff Daddy Forever
9. Phish Hampton Comes Alive
10. Various Artists Woodstock '99
Most Overrated of 1999 [December '99 Version]
1. Backstreet Boys - "I Want It That Way"
2. Cher - "Believe"
3. Everlast - "What It's Like"
4. Everlast - "Ends"
5. Kid Rock - Devil Without A Cause
6. Limp Bizkit - "Nookie"
7. Macy Gray - On How Life Is
8. Madonna - "Beautiful Stranger"
9. Ricky Martin - Ricky Martin
10. Santana - Supernatural
11. TLC - Fanmail
12. Godsmack - Godsmack
13. New Radicals - Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too
14. Staind - Dysfunctional
15. Sugar Ray - 14:59
The "most overrated" list appears to have at least started as alphabetical, although the #1 is accurate. "I Want It That Way" is not the actual 10th worst by a long shot. It's not even that bad of a song. "So Much Better" for example, is a lot worse. But it's probably the single most undeserved canonization from that year. People love to shit on Bush for having nonsensical lyrics, but BSB gets a free pass.
The first noteworthy COVID-19 headline that failed to resonated worldwide occurred after Dr. Li Wenliang's death on February 7th 2020.
We heard a Pop Smoke song on Power 105 yesterday, and we felt a jog in our memory. (Did we use "jog" correctly there?) Didn't Pop Smoke die not too long ago? Did that happen? We had to look it up to be sure, and yes, he passed away back on February 19th, a headline that feels like it belongs to a buried, distant, alternate 2020.
On February 25th, we attended a current-events themed "trivia night" where the answer to one question was Pop Smoke. The Nevada Caucus was also around that time, which may have been the most recent hopeful moment in the history of the world.
As the viral outbreak and Super Tuesday collectively decimated any remaining hope for the future, morale was low and existential dread surged.
We did not expect the highlight that defined the following weekend to arrive from Reply All, a popular tech podcast that peaked in quality well over 18 months ago, before the atmosphere of the show started to hinge more heavily on creating characters out of the show's two primary hosts. We liked the show a lot better between 2017 and 2018 when it felt like there was more reporting, more cultural commentary, and less emphasis on the hosts as podcast personalities. Like many podcasters, their laughs are frequent and grating.
That said, their March 6th episode "The Case Of the Missing Hit" was an unexpected moment of lighthearted engagement. At least 7 or 8 reporters and bloggers reviewed the episode, including someone from The Guardian erroneously claiming it as "the greatest podcast episode ever."
So that's the first thing we wanted to note here: The episode is very funny, engaging, warm and nostalgic. It was something we really needed that weekend to temporarily lift our drowning, choking, suffocating heads from the slime bucket of life.
The other thing we wanted to discuss regards Evan Olson's major label flop "So Much Better," the subject of the episode.
Are there Top 40 flops anymore? The answer is a resounding "no." Due to radio consolidation, every current radio hit is carefully considered, backed by numbers to ensure longevity and justify the immense investment.
"So Much Better" arrived toward the end of perhaps the saddest era of '90s commercial radio, a brief stretch between the great label merge of Fall '98 and the advent of Napster one year later.
After the big merge, promotional dollars per song increased as a consequence of having less songs to promote. So 1999 was probably the first year when you could turn on the radio and notice smaller new music playlists. The breakthrough hits of this era felt bland and predictable compared to earlier in the decade. The "creative genius wiz kid" (ie Beck, Busta Rhymes, et al.) was no longer a profitable commodity. (We've written about this before, but the late '98 records that we always cite as suffering the most from the first wave of consolidation were The Cardigans' Gran Turismo, Nada Surf's The Proximity Effect, and Local H's Pack Up The Cats.) By Spring 2000, the excitement of MTV's longest running show, 120 Minutes, dwindled as it spent its final few months sneaking Broadcast or Primal Scream videos between premieres from prioritized VH1 artists and nu-metal bros.
After Napster, a pristine digital copy of a minor hit was as good as yours if you could afford enough real estate among a precious 11.2 gigs of hard drive space. (That was the size of our hard drive in 1999.) So if you heard a song on the radio every day for two months and it disappeared from your favorite station's playlist out of nowhere, you wouldn't have to invest $14.99 to hear it again.
Immediately promoted as a non-crossover VH1-ready pop hit, "So Much Better" never got the chance to build momentum on alternative stations. Vertical Horizon's strategy worked more effectively, as a handful of adult-alternative stations added "Everything You Want" to light rotation throughout Oct-Nov '99, eventually building enough steam to crossover, hitting #1 on the Hot 100 in June 2000. "So Much Better" also has no music video, and it was never performed on TV. Granted, these extra boosts didn't guarantee success. It helped when people actually enjoyed the song, which was not the case with an artist like John Oszajca for instance. He can say that he got to play Woodstock '99 and that his terrible song "Back In 1999" was the lead single for the Mystery Men soundtrack; otherwise, Oszajca's flop performed just as poorly.
Out of curiosity, we spent about an hour on Sunday, March 8th digging around some November '99 back issues of Radio and Records, Billboard, and a few similar magazines to see if there were other similar Top 40 flops of that era. "So Much Better" might have been the only flop of its type from that Fall, but it wouldn't surprise us if 5 or 6 other forgotten test-singles snuck onto playlists regionally between Fall '98 and Spring 2000. However, we doubt this phenomenon continued after the advent of Napster.
It's hard to say whether Reply All purposely omitted any fun facts to assist with the story's progression. Evan Olson's Wikipedia entry states that he used to play in a couple Chapel Hill area bands in the early '90s with none other than Ben Folds, perhaps the era's most well-known musician from that region of North Carolina. The Reply All episode makes it seem like Evan's CD oddly found its way to UMG by chance, but we suspect he had some inside assistance and probably knew some people.
One final note: This song really sucks. If it were on our radar by December 1999, it's very likely it would have landed somewhere among our "Worst Songs of 1999." (We'd like to find that list tbh. It's around somewhere.) Twenty years later, we're more lenient for funny-bad, but we're still puzzled by mental space that might inspire anyone to write a song that sounds like this.
Its production value and the dorkiness in the songwriting added many LOLz to the podcast itself. If it weren't so goofy, we probably wouldn't have enjoyed it. As Susan Rogers noted (without Reply All crediting her as Prince's legendary sound engineer), "So Much Better" sounds like three misremembered segments pulled from entirely different songs. Structurally, "it doesn't sound like a hit." She is correct. But the nuances in its production (revealed at the end of the episode) somewhat align with hits from that era.
For contextual purposes, it helped a bit to recall what radio actually sounded like then. Considering our attitude at the time, we don't think we were wrong throughout 1999 growing increasingly upset with how quickly alternative and modern rock radio had been immersed in prospects for VH1 and TRL crossovers. Just for fun, here's a C+P of what WLIR was playing that month. Again, we think it's strange that Universal never thought to pitch Evan Olson to stations like these...
1. 311 Come Original (Capricorn)
2. SMASH MOUTH Then The Morning Comes (Interscope)
3. FILTER Take A Picture (Reprise)
4. FOO FIGHTERS Learn To Fly (RCA)
5. GOO GOO DOLLS Black Balloon (Warner Bros.)
6. LIVE Dolphin's Cry (Radioactive)
7. TRAIN Meet Virginia (Aware/Columbia)
8. FIONA APPLE Fast As You Can (Clean Slate/Epic)
9. PET SHOP BOYS New York City Boy (Sire)
10. BUSH The Chemicals Between Us (Trauma)
11. JIMMIE'S CHICKEN SHACK Do Right (Island)
12. CHRIS CORNELL Can't Change Me (A&M)
13. STROKE 9 Little Black Backpack (Universal)
14. CREED Higher (Wind-up)
15. COUNTING CROWS Hangin Around (DGC)
16. SANTANA FEATURING ROB THOMAS Smooth (Arista)
17. SANTANA FEATURING EVERLAST Put Your Lights On (Arista)
18. KID ROCK Cowboy (Atlantic)
19. STING Brand New Day (A&M)
20. JAMES Just Like Fred Astaire (Fontana U.K.)
21. R.E.M. The Great Beyond (Warner Bros.)
22. SARAH MCLACHLAN Ice Cream (Arista)
23. BLINK 182 All The Small Things (MCA)
24. BECK Sexxlaws (DGC)
25. MOBY Bodyrock (V2)
26. TOM JONES & THE CARDIGANS Burning Down The House (Gut U.K.)
27. MARCY PLAYGROUND It's Saturday (Capitol)
28. LIMP BIZKIT Re-arranged (Interscope)
29. FUEL Sunburn (Epic/550 Music)
30. SAVE FERRIS Mistaken (Epic)
31. RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS Around The World (Warner Bros.)
32. THIRD EYE BLIND Anything (Elektra)
33. OUR LADY PEACE One Man Army (Columbia)
34. EURYTHMICS 17 Again (Arista)
35. BEASTIE BOYS Alive (Capitol)
36. RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE Guerrilla Radio (Epic)
37. EDNA'S GOLDFISH Veronica Sawyer (Moon Ska)
38. SOULWAX Much Against Everyone's Advice (Almo)
39. BETH HART L..A. Song (Atlantic)
40. KORN Falling Away From Me (Epic)
41. MUSE Muscle Museum (Maverick)
42. STONE TEMPLE PILOTS Down (Atlantic)
43. NINE INCH NAILS We're In This Together (Nothing/Interscope)
44. EIFFEL 65 Blue (Republic)
45. OFFSPRING She's Got Issues (Columbia)
ADDS:
TORI AMOS Cornflake Girl (live) (Atlantic)
VERTICAL HORIZON Everything You Want (RCA)
BETH HART L.A. Song (Atlantic)
Al Green was scheduled to perform on Sunday morning, but backed out late Saturday afternoon citing JFK, Jr's July 16th death as the cause of his decision. We're guessing he was scheduled to open the West Stage.
