Contents
Information Page
Moshing – An Introduction
The Garden Of Serenity
White Riot – Woodstock ‘99
Mashing Down Babylon – A History Of Moshing
Dipping Into The Population – Hole, Brixton Academy, 1999
The Civil Service Of Punk – Vandals, Ataris, Slovenia 2000
Sheer Heart Attack – Musicians On Moshing
Bouncers
Unwelcome Visitors Permitted
Surviving The Pit
Teenage Rampage
One Minute Silence
Calm Like A Bomb – Rage Against The Machine
Mate Feed Kill Repeat – Slipknot
We Can Be Heroes – Berlin 2000
A Hole In The Crowd – Roskilde ‘99
Mosh Pit Bandits – The Kids Are All White
Sepultura/Soulfly
Hardcore Soft Porn – Sex In The Pit
Bastard Sons Of JFK – Dropkick Murphys
Doomsday Diablos – Underground Hardcore
Mayhem Marketing; Limp Bizkit/Big Day Out
Deftones, March 2001
Drawing Conclusions On The Wall
Acknowledgements
Sources
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Moshing is a ritualised and furious form of dancing combining very real violence with remarkable displays of emotion, life-and-death situations, and the raw sex beat of rock’n’roll. It induces euphoric displays of affection and hostility between its usually male participants.
It derives from the mid-Seventies punk practices of stage diving and slam dancing wherein spread-out gangs of punk kids at gigs would indulge in dancing, pogoing, and slamming into one another. The punks were giving expression to their profound lack of connection to the Old Guy Seventies music of Eric Clapton, The Eagles, etc. At Old Guy gigs the ageing collegiate types the punks so despised stood still in front of their heroes, clapping appreciatively, whistling, swaying, or sometimes cosmic dancing like they were attending some eternal Woodstock of the imagination.
In the late Seventies the punks were saying through their slam dancing that they were different, on the fringe, offensive. They were declaring themselves to be as alienated by traditional rock’n’roll values as they were by normal society. Gobbing, spitting at one another, at bands, at perceived enemies, was part of their strong Stay Away message. The punks were saying to the world that they were young and confident in their vision. They saw slam dancing as a new punk version of sex and violence. Like generations that went before them, and others that followed, they were convinced that there was a connection between themselves, their music, and their community.
Long after the founding fathers of punk had retired to their mansions, websites, and fortunes, new waves on underground music exploded all over clandestine America. Reports came in that seething masses of youth were to be seen crashing into one another in front of small club stages. By the early Nineties these reports talked of brutal gut-wrenching violence, especially in New York hardcore clubs. The music being played by the bands was no longer the main thing happening in American rock clubs. People came to see the rage and fury, not to hear the music – which was also frenzied and furious.
Tightly packed crowds were seen to support others amongst themselves who were body surfing over their heads. The crowds did this by uplifting their own arms and holding surfers aloft. Another trick this new crowd had was stage diving, which usually consisted of either a member of the audience or a member of a band leaping from the stage into what came to be known as the mosh pit – the area in front of the stage where all this frenzied activity took place. This was the pastime, in the main, of stripped-to-the waist adolescent boys.
Sometimes, and it was always a feat worth seeing, stage diving involved the process in reverse. Brave members of the audience attempting to leap from the auditorium onto the stage or at least into the security pit which separates crowd from band, an area full of security guards (bouncers), and, sometimes, press photographers. Artists like Courtney Love from Hole became associated with stage diving into the mosh pit – it was her style when gigging with Hole to goad the pit into a pent-up state before diving in amongst her followers. It became the norm that she emerged from the pit half-naked.
Moshing is a combination of three main factors. Crowd surfing, stage diving, and the slam dancing of the original punks taken to a new level of violence. It usually takes place in a semicircular space right in front of the stage, the heaviest and most violent moshing happening in front of the lead singer, but a little back from the security barriers. There are certain acts like Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and Slipknot, where the mosh pit extends to the entire auditorium or field where they are playing.