Foo Fighters also backed out weeks prior due to the mixing schedule of There Is Nothing Left to Lose. It's possible the show intended for them to play between Creed and Red Hot Chili Peppers, although no existing records note their prospective day, stage, or timeslot.
Without those cancellations, the candles intended for the Hendrix-tribute finale would have been handed to the audience well after midnight. By that time, the few thousand attendees who chose to riot, loot, and ignite uncontrollable bonfires might have been a lot more exhausted and worn out. The whole thing might have ended very differently, but who can really say?
An interesting fact discovered in the Break Stuff podcast: Despite claims from Michael Lang or anyone else clinging to the Woodstock myth, a series of riots and fires also plagued the original Woodstock in 1969. In one memorable scene of the popular 1970 documentary, Wavy Gravy's on-stage Sunday morning speech about "breakfast in bed for 400 thousand" is attached with the announcement that "Some hamburger guy [had] his stand burned down last night." According to Break Stuff, that food stand was actually 12 food stands, and all of them were set ablaze by an anarchist group called The Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers accusing the food vendors of "crimes against the people" charging 35 cents for hotdogs. (For the record, most vendors at Woodstock '69 sold food at cost value, but apparently that wasn't good enough for the dumbass anarchists.)
Girls Gone Woodstock
By summer 1999, none of us could have foreseen the impactful permanence of YouTube preservation. But most of it's still all there in plain sight. Hundreds of women might never know that YouTube has been hosting 20-year-old topless videos of them, currently still viewed by the tens of thousands.
Throughout Day One, the nudity shots did not seem as gratuitous or excessive. A large fraction of the naked crowd recieved a unique sense of empowerment after liberating themselves. Big natural cans (and yes, shlongs) were impossible to avoid. Everywhere you turn, people just started whippin' off the towel. The PPV show was bound to include reasonably unintentional nudity at some point.
The crowd shots of Day Three feel a lot more invasive. After watching this pay-per-view special for 62 hours, we're convinced the producers collectively agreed on a change in direction, heavily shifting focus on tasteless crowd shots resembling the Girls Gone Wild DVD and VHS series, placing frequent deliberate emphasis on privacy violation. Based on the generally loose nature of the festival organization, we're certain the festival attendees never signed a release, never heard any statement, never agreed to display their naked likeness on national TV, let alone on YouTube. The show producers are equally as scummy and shitty as the bros and bullies who tore shirts from girls' backs.
In the Break Stuff podcast, promoter John Scher does everything he can to absolve himself from providing inadequate security staff: "I am critical of the hundreds of women that were walking around with no clothes on and expecting not to be touched. [60-70%] men, average age of early 20s? The hell did they think was gonna happen if they were gonna walk around naked? That's somewhat chauvinist, and not politically correct, and I condemn it, but [for] every action in this world, there's an equal and opposite reaction, and that's just the laws of science. I hope everyone who got caught got put in jail, but it wasn't what the press made it out to be."
Scher can thank the scumminess of the PPV producers for debunking his incredibly stupid theory. Many girls in attendance did not become shirtless by choice. The cameras catch crowdsurfers and girls who wanted a temporary seat on some dude's shoulders greeted by the hands of strangers tearing at their clothes, including one clearly visible instance during Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sadly, this behavior was common throughout many arena-sized rock shows and festivals of the post Lollapalooza era -- not exclusive to Woodstock '99.
A few weeks later, Ad Rock addressed the sexual assaults to an audience of 8 million during Beastie Boys' VMAs acceptance speech for "Intergalactic." For more info on that, here's our coverage of the 1999 VMAs.
#1 The Death Count (R.I.P.)
Three of the 450,000 audience members died by the end of the festival -- the same death toll as Woodstock '69. The Ringer's 8-part Break Stuff: The Story of Woodstock '99 podcast details the heartbreaking story of rock-enthusiast and non-drug-user David G. Derosia, a 19-year-old who was sent into a coma after overheating midway through Metallica's set and died at a Syracuse hospital on July 25, 1999. He was the 2nd of 3 people to die at the festival; on the first day, a 44-year-old with a pre-existing heart condition entered cardiac arrest; another woman returning from the weekend was struck while walking along the road after experiencing car trouble.
As far as those who appear in the PPV, we were unable to find anyone from Day Three's East or West Stage bands who passed away since Woodstock '99, although John Entwistle from The Who played an unaired solo set on the AMP3.Com Emerging Artist stage.
#2 Highlights
2.1 "Me & My Friends"
Flea's return to full frontal nudity and his bonkers stage presence were already enough to award him "Grand Champion Of Day Three." But his anti-creep speech removed any doubts, although his words would have been a lot more helpful a day or two earlier. They were only the 2nd band since Offspring (on Day One) to speak up:
"Hey you know, just because a girl out there wants to feel free and take her shirt off doesn't mean a bunch of you have to go grab her tits n stuff. Because they're her tits -- they're not yours. You gotta leave those tits alone. Those tits are a girl's private property, and they're a beautiful thing, so you gotta respect 'em. Everyone should be kind to one another out there."
Yeah Flea! Not sure how, but his speech somehow also intensifies the dopeness of "Me & My Friends" a moment later -- the final song before their encore break.
[Some bonus Flea stage banter cut from the YouTube edit between "Give It Away" and "Scar Tissue": "Hey, if you have -- at home, or in a car, or under your bed, or in your pocket -- if you have a gun, be sure to throw it away! Throw it in the garbage! Just get the fuck rid of it! You don't need that shit!"]
25 minutes prior, some of the first bonfire shots in the PPV slowly fade in and out as RHCP play "Californication." Released to radio in May 2000, the song was not yet among the era's ubiquitous rock staples. Thus, the crowd does not lose their shit during the intro hook, and its mellow nature makes the bonfire shots seem a lot more peaceful and celebratory than harmful.
"Me & My Friends" precedes an encore break when John Scher addresses the fires. On stage, they appeared on the horizon dim and tiny; to those at home, they're extremely visible and huge. Anthony Kiedis' unconcerned reaction reflects the crowd's perceived distance from danger: "Make wayyy for the firetrucks!!"
The encore begins. Some kid jumps on stage, dancing along and singing every word mid-way through an outstanding 8-minute "Sir Psycho Sexy." Flea briefly joins their fan until he's tackled by security.
Throughout the day, it seemed less probable that the planned all-star Hendrix tribute finale would materialize. Minutes before the RHCP set, Jimi Hendrix's sister personally asked them to close with one of his songs. After "Sir Psycho Sexy," Flea excitedly asks "Youwannadoit youwannadoit???," and Kiedis yells back "Fuck yea!" just before launching into their first performance of "Fire" since December 1991. The PPV producers appropriately respond with even more gratuitous bonfire shots, visibly growing in size as the show progresses. According to whoever edits setlist.fm, the sound tower had caught fire by this point.
2.2 Peace Sells...but Who's Buying?
The final song performed at Woodstock '99 was not "Fire."
With another 45 minutes to go by the time Chili Peppers finished their brief Hendrix-tribute, Megadeth closed with the even more appropriately prophetic "Peace Sells." It's strange that literally all of the press about Woodstock '99 consistently get this fact wrong, including the Break Stuff podcast and every 20-year retrospective blog post that we've seen over the past month. On both the PPV and YouTube, "Peace Sells" includes an eerily slow crossfade of Dave Mustaine layered under a wide shot of four huge bonfires in the distance.
We were unaware that Megadeth had a Load - an attempt at an atmospheric update that ultimately alienated the thrash-thirsting core of their fanbase. The headbangers at Woodstock still live and die for their metal, and they're not especially responsive to Mustaine's crowdwork attempts during "Crush Em," the recent single released to radio three weeks prior (and debuted live by Megadeth at the request of Goldberg on the July 5, 1999 episode of WCW Nitro). Released in mid-August, the album Rise is considered their weakest to date. Otherwise, Mustaine and Marty Friedman trade perfect solos on all the heavy classics: "Holy Wars," "In My Darkest Hour," "Sweating Bullets," "Symphony of Destruction."
Another fun coincidence: Megadeth and RHCP both included popular non-album-jams from 1993 movie soundtracks as the 5th songs in their respective setlists: "Angry Again" from Last Action Hero and "Soul To Squeeze" from Coneheads. (JFC we are nerdy as fuck.) [Unrelated to the PPV or Woodstock, here's wishing Dave Mustaine a speedy full recovery from throat cancer.]
2.3 Best Wake and Bake: Willie Nelson
By 1999, Willie's band remarkably still had many of the same musicians as on 1978's Willie And Family Live double-LP, plus he was still opening his shows with almost the exact same order: "Whiskey River" –> "Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)" –> "Funny How Time Slips Away" –> "Crazy" –> "Night Life." (He threw in Waylon's "Good Hearted Woman" special for Woodstock.) The crowd was thin and asleep during "Whiskey River," but had grown to 200,000 by the time they got to "Mountain Dew" and "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It." With so many hot jams, it's hard to keep up.
2.4 Best Song: Elvis Costello
It was a tough call, but we ultimately had to award Day Three's "Best Song" to Elvis Costello's "Alison," because it fucking rules. Cut from the YouTube edit: Before "Alison," he asks the crowd to boo British Airways for losing all of his guitars. BOO! Elvis also receives "Special Achievement in Breaking The 4th Wall" for congratulating the intruding camera guy on a hard day of work, but "just fuck off for a minute and let me sing!"
On the PPV, everyone seems pretty engaged, attentive, and appreciative, although Rob Sheffield (on the Break Stuff podcast) recalls boredom and restlessness. Either way, Elvis manages to engage 200,000+ into a singalong of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding," supplying the show's boomer organizers and the older fraction of the crowd with a hopeful (but ultimately temporary) utopian antidote. Somewhere between Willie, Brian Setzer, Everlast's funky 420 vibes, and Elvis Costello's solo-with-piano, the show seemed to set up a neutralizer briefly cleansing the path of chaos (allegedly) set in place the night before.
2.5 Best Crowd Work: Sevendust
"SEVENDUST HAS ARRIVED! SAY IT! SEVENDUST HAS ARRIVED! Are you ready for this Woodstock??? Where my people in the pit???"
Mid-way through a few weeks on Warped Tour, Sevendust sound tight as fuck, humbled and stoked on the opportunity, and kicking serious ass at Woodstock. Any random spoken moment from this set is a contender for "Best Crowd Work Moment."
"How many of you people at Woodstock like to get high?? How many of you like to get high on bud and grass?? How many of you like to take acid?? How many of you like to do mushrooms??? Now I'm not condoning doing drugs -- I just like everyone to know that I do participate y'all. Do you know what this is right here??? How about me comin' out there and gettin' high with y'all? I said how about me coming out there and gettin high?? You wanna get high with me???"
2.6 Most Underrated Drummer: Our Lady Peace
We forgot how good Jeremy Taggert's drumming sounds in songs like "One Man Army" and "Clumsy." Many huge nostalgia bombs in OLP's set.
2.7 Best Vocal Performance: Jewel
At some point on Sunday morning, a few folks smuggled lots of posterboard and markers into the festival grounds. Sunday's East Stage crowd thusly displays the highest number of attitude-era signs -- and especially during Jewel. "JEWEL RULES," "YODEL FOR ME JEWEL," "MARRY ME JEWEL," etc.
The weekend's most unapologetically feminine musician and an honorably gifted yodeller, Jewel floats through her set, stoked as hell and dropping some refreshing ASMR to a largely appreciative crowd. Poptimist revisionism may have unfairly blocked Jewel's odds of placement in the canon of '90s pop vocalists, but she deserved better. Perhaps blame the post-Aguilera emphasis on soulless vocal gymnastics. ("Genie In A Bottle" debuted on TRL 18 days prior.)
One more note: We might be wrong about this, but we're pretty sure Sevendust's rhythm section can be heard across the airforce base throughout the most spacious moments of "Foolish Games."
#3 Other Notes
3.1 WTF Moments
With all due respect to Buckcherry, the funniest hour of Woodstock '99 belongs to Creed who brought some outstanding non-self-aware lolz. We feel bad awarding Stapp with "Best Rolex," but he displays a very impressively fancy watch for Woodstock.
Creed did not issue "Higher" to radio until August 24, and it does not appear here. The only songs teased from the not-yet-released Human Clay are a pair of unfunny and boring album tracks we're now hearing for the first time. They do not play "With Arms Wide Open." The four songs we recognize are "Torn," "My Own Prison," "One," and "What's This Life For." These jams are all very funny and dumb, but they're weirdly half-unironically enjoyable.
While Stapp is at the top of his lolz game, it gets even crazier after they're joined by The Doors' Robby Krieger, who would have been a reasonably appropriate cameo in any other context. Who could have predicted his glorious Undertaker shirt? Stapp gets funky with the crowd-work for "Well I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer" -- forcing the crowd to repeat this part 2 or 3 times more than necessary. He then flexes his upper-octave mean-vox for the "GOTTA LOVE YUR MAN" part of "Riders On The Storm." And finally, Robby Krieger stays on stage for "What's This Life For," complete with a dramatic pause at its apex: "I just have one thing left to say... WE AINT HERE ANYMOORRRE." Right at that moment, it looks as though he came inches away from getting clunked in the head with a bottle. But they made it through unscathed. Great work Creed!
The 2nd funniest band of Day Three is Collective Soul. "Where The River Flows," "Gel," "Heavy." We nearly forgot how funny, terrible, and (albeit) memorable these once-ubiquitous riffs sounded. With the exception of their worst song ("The World I Know"), all the hits are here along with a really embarrassing cover of "Crazy Train" and a bland cover of U2's "I Will Follow." They all look very douchey and have really bad '90s Bon Jovi hairstyles. The most unexpectedly enjoyable moments from Collective Soul happen during "Heavy" (and at least one other song) when one of their guitar players inserts a couple dissonant, Nirvana-influenced solos. So at least that was cool.
3.2 Future Hits
Godsmack's "Voodoo" and Chili Peppers' "Otherside" are both notably absent. "Voodoo" later peaked at #5 and became Batista's entrance music until 2002. "Otherside" held down #1 on Billboard Alternative for 11 weeks between February and May 2000 and became one of modern rock radio's most overplayed songs.
Megadeth "Crush 'Em"
Performed live on the July 5, 1999 episode of WCW Nitro, peaked #5 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock on August 30th.
Sevendust "Denial"
Released to radio in mid-July, peaked #14 on Billboard Mainstream Rock on October 30th.
Our Lady Peace "One Man Army"
After making its world debut at Woodstock '99, the live performance leaked to Canadian stations, forcing Our Lady Peace to move its radio release up to July 30th. Peaked on Billboard Mainstream Rock at #16 on October 30th.
Jewel "Jupiter (Swallow the Moon)"
A re-recorded "radio" version of this song debuted on the August 1st episode of MTV's Making The Video. It peaked on Billboard Adult Alternative at #39.
Red Hot Chili Peppers "Around The World"
Many unprovoked rock DJs sporadically spun "Around The World" as early as June 8th - the day Californication dropped. It was not officially issued to radio until early September, with its video debuting on the October 4th episode of MTV's Making The Video. Peaked on Billboard Alternative at #7 on November 20th.
Our Lady Peace "Is Anybody Home?"
Debuted at Woodstock '99, issued to radio on January 10, 2000, peaked #20 on Billboard Modern Rock.
Godsmack "Bad Religion"
Issued to radio in February 2000 and peaking at #8 on Mainstream Rock. "Bad Religion" was one of the 162 songs included in Clear Channel's temporary "banned" list following September 11th, 2001.
Red Hot Chili Peppers "Californication"
Issued to radio in May 2000, "Californication" peaked at #1 for one week on Billboard Alternative, temporarily breaking the 7-week dominance of Papa Roach's "Last Resort."
3.3 The AMP3.Com Emerging Artists Stage (and other unseen events)
The PPV shows almost no footage of the AMP3.Com Stage, excluding all of the "Emerging Artists" sets and the rave sets. It also excludes everything from the Thursday pre-Woodstock party. Here's some notables:
Thursday 7.22 (Pre-Woodstock party):
- The String Cheese Incident and Strangefolk are two bands whose names we've seen frequently in the line-ups for Gathering Of The Vibes, a jam-band festival and narcotic-flea-market frequently held in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
- Vertical Horizon performed an extremely boring set. One year later, "Everything You Want" hit #1 on the Hot 100. Who knew?
- 3rd Bass performed an ok set eight years after "Pop Goes The Weasel" received spins on Yo! MTV Raps. For context, this would be the equivalent of Woodstock 50 booking the rapper who did that song "Like A G6."
Spitfire:
- Spitfire performed Woodstock 99 three times -- opening the West Stage on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 11AM. It seems like they weren't really a band, but more of a political performance art collective combining EDM and spoken word. The group featured Perry Ferrell and Michael Franti as the core members. (Podcast 99 claims that clothing designer Kenneth Cole was also one of the core members, but we can't find evidence of this through quick Google searches.) None of their performances were recorded or filmed. Perry Ferrell also headlined one night of the 6th Element rave, but he still never appeared on the PPV despite performing at least four times.
Friday 7.23 (Emerging Artist Stage and The 6th Element):
- Bijou Phillips was in Bully, a Larry Clarke film that we dug throughout college. In the first half of 1999, she had a video on 120 Minutes and was twice prominently featured in SPIN -- once in an artist profile, and again when they gave her album a score of 1 out of 10.
- Ben Lee from Noise Addict is cool. We got him confused with Ben Kweller from Radish. Both were in The Bens with Ben Folds, the guy from Ben Folds Five and William Shatner. We're guessing Ben Lee's Woodstock set included WLIR hit "Nothing Much Happens" which is not only a hot jam but also a gigantic nostalgia bomb. It was on one of our 2 or 3 most overplayed car mixtapes from summer '99, and definitely segued into "Ana's Song (Open Fire)" from fellow Aussies Silverchair.
- Moby is someone who we used to really dig, and we still have good nostalgia connected to many of his '90s jams, although we're pretty sure we haven't actively enjoyed a single song he's released since Play. We saw him play twice that summer and haven't seen him live since then.
Saturday 7.24 (Emerging Artist Stage and The 6th Element):
- Gargantua Soul is from Connecticut and probably received occasional spins on WCCC and Radio 104. Before we joined our college band, they played occasional shows with G-Soul. Frequent Toads Place headliners. Nu-metal from New Haven. All that fun stuff.
- 3 is a band name that we also recognize from Woodstock '94's emerging artist line-up.
- Full Devil Jacket actually ended up achieving some national spins -- charting twice on Billboard Modern Rock airplay throughout 2000. By the end of that year, one of the band members overdosed while on tour sadly killing their momentum.
- Old Pike joined Counting Crows on stage for "Hanginaround," but otherwise we don't know who they are.
- Strangefolk played again, wtf.
- We've seen 2 Skinnee J's twice. Their stage banter was frequently political, although the subject matter of the songs did not seem reflective of this. They were not quite as embarrassing as MC Paul Barman, but close enough.
- We would really have to think hard to determine whether we still dig any Fatboy Slim music. Probably not.
Sunday 7.25 (Emerging Artist Stage and The 6th Element):
- Supersuckers joined Willie Nelson on stage for "Amazing Grace," but we don't know who they are.
- Muse played a short set of songs from their first album which we have never heard. In 2001, they had a sick album called Origin Of Symmetry. In 2003, they had a dope single called "Hysteria." Most of what they did after that sucked.