Sometimes there are circle pits, extraordinary expressions of solidarity in front of hardcore bands. A circle pit involves a large number of people – it needs a decent crowd – forming and running around in a huge circle, holding on to one another to maintain balance. The circle turns faster and faster as the music picks up speed. Circle pits are uniquely good humoured, a source of tender youthful joy to the participants, and are often instigated by bands when they see things getting a little tight or sour in the pit.
To the outsider moshing looks like the most terrifying spectacle, as if things have got totally out of control, as if hundreds will surely get badly injured. In fact there is a highly structured sense of community within a good pit. Sometimes there are kids there who are natural leaders and organisers. Often these are feral little guys concerned about the safety of those around them. Then again, sometimes there are pit lieutenants who’ve been sent in there by responsible bands who are concerned about things going wrong. These pit lieutenants are rarely bouncers or roadies, they’re usually the given band’s original camp followers – those who followed them from the earliest days – who now enjoy the confidence of both band and pit. Pearl Jam and the London band One Minute Silence have been particularly diligent in this regard.
In addition to these unobserved leaders there is also the concept of Pit Etiquette which is a common law shared by those who take the pit seriously. The fundamental rules of this Etiquette insist that people look out for one another and react instantly when they see something going wrong. Sexual harassment of boys and girls is frowned upon, as is irresponsible crowd surfing and bullying. The idea of this Etiquette is that people should intervene communally when they see something they don’t like. Violence is not forbidden by this Etiquette, as actual consensual violence is part of the dancing which happens in the pit.
What began in small clubs now stuffs arenas. The violence of the mosh pits, which ten years ago resulted in self-elected injuries shared between grown men, has spread out all over the place. Now the moshing is often carried out by as many as 50,000 people at one time. Many of the moshers are young teenage boys, many more are out-of-their-depth college girls, and an awful lot of moshers are huge muscle-bound jocks looking for a legal way to kick the shit out of one another or thinking with their cocks. There have been a few deaths in the pit. Many others have ended up paraplegic or with serious injuries. Minor injuries like broken arms and legs are the norm at any outdoor festival where the flag of rock’n’roll is raised. Broken noses and sprained ankles are no longer deemed serious. A free clinic in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury set up a Rock Medicine program devoted entirely to dealing with mosh injuries.
In 1994 two deaths attributed to mosh-related head injuries brought the issue into sharp focus. A 21-year-old guy died at a Motorhead gig in London while a 17-year-old died at a rock club in New York. That same year two moshing participants were made paraplegic at a Rhode Island Lollapalooza show and at a Sepultura/Pantera show in Maryland. Concert and club venues now live in terror of legal actions inspired by pit injuries and have taken to videotaping mosh pits in an effort to document the fact that moshers are bringing the danger upon themselves.
This is an attitude with which most moshers have some sympathy. “If you don’t want to get injured, don’t go into the pit,” is the consistent message you get from pit veterans. This simple advice is exactly right. People know that they stand a chance of being injured or molested in the pit. The very presence of these dark dangers is what drives them in there and, conversely, gives them a comforting sense of belonging. In this sometimes hostile landscape, they have to look out for one another. There is more fraternity and harmony in the pit than outsiders can possibly imagine.
Moshing happens amongst several different tribes. Some of these tribes cross over into one another, as is only to be expected because most people like a few different styles of music.
Rapcore is a mixture of white rap and hardcore. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are the best band in that genre, while Limp Bizkit are the most popular. Nu-metal is essentially a pop version of rapcore, and leading exponents include the super-lite Linkin Park and the humorous Bloodhound Gang. Ska-core is often just punk with a brass section, like Less Than Jake.
Emocore, emotionally charged punk, is guitar-based mid-tempo rock played by bands like Fugazi. Originally bands on this scene did long drawn out songs with a vocal contrast between conventional singing, soft whispering, gut-wrenching screams, and actual crying or sobbing.
Grindcore sounds exactly like what the name implies, a grungy guitar noise assault founded by Napalm Death, and popularised by Biohazard and Suicidal Tendencies. It is a close relation of Death Metal, with which it shares an impressive brutality, downtuned guitars, and growled vocals. Whereas Death Metal tunes can go on forever, Grindcore benefits from an economic punk brevity in songs which have either social conscience or angst-ridden lyrics.