- John Oszajca's minor 120 Minutes hit "Back In 1999" was featured prominently on the Mystery Men soundtrack. We remember the video featuring random people lip syncing the song's lyrics. The video also inspired us to consider a lip-sync-on-the-street parody set to a brutal Cannibal Corpse song, although the idea never materialized.
- John Entwistle played an unaired solo set that included "My Wife" and six other songs. A decently well-produced low-bitrate video of "Young Man Blues" is on Youtube. The production value looks pretty decent, providing some hope that other "Emerging Artist Stage" videos exists.
- Someone from the band Reveille was interviewed on Podcast 99, but we haven't heard that episode yet.
- The ravers who continued partying indoors from Sunday night into Monday morning mostly remained unaware of the insane riots and fires blazing outdoors. We're not sure which DJs were spinning throughout this part of the fest. It's possible that Sunday was Perry Ferrell's night to headline the rave.
3.4 Miscellaneous
All the bands who play around sunset have such beautiful natural stage lighting. For better or worse, this includes Limp Bizkit, Creed, and Godsmack.
Similar to Day Two, Day Three begins with riffs from Kennedy and another 30 minute countdown. After a few minutes, we realize that she is attempting to lure viewers. This portion of the show is possibly unscrambled on PPV channels, and she is encouraging people to call in and order Day Three before the countdown reaches zero. This was unclear throughout the 30 minute countdown at the start of Day Two.
In addition to the surge of camera operator scumminess, Day Three has the most ads for Columbia House, the most random artist interviews, and the most interruptions overall.
Day Three had the most stuff that we strongly dislike:
- We probably hated Rusted Root the most, who teased "All Along The Watchtower" and "Taking Care Of Business."
- The Brian Setzer Orchestra were introduced by a girl who was probably in the movie Swingers or something and introduced them as her favorite band OF ALL TIME. Not kidding.
- Godsmack were equally as bad as Creed except not funny, so what's the point? They also extended almost all of their songs past the 7 minute mark for some reason. "Keep Away" and "Whatever" were their two hits at the time; both are entirely nondescript.
- We used to like some Social Distortion songs, so we gave Mike Ness a shot. But it's pretty bad. He does the boring "Don't Think Twice" cover from his 1999 solo album and the Social Distortion version of "Ring Of Fire." When it comes time for "Ball and Chain," he asks "Who here would like to hear a Social Distortion song?" The crowd cheers, and they respond with a slowed down '60s country-ballad arrangement. Seriously dude, fuck you lol.
Everlast's set was fine. They do a Marvin Gaye cover. "Ends" is a jam; it's his best song, and the highlight of the set. With 20 years of hindsight, "What It's Like" still sounds overrated and Sublime-derivative. They play a non-hiphop arrangement of "Jump Around," but at least it wasn't a miserable ballad-arrangement (like Mike Ness's Woodstock version of "Ball and Chain"). The point of the band is that he assembled all white dudes to play funky music, which feels very in-character for 1999.
"...We don't need no water / Let the motherfucker burn..." Is this from something other than "Fire Water Burn?" In either case, many bros can be overheard loudly chanting this during Chili Peppers.
3.5 Conclusion
We're so happy that this is over. It was a lot of fun, but a lot more effort than we expected.
For help with context, we listened through two recently launched podcasts: The Ringer and Luminary's Break Stuff, and Culture Dumps' Podcast 99. Neither show is essential listening, but we're happy we checked them out. The two shows decently fill gaps left open by the other. Out of the two, we would recommend Break Stuff because it's faster to binge, and its production value makes it easier to digest.
The 8-part Break Stuff documentary series explores the "What Went Wrong?" angle exploited by literally every other Woodstock 99 thinkpiece that we read this past summer. Their series finale arrives this upcoming Tuesday. Afterwards, we plan to promptly unsubscribe from our 30-day trial of Luminary -- the worst podcast app we've ever used.
Podcast 99 is a hangout/discussion series celebrating the festival's music and many of its strangest moments -- a take rarely explored elsewhere. They dissect each set individually, accompanied by various trivia and (often) badly researched examinations of the artists' backstories. We will probably continue hate-listening to this series despite its lack of depth.
After hearing 15-20 episodes of Podcast 99, we've determined that the hosts enjoy the lore of the festival more than they enjoy music. The show could use a fact checker so that they can stop authoritatively stating easily Googleable mistruths as fact. The show could also use some additional insight from a source who consumed alternative rock throughout the entirety of 1999, since they only passively consume most of these bands. They had never heard "A Long December," nor could they ID which Alanis Morissette album featured the song "Ironic." This is basic entry-level '90s rock trivia. Stuff like this happens during every single episode. It annoys us that we know a lot more about this topic than them.
The most egregious take so far happened two weeks ago. They finally got around to discussing Rage - the best band of Woodstock 99 - ultimately concluding that they played a bad set without offering any valid explanation.
We know why these guys didn't like Rage's set: It's because they're posers who didn't recognize enough of the songs. We're certain they would have enjoyed it more if the setlist included "Testify," "Guerilla Radio," and "Sleep Now In The Fire."
Our source who was actually there confirms that Rage played the best set of Woodstock 99. Another source had a recent conversation with Rob Sheffield, who relayed solid confirmation that he was not a big fan of Rage Against The Machine UNTIL seeing them play at Woodstock 99. We also recall one of the DJs on K-Rock (we're guessing Cabbie) discussing his experience at the festival. "What was my favorite set?" He answered this question stating that he did not agree with Rage's politics but could not deny how hard they crushed it.
So despite the podcasting world's lack of insight, a little homework reveals that we were not alone in determining that Rage objectively played the best set of Woodstock 99.
We'll stop there because we could easily list 30 more reasons why Podcast 99 has pissed us off.
Thank you, and have a cool day.
[March 2022 addendum: When this series of posts was written a few years ago, we didn't anticipate so many people would find it through Google searches. What started as a labor of love is now the most popular thing we've posted in years.
With this in mind, we regret our negative take on Podcast 99. It's unfair to describe our experience as "hate-listening" -- at its best, the show is a pretty fun listen. We strongly recommend the Wyclef episode. It's also unfair to label the hosts as posers, since they are clearly passionate about the subject matter. And we haven't unfollowed their Instagram.]
Block 1, The party starters: Tragically Hip, Kid Rock, Wyclef
Block 2, The VH1-friendly frat party: Counting Crows, DMB, Alanis
Block 3, Time to tear this MF down: Limp Bizkit, Rage, Metallica
It looks very smart on paper. What could go wrong?
The Stage Mural Of Doom
Between 3:50:00 and 4:00:00, the PPV experiences one of its many lulls when not much is happening. The show kills time with random live shots of naked 20-somethings meditating and pre-recorded montages of retired town locals: "How are we gonna get to the golf course? They're gonna terrorize everything! It's gonna be a blood bath!" How's that for prophetic?
Contracted boomer sound guys supply the muffled set-break music. We had to Shazam this, but one of these idiots chose "Two Wrongs" from Joe Cocker's 1987 Unchain My Heart LP.
While awaiting Counting Crows around the 4-hour mark, the PA plays "Magical Mystery Tour." We initially thought this was yet another boring boomer sound guy selection. But then Counting Crows finally takes the stage right at the "climax" part (when the song slows down at the end). Did the band personally select this as their Woodstock 99 walk-on music? If so, they highlighted a point that horrified us quite deeply: The East Stage's clownish decor may have been intended as a football-field sized tribute to one of the scariest album covers of all time. The logo across the top of the stage looks identical to the font used on the cover of Magical Mystery Tour with similar stars and rainbow patterns filling up other areas.
We're interested in knowing what persons were responsible for choosing this as the theme of Woodstock 99's backdrop. This mural of doom confronted 400,000 sensory-immersed, dehydrated, malnourished, acid-dropping 20-somethings for three days and drove them all to the point of insanity. Considering this chilling context, the festival's aftermath feels even more disturbing. Who knows what Lord-Of-The-Flies / mass-suicide types of horrors might have ensued had the festival continued even longer?
#1 The Death Count (R.I.P.)
- Joe C was forced to leave Kid Rock's "Devil Without a Cause" tour by November '99 due to health concerns but was present for the rapid, meteoric ascent of "Bawitdaba" and their iconic Woodstock performance.
- Verne Troyer -- then known as Mini-Me -- introduced Limp Bizkit's set with "You wanted the worst? You GOT the worst!"
- The original '90s line-up of Dave Matthews Band performed the East Stage, including sax and woodwind player LeRoi Moore who passed away in 2008.
- The Tragically Hip opened the East Stage on Day Two. The band split up in 2017 after the death of their vocalist and lyricist Gord Downie.
#2 Highlights
2.1 "Killing In The Name"
Our crowning Day Two highlight goes to the flag draped over Tim Commerford's bass amp.
Rage allegedly agreed to a lower-than-normal stage volume after festival staff briefed them that all hell had just broken loose. They also obliged with less frequent banter than than almost any other Day Two artist from either stage (aside from Zack quickly dedicating "Freedom" to Leonard Peltier). No bullshit; just ass kicking, intensity heightening further with every song. The tension hits an apex with the final minute of their closer "Killing In The Name," culminating with the flag burning throughout the mantra in its coda: "Fuck You / I won't do what you tell me" hasn't sounded this exciting since 1993.
2.2 The Plastic Bottle Barrage
We had so much fun watching Kid Rock's set that we almost completely forgot how much we hate his terrible music. This easily wins for "Best Set / Worst Songs." His grand entrance was a 10 out of 10. The build in the intro of "Bawitdaba" was a 10. Joe C's "I'm Not A Fucking Midgit" t-shirt gets a 10. He dedicates "Balls In Your Mouth" to Howard Stern. He brings his platinum award for Devil Without A Cause on stage. His cover of "Fortunate Son" might be the weekend's most tasteful (albeit possibly unintentional) Woodstock '69 tribute. (Creedence initially released the song as a b-side a month after Woodstock. Barely missing the cut off.)
And finally, the grand finale: The plastic bottle barrage. A few recent Woodstock '99 retrospectives have attempted to call out this moment as problematic (assuming it resulted in crowd injuries), but it's honestly incredible. Joe C accurately yells "Holy shit!" into the mic as the stage quickly fills with a sea of plastic for over two minutes. The ground was already a trash heap -- might as well make something beautiful out of it.
2.3 James Hetfield's Best Look
Homie needs to bring back "the road warrior."
Metallica's set has bonus tracks (cut from the YouTube edit): Wasted and having the time of his life, Kid Rock staggers onto the drum riser before "Battery" and splits a Corona with Lars Ulrich.
2.4 Best Limp Bizkit Cameo
For some reason, Puff Daddy made it his business to be there for Limp Bizkit, taking a helicopter into Woodstock just for this one set and then peacing out right after they were done. In the biz, it's all about who you know, and Durst knew literally everyone.
2.5 Best Song: Counting Crows
We're not huge Counting Crows fans, but we are HUGE fans of "A Long December" -- still one of the greatest songs of all time and the hottest jam of Day Two. It looks like they lugged out the grand piano just for this one song. Completely worth it.
2.6 Best Non-Cover Attributions: Bruce Hornsby
Bruce Hornsby's set was not shown in full until about 3AM. It's not really all that notable, but we want to talk about it at length anyway because we think it's funny to talk about Bruce Hornsby for a long time.
John Scher -- Woodstock 99's co-organizer -- had made it a point to personally introduce Hornsby's shockingly half-dope set, sounding way better than it had any right to be. He does not perform with his '80s band Bruce Hornsby and The Range, so most of his AOR '80s hits are absent. No "Mandolin Rain," or "Every Little Kiss," or "The Valley Road." (We had to look up those song titles. "Mandolin Rain" is kind of a jam btw.)
They play a 12-minute version of his most well-known song, "The Way It Is," boldly introduced as a Tupac Shakur cover. They follow this with a bluegrass version of a song we hadn't heard in years: "Step by step / One by one / Higher and higher..." It's "Jacob's Labber," a song Huey Lewis not only covered but took to #1 in 1987. Hornsby's non-Range band is tight as fuck, despite the guitar player's wack faux-Anastasio tone. (Later on the same stage, Mickey Hart and Planet Drum's guitarist predictably achieves the exact same sound. Bummer.) The stage mix and sound-quality rest among the day's fullest, effectively outing Everclear who took the stage immediately afterwards and sounded like absolute shit.
In the uninterrupted re-airing, a panning camera catches a kid who is likely amid a very intense acid trip, hiding from the 100 degree heat with a white blanket. [See photo.]
#3 Other Notes
3.1 Most Compelling Disaster: Wyclef Jean
Considering the festival's aftermath, it's not especially strange that Wyclef's painfully awkward set hasn't placed on multiple "worst of all time" lists. He repeatedly emphasizes "This is Pay-Per-View" to the massive crowd, but appears entirely unrehearsed, shouting impulsive instructions to The Refugee All-Stars. The only preparedness we detect come from moments blatantly plagiarized from bands who had already played that weekend.
Stolen from James Brown and Kid Rock: The Refugee Allstars' lackluster solos kill time for the first 10 minutes before he takes center stage.
Stolen from 3rd Bass: Wyclef has his DJ play "Jump Around," likely unaware that both Everlast and DJ Lethal from House Of Pain separately performed later that weekend. (By the end of Woodstock 99, "Jump Around" was played at least three times.)
Stolen from Lit: After botching yet another cliched "Star Spangled" Hendrix-tribute solo (missing several notes), Wyclef fails at igniting his stratocaster with lighter fluid, and he again fails miserably at a meaningless, unearned guitar-smashing attempt. With a pricetag still hanging from its headstock, the axe stays 100% intact despite Wyclef's physical exertion.
Stolen from Kid Rock: Less than one hour after The Plastic Bottle Barage, he does the exact same thing.
Stolen from James Brown (Again): Wyclef asks a random audience member (only referred as "Diana") to wrap his final 3 minutes with an impromptu karaoke version of "Piece Of My Heart." Halfway through, Diana yells "STOP THE MUSIC!" and effectively calls out The Refugee All-Stars on playing the song incorrectly -- on live TV, in front of 300,000 people.
There's so much more, but we need to move on with our lives eventually.
3.2 The Point Of No Return: Limp Bizkit
There's a lot to unpack here. A few underlining points:
#1 Durst's vocals pretty much suck, but otherwise their set is actually not bad at all -- way better than their reputation would indicate. The interesting parts of their aesthetic derive almost entirely from bassist Sam Rivers keeping up with guitarist Wes Borland's peculiar inventiveness. Together, they're the secret glue holding it all together, meshing the funk and dissonance within most of the best '90s hiphop.
#2 With 20 years of hindsight, Durst's "provocation" feels unfairly overstated. Perhaps the lore made us anticipate something more extreme, but he's clearly seizing the day, feeding off the crowd without flinching. Otherwise, their set arrived precisely calculated to fuck shit up.
Unfortunately, YouTube has edited out most of Durst's controversial stage banter. "The Point Of No Return" and its aftermath can only be found in full on the PPV version. Here's a breakdown of the timeline:
08:46:00: Recalling the Korn set from one night earlier, the crowd density is not nearly as packed, but they're twice as exhausted, dehydreated, and hungover. Now four songs deep, the rowdiness reaches a new peak.
Durst responds to a note from production: "Hey, they wanna ask us to ask you to mellow out a little bit. They say too many people are gettin' hurt! Don't let nobody get hurt, but I don't think you should mellow out? Mellowing out? That's what Alanis Morissette just had you motherfuckers do. "Birkenstock Rock," y'all. This is 1999, motherfucker. Take your birkenstocks and stick 'em up your fuckin' ass! Now I'm gonna do somethin' to see if I can't get this whole fuckin' place from front to back to get the fuck up!"
The repeated phrase "mellow out" had us thinking they might go into "Sour" from Three Dollar Bill Y'all, which would have been appropriately chill, but instead...
08:47:05: We definitely did not expect the turning point of Woodstock 99 to happen during a Ministry cover (nor did we realize Limp Bizkit ever covered Ministry, let alone during their Woodstock 99 set).
The entire second-half of "Thieves" removes Ministry's lyrics and switches to a breakdown, slowly and slowly building up to that final "GET THE FUCK UP!" He might be a terrible singer, but he's a natural hype man.
"One thing I'm not seeing here--- Ohhkay, I'm not saying that." - Durst finally acknowledges they've taken Woodstock 99 to the point of no return -- attempting to unfire the gun, but it's far too late.
08:55:00:Durst gives the crowd a genuine glance of surprise for a quick moment. Seconds later, cameras show the first plywood surfers.
09:00:00:Sam Rivers kicks off "Re-Arranged," their only moment remotely approaching "mellow." Impressive guitar tapping from Wes Borland.
09:08:45: During the breakdown of "Break Stuff," he encourages to crowd to let out "all of that negative energy." Aerial cameras zoom to an ant colony of humans pulling plywood from "The Alamo," also known as Woodstock 99's sound booth tower, exposing the left side and back end. Many shirtless humans have entered. Others pass around 20 boards of plywood. Within moments, dangerously large amounts of people begin crowd surfing them.
09:09:45:DJ Lethal's intro to "Nookie" might not be audible through the PA. TV viewers can still hear everything, including Fred Durst realizing his mic got cut. A chant begins: "BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!" A piece of plywood caves in, unable to hold the weight of the five dudes standing on top, knocking over about 15 other people. Durst thanks someone in the crowd for hitting him with a bottle of orange juice.
09:11:45: PA's back on.
09:16:05: After the 2nd chorus of "Nookie," three porto-potties behind the sound booth are knocked over. About 40 determined shirtless dudes are ripping the entire thing apart. Garbage is flying everywhere.
09:17:45: The outro "Nookie" dies down. The sun has set.
09:23:45 It takes six minutes, but Durst is finally on his very own plywood at the edge of the crowd, and he dedicates "Faith" to all the ladies. Podcast 99 recently claimed that "Durst singing "Faith" while surfing plywood" was the triumphant defining "Star Spangled Banner" moment of Woodstock 99.
3.3 Future Hits
Fun Fact: Rage did not play "Guerilla Radio" at Woodstock, even though The Mandella Effect had previously assured us that this actually did happpen. Same goes for Ice Cube's "You Can Do It."
This was probably the weakest of the 3 days for songs that would later go on to become hits in some capacity, but there were a few...
Kid Rock "Cowboy"
Issued to radio in early August, peaked #5 on Billboard Modern Rock, debuted on TRL August 3rd and retired from TRL on November 2nd after placing in 65 episodes.
Limp Bizkit "Re-Arranged"
Issued to radio in mid-September, peaked #1 on Billboard Modern Rock.
The Chemical Brothers "Out Of Control"
The single charted #21 in the UK. Its video (featuring Rosario Dawson) debuted on 120 Minutes in October.
Counting Crows "Hanginaround"
Released in mid-October, peaked #17 on Billboard Modern Rock, hit #28 on Billboard Hot 100.
Limp Bizkit "Break Stuff"
Issued to radio in March 2000, peaked #14 on Billboard Alternative, debuted on TRL at #6 and appeared at least 30 times throughout March and April.
Moby Play singles
No record exists of Moby's Woodstock setlist, and he does not appear on the PPV. But his summer '99 shows frequently included many of the future hits from Play including "South Side," "Porcelain," "Natural Blues," and "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad."
3.4 WTF Moments
- "Sometimes there's an abundance of things, and sometimes there's a lack. Today, there's an abundance of titties."Dave Matthews' now infamous observation embarrassed so many people that it killed the on-stage objectifying for the rest of Day Two on both stages. We have no memory of his "making weird noises between songs" schtick. DMB's setlist included the most nostalgia bombs of any band so far. The last time we heard "#41" or "Two Step" or "Too Much" or "Tripping Billies" was probably 1998.