Punk rock divides into hardcore punk, the outstandingly powerful scene from which moshing first emerged, and pop punk, an idiotic licence to print money. Pop punk superstars like Green Day and The Offspring play stadiums all over the world. Pop punk bears scant resemblance to punk but has strong roots in the lighter end of the New Wave which conquered America in the aftermath of Seventies punk.
And then there are about fifty other semi-obscure sub-genres in front of which people dance, riot, and inflict damage on one another.
As in all areas of art, in rock music the hardcore cutting edge, the real extreme stuff, has been used as a battering ram with which to sell the softer stuff. For every interesting and innovative presence such as Sepultura or Rancid there are a thousand mediocre opportunists cynically exploiting this new teenage phenomenon. You won’t see too many of the pubescent middle-class kids who’ve been suckered into believing that Green Day or Blink 182 are punks showing up for the adult rough and tumble of violent moshing that goes on at covert thugcore basement gigs in Miami and New York, where those on the fringes of punk society gather to beat the living daylights out of one another.
America now abounds with corporate “tough guy” bands (known as such within the industry) using the rhetoric of mosh pit life in much the same way that commercial R’n’B has exploited menacing hiphop beats, style, and rhetoric. Many of the cultural borrowings of both real mosh pit culture and its corporate parasites owe everything to hip hop. Which is ironic, for hip hop was fundamentally challenging the relevance of rock’n’roll until the moshers reclaimed the territory, and the most powerful pit bands proved that there was life in the old warhorse yet.
Gerard works in banking in the City of London. During the day he sports a Ralph Lauren suit and stares at a computer screen. He is vague about exactly what it is that he does, not because he is embarrassed by his job but because most of the guys he knows in the pit wouldn’t have a clue what that job was anyway. “It’s not like I have a great job,” he laughs, “in fact it is shitty and boring but I don’t give a fuck. I work so that I have enough money for going to gigs. Buying CDs. Clothes.”
The job may be a big nothing but when it comes to music he operates with an obsessive passion. In a town where I can’t find more than one or two punk gigs to go to each week, he seems to find five or six. He makes it to all the obvious places, The Garage, The Monarch, The Red Eye, small club and pub venues where you can sometimes catch five band gigs by semi-obscure and on-the-up acts but he also knows about other gigs way out of town that he discovers through photocopied flyers and via a circle of off-the-map fanatics who keep each other informed via the Internet. There are various mailing lists to which Gerard subscribes, and he gets news of things by word of mouth all day on his mobile. Often when I’m talking with him he’ll get a call from somebody telling him about a punk all dayer in Paris or an anarchist fund-raiser in some dodgy pub down the East End. I first met him at the Anarchist Book Fair where he gave me a lecture on the liberating nature of punk.
I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine Gerard in his suit. He is nineteen and looks a lot younger. For the first six months that I knew him we never spoke but we were the best of friends. We tended to meet at the smaller gigs where we had to help each other out on many occasions before we ever talked. He stood out in the pit, tall, wiry, sarcastic. Sometimes in the pit the two of us would be watching somebody doing something stupid. We’d catch each other’s eye and Gerard would condescendingly shrug his shoulders, implying that we were in a world of fools. He subsequently told me that he was glad to run into me because, most of the time, he felt he was “swimming against idiots” in the pit.
Every three or four weeks we’d literally bump into one another or lean on one another to steady ourselves, to take a rest in the combat zone. I did get to know him in the pit, despite the fact that our relationship was formed through a sort of rough mime. There were all manner of silent communications. Sometimes a smile. Sometimes an encouraging pat on the shoulder. He seemed to be a good lad.
Gerard frowns on the bigger gigs but he’ll follow some underground bands as they start climbing the ladder towards the stadiums. He disapproves of stadium rock not because he likes being on the avant garde cutting edge or because he feels that his heroes are selling out on some nebulous principles of punk.
“I like to mosh. I like the violence. I like the violation of the pit. I don’t socialise too much. Most of my time is taken up with my job and the evenings I’m travelling to a gig. Sunday I often don’t have too much to do so, of course, I try to have sex on Sundays when the opportunity arises. I don’t like to hang out with nobody too much. But I like to hang out in the pit. It’s nice to see some of the pit guys afterwards for sure but I don’t even want to get too close to them.