- Art Alexakis from Everclear wins the "angriest angry dad of the day" award for his "angry dad" set. "Fuck you to anyone who wants to make this into a commercial venture." Nice try, dad. Their drummer is the poor man's Tre Cool. In a TRL reminiscent moment of slight redemption, they pull over 100 mostly half-naked fans on stage for the last song. One girl with a "thousand mile stare" is visibly peaking on some very intense acid.
- After the Rage set, the show sneaks in a montage of Danny Masterson and Wilmer Valderrama's mundane adventures at The 6th Element aka the all-night rave. Nothing happens.
- The most gigantic WTF of the day goes to Wyclef's "Oldstock Rock." Congratulations.
3.5 Miscellaneous
- Day Two of the PPV kicks off backstage with some long-winded exhausted riffing from Kennedy, host of MTV's Alternative Nation and current Fox News contributor. Sadly, Kennedy may have been the most prepared and musically informed out of the 3 or 4 embarrassingly douchey bargain-bin nobodys selected to provide announcements or interview artists between sets. One clip from YouTube that we haven't been able to locate in the PPV shows a backstage VJ -- or DJ or whatever he was -- interviewing Los Lobos for 8 minutes worth of insultingly racist questions. The band did not seem happy about this.
- Frequent interruptions from the ColumbiaHouse.Com giveaway.
- With regards to their recent history, we would prefer to speak positively about The Tragically Hip. The singer rolled around on the ground a lot, and we like when bands do that.
- Los Lobos and Mickey Hart and Planet Drum both covered "Not Fade Away" as the 2nd-to-last song in their set. Some might say they both chose it as their penultimate song, but not us. We would not say that.
Some good setlist choices:
- Alanis Morrisette played "Uninvited" which we never realized was a non-album track.
- Ice Cube did all three of his hits from The Predator!
- Los Lobos covered "Are You Experienced?" and "Dear Mr. Fantasy." (They did not play "La Bamba.")
- Mickey Hart and Planet Drum's highlight was a drum & vocal song called "Tall Grass."
- The Chemical Brothers did lots of stuff from Surrender, their best record, released about a month prior.
Overall, the majority of the music was very good. We're ready to rescind our "worst concert of all time" award. Sorry Woodstock 99. We had no idea that you didn't completely suck.
By 2000-2001, we had already made up our minds about labeling Woodstock '99 as The Worst Concert of All Time -- an assessment we've been strongly reconsidering in hindsight. With the 20-year anniversary looming and all the big music blogs preparing their various takes, July 2019 seems like a good opportunity for renewed analysis.
Today we're posting the first of a 3-part series examining the Pay-Per-View of Woodstock '99 shown live on July 23, 24, and 25, 1999. Within the past month, we were lucky enough to find a very large video file including all 62 hours of this TV event. Upon digging into Day One, we soon realized this adventure would prove more tedious than our revisits of the VMAs, with far more elaborate context and lore to consider.
Unlike the VMAS, most of Woodstock '99 is still on Youtube which eases the burden of wordy contextual descriptions. However, the PPV arguably does a better job of maintaining the festival's rawness. Many of the sets and off-stage activities are shown in real time. Frequent live split screens show bands playing on the left side of the screen; meanwhile, the right half shows skaters on a halfpipe, or massage booth patrons, or an old crusty dude with a sock on his dick, or boobs getting painted.
Additional context was provided from a re-familiarization with the coverage from SPIN, Rolling Stone, and MTV, as well as the recently launched and aptly titled Podcast 99 -- an often frustrating but surprisingly informative dissection of the festival's proceedings. (Another related podcast titled "Break Stuff" launched within the past week, but we haven't heard it yet.)
Background
In July 1999, those interested in checking out Woodstock were provided several options, depending on desired level of attendance:
- Full investment: If you wanted to physically attend the festival, 3-day passes cost $150 plus Ticketmaster's service charges. The round trip from Rome, NY may have cost many people a few days worth of travel investment, plus food, water, lodging, drugs (because it's Woodstock), a change of clothes that will almost certainly get destroyed, physical and mental exertion, existing uncomfortably within the organism of the festival itself surrounded mostly by jocks and bullies.
- Casual investment: For the marginally curious, Westwood One provided a heavily edited (not live) simulcast which could be heard for free on stations like 92.3 K-Rock in NYC. MTV News aired frequent on-location updates, interviews, song fragments, and incomplete performances.
- Pay-Per-View: An option was provided for those who simply couldn't fuck with the idea of getting confronted by a potential living hell, but whose fear-of-missing-out on history was just enough to desire consumption of everything.
Providing far beyond what Westwood One and MTV were legally allowed to air, cable companies would gladly unscramble PPV for one day's worth of Woodstock '99 for $29.95 (the same price as that year's Wrestlemania PPV) while $59.95 would provide a 3-day package (about $10-20 more than most UFC or boxing PPVs).
Illegal cable boxes could access the PPV in its entirety for free. But for those without illegal cable boxes or $59.95, the limits of 1999's cable box technology still allowed audio to continue while only video stayed scrambled, providing access to the PPV's uncensored audio for those who just wanted to hear the music and didn't care what it looked like.
The PPV primarily focused on performances from two of Woodstock's stages -- The "East Stage" (the main stage) and the "West Stage" (the largest side stage). Other performance areas of the fest encompassed less than 1% of the coverage: This includes the "AMP3.Com Emerging Artists Stage," a film festival hosted by IFC, and a rave called The 6th Element lasting every night from midnight to 6AM with artists like Moby, Perry Farrell, and Fatboy Slim.
#1 The Death Count
As of Day One, the Woodstock '99 death count remains surprisingly low, although we don't know the back stories of everyone who performed.
- Bernie Worrell played a set at the Thursday party on July 22nd and performed again with George Clinton and The P-Funk Allstars on Day One.
- James Brown's unannounced surprise set opened the East Stage on Day One.
- The OG line-up of Lit performed on the West Stage mid-afternoon along with drummer Allen Shellenberger who passed away in 2009.
#2 Highlights
Working through the entirety of Day One is hell, but the highlights are worth locating. They take a minute to find, but moments of magic are definitely buried in there.
2.1 "Medley: Somethin' Stank / Booty / Jam"
Our top pick for the crowning highlight of Day One goes to a gentleman named Louie "Babbling" Kabbabie -- a stocky, balding dude in his mid-to-late '50s who kinda looks like Paul Heyman, described in P-Funk's Thursday night 7/22/99 pre-show set as "the hardest working man in show business." Louie arrives center-stage without introduction halfway through George Clinton's set to rap on a rare non-album cut titled "Booty." The song was part of a medley featuring George Clinton's teenage granddaughter Shonda rapping about weed on the song "Somethin' Stank (And I Want Some)" and an extended jam surpassing the 10-minute mark.
Bernie Worrell's 20 minute set (incorrectly labelled on the PPV as George Clinton) was performed in what appears to be a glamorous blue pope's outfit.
We had no idea that Shock G continued the "Humpty" persona as late as 1999, nor did we realize he was ever a hype man for George Clinton. Yes, P-Funk absolutely should have performed "The Humpty Dance," but we'll take what we can get.
2.2 "ARRRE YOUUU READAAYY?"
The sea of chaos immediately after Jonathan Davis screams "ARRRE YOUUU READAAYY?" in the intro of "Blind" might exemplify the utter fucking insanity of the monstrous crowd-size better than any other moment from Day One. The bodies somehow create actual waves resembling the Atlantic Ocean during hurricane season. We've never seen anything else quite like it in any other concert footage.
We recently spoke to at least one firsthand account who specifically notes the intro of "Blind" as Day One's apex of absurdity. Friends standing beside each other were suddenly pulled 15 feet apart. Those lucky enough to stay afloat still trampled over heads and arms against their best efforts. In that moment, a fraction of the crowd all at once decides "fuck this" and wisely trudges further out, slightly loosening the East Stage's crowd density for the remainder of the night.
Incidentally, Korn were in absolute top form. In one part, they tease Slayer's "Seasons In The Abyss." (!!!!) Jonathan Davis and Fieldy would later acknowledge their hour set as the high point in their career.
2.3 DMX's Prayer
The earnest, impassioned prayer closing out DMX's set gave nothing if not the aura of a genuine sermon of worship. The day's most intense and frequent cult-like call-and-response crowd participation began with fans loudly chanting "D!M!X!" the instant the previous set had ended. The backstage Q&A found here indicates DMX only saw the crowd size for the first time the moment he started his first song while stepping onto the stage alone. Just one MC and one DJ. The day's best 3-in-a-row: "Get At Me Dog" -> "Ruff Ryders Anthem" -> "Slippin." Special awards for Best Overalls and Best Underwear.
2.4 Best Song: Sheryl Crow
"My Favorite Mistake" -- the jam that might or might not be about Eric Clapton -- is probably the best song played all day by anyone (with regards to "Swallowed," "Glycerine," and "Miserable"). Sheryl Crow unexpectedly plays bass for about half of the set (!!!!) and wins a special award for Best Pants.
2.5 Best Wrestling: Insane Clown Posse
ICP arguably played Day One's most visually engaging set. Midway through, some "heel" cops rushed the stage, grabbed the mics, and announced "We're just been informed that this show is over! Everybody go home!" The kayfabe policing predictably set off 100,000 rounds of boos. But moments later, Violent J saved the day, crushing the pigs after descending from the top of a ladder. A piledriver from Shaggy 2 Dope sent another cop through a table.
Podcast 99 noted the one lone Juggalo who claimed a spot for ICP two hours early, seeming awkwardly out of place front-and-center for The Roots.
Rome, NY falls well outside Faygo country, so we're guessing ICP had to transport their 300+ bottles all the way from Michigan. We feel very bad for George Clinton and P-Funk, who had to perform moments after the stage was covered in a sticky pool of 100 degree soda, although the floor was likely cleared off by stage hands between sets. And maybe they ended up enjoying the soda grime since George Clinton and P-Funk would go on to play Gathering Of The Juggalos in 2011.
- Best Crowd Decoration goes out to the person at the West Stage who remembered to bring their 10-foot inflatable dick.
#3 Other Notes
3.1 The First 2 Hours
- The Woodstock '99 PPV kicks off with a 25-second bumper prominently displaying the words "Inked, Pierced, and Ready to Rock" as a horribly shitty "TV ad" version of Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" introduces the festivities. The 2nd thing shown in the PPV is an aerial shot of Griffiss Technology Park (a former toxic waste dump repurposed as an Air Force base) while a stage announcer introduces "a guy here from the health department who wants to tell you something about drugs," which is met with cheers from the crowd.
Reports from our firsthand source tell us the crowd expected Sugar Ray to kick off Day One. At 12PM Noon time, the East Stage's unidentified MC arrives to tell everyone that Mark McGrath reportedly became too sick to play. Instead, James Brown kicked off the show with an unannounced surprise set, and the crowd loses their shit in disbelief. However, it takes JB almost 30 minutes before he appears on stage at all. And so the first song performed on Day One of Woodstock '99 is instead sung by a literal Janis Joplin impersonator from Las Vegas named Tomi Rae Hynie (who James ended up marrying and divorcing within subsequent years). Tomi also sings the 2nd and 3rd songs played at Woodstock '99. The crowd is so stoked with Positive "Day One" Energy that they love every minute of this. Finally, James Brown arrives to sing on "Get Up Offa That Thing" and all of his other biggest hits. When he's not in front of the mic, he frequently hangs out in the back playing keyboards (!!!!) while other members of his band take solos. We didn't know he ever played keys on stage this late into his career.
By the way, none of the excitement from that last paragraph is shown on the PPV until well after midnight. Instead, the PPV's first 90 minutes include banal and nondescript rock music from Oleander, G. Love and Special Sauce, and moe. An Australian sketch comedy group called The Umbillical Brothers are responsible for the most cringeworthy moment of the first 2 hours. Met with bewilderment, a resounding stream of boos, and at least one guy screaming "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT," The Umbillical Brothers' brief segment might be the only non-music performance to appear on the PPV.
3.2 Depraved Behavior
Jamiroquai is the PPV's first band who does not completely suck, but this also marks the beginning of a series of patterns related to Woodstock '99's excessively depraved debauchery, all shown uncensored:
- About 2 hours in: Jay Kay's stage banter marks the earliest on-stage acknowledgement of the crowd's half-naked women. "Repeat after me: American breasts are the best breasts." The speech awkwardly continues for a little too long. Much raunchier takes on the same observation arrive later from Lit, Buckcherry, and ICP, who invite many crowdsurfing topless women on stage during their set.
- About 3 hours in: The crowd during Live may have included the first instances of unwarranted gropes caught on camera.
- Around the start of Hour 4: Andy Dick becomes the first to pull out his dick on stage midway through a song called "I'll Fuck Anything That Moves" - a strong candidate for the worst song performed on Day One (and that's really saying something).
- Halfway through Hour 4: Correctly assuming she would get harassed by the crowd to show her tits, Sheryl Crow arrived on stage prepared, casually remarking "It's a take your top off kind of day -- Sike!" between her first 2 songs and alleviating the awkwardness.
- Midway through Hour 5: Rosie Perez briefly appears on stage to introduce DMX, and gracefully dodges the blatant crowd harassment. "Yo, for real, you wanna see 'em? $3.99 at Blockbuster: Do The Right Thing. Go and order it baby!"
- Around the start of Hour 7: At long last, The Offspring are the one and only band from the entirety of Day One discouraging the crowd from groping crowdsurfing females. "Just because a girl wants to go crowdsurfing or whatever, that doesn't give the guys the right to molest them, you know what I'm sayin? So if you're a guy and you see a girl passing overhead, give her a break, you know what I'm sayin?"
There's literally hundreds more (especially during ICP), but these are some "firsts" that we noticed.
3.3 Future Hits
At the time of Woodstock '99, "Scar Tissue" was in the middle of a 16-week run topping Billboard's Alternative Singles chart, which overtook an 11-week run for "My Own Worst Enemy."
Many "buzz" acts were booked for Woodstock '99, partially to keep the festival seeming edgy, partially to align with the freshness of the 1969 and 1994 line-ups, but mostly because new bands with one minor hit are cheaper to book. This contributed to a phenomenon where a lot of Woodstock 99's music later went on to become hits in some capacity.
The Offspring "The Kids Aren't Alright"
We're counting this since the video premiered on 120 Minutes 4 days prior and debuted at #10 on TRL 1 day before the festival started. The single had been steadily climbing Billboard's Alternative Singles since mid-June. For whatever reason, it's remained Offspring's most-scrobbled song every week since many years ago.
Buckcherry "For The Movies"
Issued to radio August '99, peaked #25 on Billboard Modern Rock.
Lit "Zip-Lock"
Issued to radio in August, peaked #11 on Billboard Modern Rock. Its video (featuring Dee Snider) hit #9 on the August 20th edition of TRL, and placed at #37 on TRL's "End of Summer Countdown" on August 28th.
Live "The Dolphins Cry"
Released in late August, peaked #3 on Billboard Modern Rock, #78 on Hot 100.
Bush "The Chemicals Between Us"
Released on September 14th. Peaked #1 on Billboard Alternative, #67 on Hot 100.
Korn "Falling Away From Me"
Released in late October, prominently featured in a Halloween episode of South Park, peaked #7 on Billboard Alternative, hit #1 on TRL multiple times throughout November and December.
Vertical Horizon "Everything You Want" (from the 7.22.99 pre-Woodstock "party")
Issued to radio in January 2000, hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 2000.
Lit "Miserable"
Issued to radio in February 2000, peaked #3 on Billboard Modern Rock. Its video (featuring Pamela Anderson) debuted on TRL at #6 and placed 5 more times on TRL throughout February.
Vertical Horizon "You're A God" (from the 7.22.99 pre-Woodstock "party")
Issued to radio in July 2000, peaked at #23 on the Hot 100.
3.4 WTF Moments
- Again, Andy Dick singing "I'll Fuck Anything That Moves" and pulling out his dick on stage has to be the weirdest and most disturbing moment of the day.
- For some reason, Stephen Baldwin (from the movie Bio-Dome) appears on stage multiple times to introduce bands.
- Lit's "workin' on my hot rod" aesthetic helped them easily win "worst dressed" for the day. During their last song, the guitar player uses a vibrating dildo as a slide (which sounds shockingly awesome but looks horrendously douchey). A few moments later, he lights his guitar on fire with lighter fluid, raises it above his head, and smashes it to pieces. The crowd approves.
- As much as we appreciate their anti-groping speech, The Offspring's set was probably the most grating out of all the big-name acts. Dexter Holland sounds like he either genuinely can't sing, or can't hear the monitors, or some combination of both. Also in one part, they use baseball bats to decapitate mannequins bearing likeness to The Backstreet Boys.
- The character Buffalo Bill from Silence Of The Lambs is actually based on the life of Ed Kowalczyk from Live who also locks humans in cages in his basement. They play "Shit Towne" from Throwing Copper, and Ed ad libs "God bless America" into the lyrics. Before playing the godawful ballad "Turn My Head," he encourages the crowd to grab someone's skin "if the romance moves you."
3.5 Miscellaneous
- Overall, Day One was surprisingly good aside from the overbearing masculinity. They couldn't have asked Garbage or Missy Elliott or The Cardigans or Fiona Apple to play this thing?
- The surprise cameo from Erykah Badu highlighted The Roots' set. It's too bad she couldn't have been booked to perform on her own.
- Two acts cancelled their Day One slots: Sugar Ray and Aerosmith were scheduled to open and close the East Stage respectively.
- Unpopular opinion: Bush's first 7 or 8 radio hits are entirely unoffensive, and they simply weren't worth the rockist vitriol they received. They were never "alternative" in the literal sense but rather "pop with distortion pedals," wisely allowing their management to package them as a heartthrob-focused Nirvana clone. The remixed version of "Mouth" from An American Werewolf In Paris was a bad management decision, however, and it was this song that set off our own disdain of Bush between '97 and '99. But that turned back to positive after we heard the PJ Harvey influenced "Greedy Fly" on K-Rock's Woodstock simulcast. It's a much weirder song than it gets credit for. Their set was fine, aside from the speech before "The Chemicals Between Us" -- "I am a black man / I am a white man / I am an Englishman / I am an American" -- appropriately labelled on the Podcast 99 show as pretentiously Bono-esq.
- This has nothing to do with the PPV, but MTV's "Live From Woodstock '99" edition of TRL took place on this day sometime between 3PM and 5PM. The top 10 looked like this:
10) Eminem / Dr. Dre "Guilty Conscience"
09) Orgy "Stitches"
08) The Offspring "The Kids Aren't Alright"
07) Joey McIntyre "I Love You Came To Late"
06) Blink 182 "What's My Age Again?"
05) Christina Aguilera "Genie in a Bottle"
04) Britney Spears "Sometimes"
03) 98 Degrees "I Do (Cherish You)"
02) Limp Bizkit "Nookie"
01) Backstreet Boys "I Want It That Way"
TASTE MY KIDS is a digital newsletter compiling recommendations for a happier and healthier existence, most often in the form of "best-of" lists, youtube posts, album or movie reviews, and various scribblings. We lived on Geocities starting in August 2000. In January 2009, times got tough and posts were on hiatus until a new host could be located. Geocities eventually died anyway, and now we live on blogspot. True story.
The other thing we wanted to discuss regards Evan Olson's major label flop "So Much Better," the subject of the episode.