“I’m not from London. My family live out of town but I came here to live because I knew I could have a certain anonymity here. I could earn good money in the City and if I kept to myself I could spend every penny of that money on music. The reason I prefer the small gigs is because there is room to breathe in the pit. You can actually move your arms and legs so that you can duck and dive to avoid punches and kicks. You can dance. They call dancing all kinds of things and older people can’t understand it when you tell them moshing can be dancing. Then, nobody can ever recognise dancing until you explain it to them. If you’re reasonably fit and young in a spread out pit you’ll never get badly touched. You’ll just attain a sort of invisibility in there which is a real nice feeling. It’s like in those war movies when some stupid pacifist cunt is caught in the front-line and everything seems to be happening around him in slow motion and all he can hear in his fucking ears is classical music and see some image of his virgin girlfriend back home in Paris or London or wherever the fuck he is supposed to come from. And then in the movie of course the next thing you know you see his brain being splattered all over the ground by a random bullet. Well, the part of that where he’s hearing the classical music and thinking about his bitch, that’s what the pit is like. I don’t think you have a conventional awareness of the music at that point. It is part of the experience along with your own body and the shapes that are forming themselves around you. But the pit can be like the bullet splattering your head bit too. Sometimes you snap right out of it because you’re about to get a boot on the side of the head … But when the pit is cool this is rarely the end of the world, you shouldn’t be thinking about enemies when you’re in the pit. You’re with friends.”
The last time I saw Gerard was at Sick Of It All at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. The support act was 28 Days, an ugly-sounding Australian punk outfit who’re frowned upon back home as a kid’s band but who seemed to be enjoying a fair level of respect in London. They delivered a fine celebratory brand of take-no-prisoners noise which encouraged the pit bulls to bite lumps out of each other. They have a convincing line in punk rhetoric delivered through passionate and subtle two-minute classics like ‘Never Give Up’ and ‘The Bird’.
I liked what they were at so I spent the entire 28 Days set up front with a mixed crew of normal enough kids peppered with 300 pound monsters and the occasional well toned greyhound like Gerard. 28 Days won over the crowd so it was a pleasant pit. The big guys were being smart about it all, and space was being made for girls and little guys.
During the break I headed for the upstairs lounge with Gerard. The talk started, as it often did, with mosh war stories from battles long ago. He was dressed immaculately in Criminal Damage trousers, Vans trainers, and a Mambo hoodie. “I’m really looking forward to Sick Of It All. I love the hard edge sound and I always like their pit,” Gerard said. “I like the pain of a rough pit. I get off on it. Not because I want to get hurt all the time … just that I like a little pain.” He inadvertently pauses to stroke his left eye, which betrays the last remains of a black eye which he got two weeks back. He is about six foot tall, powerfully built but thin, the very essence of teenage good health. He has a certain amount of scarification on his neck.
He says his real motivation for being in the pit is to be involved in the music.
“I love the music. I love the drums and the guitars. Sometimes the lyrics can be totally stupid and say nothing to me but the drums in particular speak volumes to me. So I’m standing there in the darkness and all the lights are focused onto the stage. All I can hear inside my head is the drumming. If the drumming is shit I don’t like it and I’m out of there. If the drumming is shit then it’s unlikely that there’ll be a pit in any case. So I forget about everything else. My job, whether the band are cunts, whether the other people in the pit with me are idiots.
“I go off into this other place as I dance and move and touch up against everybody all the time. It is very very sensual. If I’ve smoked a little beforehand and the drumming is in synch with the band and the pit I lose actual sight of everything around me. Things get a bit darker than they actually are and the only part of myself that I’m aware of is of my body moving like its a musical instrument being played by me and the band. The Ramones have this song I heard one time called ‘The Garden Of Serenity’ and that is exactly where I feel myself to be when the music and moshing rises to a peak inside me. It is as pleasant as if I’m in a garden full of roses and water fountains where the sun is shining real bright. It’s like going on a holiday or having sex. I feel really warm, confident, relaxed. Then of course you snap out of it and you realise you’re in some shitty rock club where your feet are sticking to the floor and surrounded by their huge sweating monsters and you’re a sort of a sweating monster yourself. The garden has disappeared for you but it always comes back again.