After Napster, a pristine digital copy of a minor hit was as good as yours if you could afford enough real estate among a precious 11.2 gigs of hard drive space. (That was the size of our hard drive in 1999.) So if you heard a song on the radio every day for two months and it disappeared from your favorite station's playlist out of nowhere, you wouldn't have to invest $14.99 to hear it again.
It's hard to say whether Reply All purposely omitted any fun facts to assist with the story's progression. 
An interesting fact discovered in the Break Stuff podcast: Despite claims from Michael Lang or anyone else clinging to the Woodstock myth, a series of riots and fires also plagued the original Woodstock in 1969. In one memorable scene of the popular 1970 documentary, Wavy Gravy's on-stage Sunday morning speech about "breakfast in bed for 400 thousand" is attached with the announcement that "Some hamburger guy [had] his stand burned down last night." According to Break Stuff, that food stand was actually 12 food stands, and all of them were set ablaze by an anarchist group called The Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers accusing the food vendors of "crimes against the people" charging 35 cents for hotdogs. (For the record, most vendors at Woodstock '69 sold food at cost value, but apparently that wasn't good enough for the dumbass anarchists.)
By summer 1999, none of us could have foreseen the impactful permanence of YouTube preservation. But most of it's still all there in plain sight. Hundreds of women might never know that YouTube has been hosting 20-year-old topless videos of them, currently still viewed by the tens of thousands.
Flea's return to full frontal nudity and his bonkers stage presence were already enough to award him "Grand Champion Of Day Three." But his anti-creep speech removed any doubts, although his words would have been a lot more helpful a day or two earlier. They were only the 2nd band since Offspring (on Day One) to speak up:
25 minutes prior, some of the first bonfire shots in the PPV slowly fade in and out as RHCP play "Californication." Released to radio in May 2000, the song was not yet among the era's ubiquitous rock staples. Thus, the crowd does not lose their shit during the intro hook, and its mellow nature makes the bonfire shots seem a lot more peaceful and celebratory than harmful. 
The final song performed at Woodstock '99 was not "Fire."
It was a tough call, but we ultimately had to award Day Three's "Best Song" to Elvis Costello's "Alison," because it fucking rules. Cut from the YouTube edit: Before "Alison," he asks the crowd to boo British Airways for losing all of his guitars. BOO! Elvis also receives "Special Achievement in Breaking The 4th Wall" for congratulating the intruding camera guy on a hard day of work, but "just fuck off for a minute and let me sing!"
"SEVENDUST HAS ARRIVED! SAY IT! SEVENDUST HAS ARRIVED! Are you ready for this Woodstock??? Where my people in the pit???"
We forgot how good Jeremy Taggert's drumming sounds in songs like "One Man Army" and "Clumsy." Many huge nostalgia bombs in OLP's set. 
With all due respect to Buckcherry, the funniest hour of Woodstock '99 belongs to Creed who brought some outstanding non-self-aware lolz. We feel bad awarding Stapp with "Best Rolex," but he displays a very impressively fancy watch for Woodstock.
While Stapp is at the top of his lolz game, it gets even crazier after they're joined by The Doors' Robby Krieger, who would have been a reasonably appropriate cameo in any other context. Who could have predicted his glorious Undertaker shirt? Stapp gets funky with the crowd-work for "Well I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer" -- forcing the crowd to repeat this part 2 or 3 times more than necessary. He then flexes his upper-octave mean-vox for the "GOTTA LOVE YUR MAN" part of "Riders On The Storm." And finally, Robby Krieger stays on stage for "What's This Life For," complete with a dramatic pause at its apex: "I just have one thing left to say... WE AINT HERE ANYMOORRRE." Right at that moment, it looks as though he came inches away from getting clunked in the head with a bottle. But they made it through unscathed. Great work Creed! 
Day Three had the most stuff that we strongly dislike:
We're so happy that this is over. It was a lot of fun, but a lot more effort than we expected. 
Between 3:50:00 and 4:00:00, the PPV experiences one of its many lulls when not much is happening. The show kills time with random live shots of naked 20-somethings meditating and pre-recorded montages of retired town locals: "How are we gonna get to the golf course? They're gonna terrorize everything! It's gonna be a blood bath!" How's that for prophetic?
- Joe C was forced to leave Kid Rock's "Devil Without a Cause" tour by November '99 due to health concerns but was present for the rapid, meteoric ascent of "Bawitdaba" and their iconic Woodstock performance.
Our crowning Day Two highlight goes to the flag draped over Tim Commerford's bass amp. 
We had so much fun watching Kid Rock's set that we almost completely forgot how much we hate his terrible music. This easily wins for "Best Set / Worst Songs." His grand entrance was a 10 out of 10. The build in the intro of "Bawitdaba" was a 10. Joe C's "I'm Not A Fucking Midgit" t-shirt gets a 10. He dedicates "Balls In Your Mouth" to Howard Stern. He brings his platinum award for Devil Without A Cause on stage. His cover of "Fortunate Son" might be the weekend's most tasteful (albeit possibly unintentional) Woodstock '69 tribute. (Creedence initially released the song as a b-side a month after Woodstock. Barely missing the cut off.)
For some reason, Puff Daddy made it his business to be there for Limp Bizkit, taking a helicopter into Woodstock just for this one set and then peacing out right after they were done. In the biz, it's all about who you know, and Durst knew literally everyone.
Bruce Hornsby's set was not shown in full until about 3AM. It's not really all that notable, but we want to talk about it at length anyway because we think it's funny to talk about Bruce Hornsby for a long time.
Considering the festival's aftermath, it's not especially strange that Wyclef's painfully awkward set hasn't placed on multiple "worst of all time" lists. He repeatedly emphasizes "This is Pay-Per-View" to the massive crowd, but appears entirely unrehearsed, shouting impulsive instructions to The Refugee All-Stars. The only preparedness we detect come from moments blatantly plagiarized from bands who had already played that weekend.
There's a lot to unpack here. A few underlining points:
Unfortunately, YouTube has edited out most of Durst's controversial stage banter. "The Point Of No Return" and its aftermath can only be found in full on the PPV version. Here's a breakdown of the timeline: 
08:47:05: We definitely did not expect the turning point of Woodstock 99 to happen during a Ministry cover (nor did we realize Limp Bizkit ever covered Ministry, let alone during their Woodstock 99 set).
09:16:05: After the 2nd chorus of "Nookie," three porto-potties behind the sound booth are knocked over. About 40 determined shirtless dudes are ripping the entire thing apart. Garbage is flying everywhere. 
- "Sometimes there's an abundance of things, and sometimes there's a lack. Today, there's an abundance of titties." Dave Matthews' now infamous observation embarrassed so many people that it killed the on-stage objectifying for the rest of Day Two on both stages. We have no memory of his "making weird noises between songs" schtick. DMB's setlist included the most nostalgia bombs of any band so far. The last time we heard "#41" or "Two Step" or "Too Much" or "Tripping Billies" was probably 1998. 
- Day Two of the PPV kicks off backstage with some long-winded exhausted riffing from Kennedy, host of MTV's Alternative Nation and current Fox News contributor. Sadly, Kennedy may have been the most prepared and musically informed out of the 3 or 4 embarrassingly douchey bargain-bin nobodys selected to provide announcements or interview artists between sets. One clip from YouTube that we haven't been able to locate in the PPV shows a backstage VJ -- or DJ or whatever he was -- interviewing Los Lobos for 
Unlike the VMAS, most of Woodstock '99 is still on Youtube which eases the burden of wordy contextual descriptions. However, the PPV arguably does a better job of maintaining the festival's rawness. Many of the sets and off-stage activities are shown in real time. Frequent live split screens show bands playing on the left side of the screen; meanwhile, the right half shows skaters on a halfpipe, or massage booth patrons, or an old crusty dude with a sock on his dick, or boobs getting painted. 
Our top pick for the crowning highlight of Day One goes to a gentleman named Louie "Babbling" Kabbabie -- a stocky, balding dude in his mid-to-late '50s who kinda looks like Paul Heyman, described in 
The sea of chaos immediately after Jonathan Davis screams 
ICP arguably played Day One's most visually engaging set. Midway through, some "heel" cops rushed the stage, grabbed the mics, and announced "We're just been informed that this show is over! Everybody go home!" The kayfabe policing predictably set off 100,000 rounds of boos. But moments later, Violent J saved the day, crushing the pigs after descending from the top of a ladder. A piledriver from Shaggy 2 Dope sent another cop through a table. 
- The Woodstock '99 PPV kicks off with a 25-second bumper prominently displaying the words "Inked, Pierced, and Ready to Rock" as a horribly shitty "TV ad" version of Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" introduces the festivities. The 2nd thing shown in the PPV is an aerial shot of Griffiss Technology Park (a former toxic waste dump repurposed as an Air Force base) while a stage announcer introduces "a guy here from the health department who wants to tell you something about drugs," which is met with cheers from the crowd.
Jamiroquai is the PPV's first band who does not completely suck, but this also marks the beginning of a series of patterns related to Woodstock '99's excessively depraved debauchery, all shown uncensored:
- Unpopular opinion: Bush's first 7 or 8 radio hits are entirely unoffensive, and they simply weren't worth the rockist vitriol they received. They were never "alternative" in the literal sense but rather "pop with distortion pedals," wisely allowing their management to package them as a heartthrob-focused Nirvana clone. The remixed version of "Mouth" from An American Werewolf In Paris was a bad management decision, however, and it was this song that set off our own disdain of Bush between '97 and '99. But that turned back to positive after we heard the PJ Harvey influenced "Greedy Fly" on K-Rock's Woodstock simulcast. It's a much weirder song than it gets credit for. Their set was fine, aside from the speech before "The Chemicals Between Us" -- "I am a black man / I am a white man / I am an Englishman / I am an American" -- appropriately labelled on the Podcast 99 show as pretentiously Bono-esq.