“I don’t work out. I guess at this age I don’t need to but in any case I go moshing at least … at least four nights a week. I get the right kind of total body exercise in the pit. To watch out for yourself in there you actually need to be incredibly fit and tight. I’ve never been as confident of myself as I have been in the pit.”
By the time we got back downstairs there had been a substantial demographic change in the people gathered around the stage. The entire hall was rammed and sweaty but down around the pit there was hardly room to breathe. Most of the rainbow nation of youth, women, and racial minorities had disappeared, replaced by a monolithic bevy of six foot adult men – aged between twenty and thirty – most of whom weighed in heavy. They were a fit and healthy crew. Friendly enough in their own macho punk way. The vast majority were dressed in jeans and black T-shirts. They had either tight cropped hair, skinheads, or baldheads.
Gerard said he didn’t think he’d have much fun in the pit when it was crushed that way. He said he’d come back later to see if it’d loosened up a bit, that he was going to position himself more towards the centre of the hall. This surprised me a lot because I know him to be a fearless defender of his space in the pit. He’s not exactly scared of big guys. I asked him why he was going back and he said that it was just going to be too much hassle up front.
“I’ve seen Sick Of It All three times,” he explained, “always in clubs that took about five hundred people. Now that they’re playing these ballroom places some of the fun has gone out of it for me. I still love the band, that’s why I’m here. But guys like these ones at the front have an attitude, they think they own the space, that because they’re adults they have some kind of rights to the pit. It’s real fucking grown-up thinking. This kind of I’ve worked hard for a living and I’m entitled to my rights anal bullshit.” With that he gave me a high five and ambled elegantly into the crowd where he disappeared at the exact same moment that the lights dimmed and I turned my attention to the stage where Sick Of It All were making their entrance amid an eruption of primitive chaos.
Sick Of It All have been doing their raucous thing for fifteen years and their performance is a well-oiled machine. Not too slick, just a powerful engine of intelligent noise. For the next hour that noise is relentless so there’s no way you could call the pit activities a garden of sobriety. A concrete jungle of discord, perhaps. I was not unhappy in there because, while there were big tough guys all around me, there was room enough to manoeuvre and people were respectful of one another. There were kids standing a bit back from the pit, assessing just what sort of welcome they could hope to get. When they saw that it was friendly some of the younger, more loose limbed ones returned. A combination of Sick Of It All’s fancy pulsating hardcore and the sheer physical exhaustion that was slowing down the older, bigger moshers calmed down the fury just enough for dancing, rather than fighting, to become the dominant thing.
It took me two days to recover from the muscular strain of surviving that pit. As I left the ballroom I bumped into Gerard. He was as sweaty and as worn out as I was. It turned out that he was one of those who’d re-entered the pit when it’d calmed down. Just that he was working his end and I was working mine so we never saw each other. He was well pleased with the night’s excitement but he had to rush off. Work in the morning. What was he doing the following night, a Saturday? “I’m off to Brighton,” he grinned. “There’s this real good band there called Guts And Education who’re organising a squat party. I want to check them out. They’ve done a couple of singles and tapes they’ve put together themselves. I’ll tell you all about it next time I see you.”
Woodstock ‘99 shocked America and gave it a wake-up call as stark as that which the original festival gave in ‘69. The new message was that the kids were turning weird, getting involved in something bizarre beyond the grasp of their parents. But whereas the hippies had been interested in making love, the ‘99 kids were only interested in making war.
Woodstock ‘99 took place in an upstate New York small town called Rome, population 10,000. Rome, a typically conservative backwater, is 100 miles away from the site of the original Woodstock. The choice of the disused Griffiss Airport Base, deserted by the US Air Force four years earlier, as a site for a festival associated in the public imagination with love and peace seemed ironic. Perhaps some of the bad vibes left behind by the old war machine clung to the site.
Until film producer and original Woodstock guru Michael Lang started waving greenback dollars in the faces of local entrepreneurs managing the site – the Griffiss Local Development Corporation – the idea had been to turn the airport into an information age business park. Ralph Eannace, County Executive, told a press conference during the festival: “The economic impact is going to unfold as we go along from here. Already in the bank from the Woodstock organisation is one million dollars of host fee, three-quarters of which is going to the rebuilding of the Griffiss base. And the rest is going to the city and county.”
Woodstock ‘99 featured a strong roster of mosh friendly rock bands (Korn, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Buckcherry, Rage Against The Machine, The Offspring) totally in synch with the way things were going out there in young America. In terms of star appeal it was in many ways superior to the somewhat dull array of guitar heroes whose nascent cock rock dominated the original ‘69 event. Lang made very little space for the hip-hop rebels who, for the last ten years, had defined the cutting edge of both black and white music. In fact the dance acts on offer – Moby, The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim – were just about as white and unadventurous as it is possible to imagine. It is certainly the case that the vast majority of the Woodstock ‘99 rap metal and nu-metal bands were the fodder monotonously served up on a daily basis on MTV and that this was a white festival for white kids.
The media eventually called it Boobstock, Partydowndudestock, Rapestock, and Tittystock, claiming that everyone involved was trashing a tradition in the name of Woodstock. “By the time they got to Woodstock it was gone,” declared one paper. Village Voice related: “Eight cases of rape and sexual assault, allegedly occurring both in and out of the pit, have been reported by the New York State Police – Rome city police indicted a 26-year-old state prison guard, for assaulting a 15-year-old in the concert’s final hours.”
On July 23 around 200,000 of America’s finest youth descended on Smalltown, USA, where they were corralled within a four and a half mile perimeter fence. “It was like a concentration camp,” one of them later whined, obviously unaware of what conditions were like in Belsen and Dachau. Inside that fence the police, because it was felt that they would be a provocative presence, were barred until the end of the third day when rioting got so out of hand that baton-wielding cops confronted rioting and looting kids in the only scenes at Woodstock ‘99 which were truly reminiscent of the Sixties. A month after the riots organisers claimed that ticket sales for the event were actually 187,000. Many felt that this figure was conveniently below the 200,000 mark because, if attendance had gone above that reckoning, the Griffiss Local Development Corporation would have received an additional quarter of a million dollars in accordance with the deal they’d made with Lang and partners.
There were immediate problems on day one caused by the amounts of rubbish and excrement generated by this party army. After using the toilets on-site one local reporter told the BBC: “I was gagging. It was so disgusting. I have never been so grossed out.” Another witness said: “I had to go to the bathroom so I went into one of those Porta-Sans. Forget about it. You never saw anything so disgusting in your life. I mean, think of the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen and multiply it by a thousand and that’s what it was like. I could hardly go.”
Lisa Law, a veteran of the original Woodstock, went through the crowd trying to distribute plastic rubbish bags to the festival goers so they could clean up their own mess. Law told the BBC that they told her: “You clean it up. I paid $150.” Law said that the attitude of the crowd gathered to hear the Nineties superstars was: “These kids didn’t give a shit. Party! Get down! Fuckin’ Yeah! You know?” Singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette was pelted with shoes and rubbish, and most female performers were subjected to the coarsest of sexist comments.
An atmosphere of claustrophobic sexism permeated the event from the very start with banners held aloft declaring “Show us your tits” and “Girls, look at my ring". One of the main generators of this obsessive mentality was the pay-per-view team whose cameras were, for $60, bringing highlights of the festival (tits, violence, music, and more tits) into the homes of those who wanted to catch the festival from the comfort of their lounge. Pay-per-view cameras zoned in on topless women in the crowd and broadcast those images onto huge video screens which could be seen all over the festival site. Ossie Kilkenny, the Irish co-promoter of Woodstock ‘99, said that the amount of money he made out of it was “all tied up in the multifarious complexities of pay-per-view.” The main stage was flanked by two large camera platforms on each side while a huge light tower stood right in the middle of the site, blocking out unimpeded long distance views of the stage, forcing anybody beyond the tower to catch the show on Jumbatron video screens.
Michael Lang said that, just as in ‘69, the idea was “to liberate them so they can live the way they want to do.” It was pricey, though, to live the way you wanted to, and liberating the kids of their money seemed to be the main politics on offer. A bottle of water was $4, a soda $6, hamburgers $8, and small pizzas were $12. One boy commented that there was “no one there to tell you what is right and wrong” and public address systems advised people to keep on drinking water in between taking drugs.
There was a hell of a lot of moshing on day one to good time pop punk bands like The Offspring, whose fans bounced around joyously in the mud and the dirt, flinging garbage and used plastic bottles at one another. What happened during The Offspring couldn’t be described as anything other than good-hearted adolescent exuberance although there were the usual injuries. Subsequently the pit was whipped into a darker, more fanatical and driven state when Korn’s somewhat moronic fans replaced the reasonably smart Offspring followers. Korn fans are notoriously obsessive, and they take shows by their heroes very seriously indeed. The injuries mounted but, in terms of what goes on, it was nothing extraordinary.
Each night in the camping area there was an all-night rave which deprived everyone, especially those who liked their guitar rock and were against the whole nature of the rave sound, of a good night’s sleep. By the time the real riots started on the final day, Sunday, a lot of people had not slept for three nights.
The raves were a focus of still more of the sexism at the core of ‘99. When Korn left the stage it was getting late and the main stage bands were winding down. A lot of Korn’s mud caked testosterone-fuelled fans made their way to the rave area where the party began all over again. While one DJ was doing a techno set two women climbed on top of men’s shoulders and peeled off their tops. Men swarmed around them, shining flashlights on their breasts and staring hungrily at them like they’ve never seen tits before. Some of them pulled out their cameras and took a few shots. Then they stood around and looked some more.
Salon magazine reported:
“On the pavement outside the rave stage and the movie building a dozen kids have overturned metal garbage cans. They beat on them with sticks with a pulsing, arrhythmic clang. One guy is clearly motivated by the drang. He’s shirtless, and has a braided leather belt cinched around his neck. His black hair mats to his forehead and blood, sweat and filth are smeared across his torso. Beltless, his shorts are falling down, exposing at least four inches of vertical crack. He circles around the drummers and picks up a garbage can and slams it into the pavement, baring his teeth and grinning like an overgrown toddler enamored with a rubber ball that won’t bounce.”
The Woodstock mood began to change late the following day when Limp Bizkit, infamous for their provocative behaviour, started on the main stage. The crowd had been surly all day. Five hours before Limp Bizkit played one of the blue-shirted medical team told a reporter: “People are really giving us a hard time. I’m stationed down by the light tower. They throw shit at us, steal our stuff. We had to take a woman out yesterday. I’m pretty sure her neck was broken. You can tell because her hands were starting to curl up. Her heart rate was almost non-existent and she was hardly breathing. Her boyfriend didn’t want to let her go. I can’t wait for Metallica tonight.”
During Limp Bizkit, who have taken over rap and made it safe for Mid-western jocks, fans began to dismantle the barriers around MTV’s broadcast towers and use the wood as platforms for crowd surfing. Singer Fred Durst told the pit that, “There are no rules” and ordered them to “smash stuff". Thus incited, the pit turned into a serious war zone where vicious guys began to kick the shit out of each other. Bodies on cardboard stretchers emerged from the audience at least twice during every song. Durst was to be seen crowd surfing on one of the pieces of looted corporate wood.
Michael Lang commented: “I think he got dangerously close to inciting people beyond a safe situation.” At the end of the Limp Bizkit set an announcement from the stage urged calm: “Please, there are people hurt out there. They are your brothers and sisters. They are under the towers. Please help the medical team get them out of there … We have a really serious situation out there.” One beefy guy was overheard saying to another Beavis and Butthead mammoth: “Dude, you figure the pit is the closest thing to assault and battery you’re going to get without getting arrested.”
During the Limp Bizkit set a 24-year-old Pittsburgh woman was stripped, pulled down from the crowd, raped, then surfed to security. Police later said: “Due to the congestion of the crowd she felt that if she yelled for help or fought, she feared she was going to be beaten.”
“No perpetrator has been identified and we have no suspects, we have not received tips from anyone,” said one cop investigating the incident.
David Schneider, a rehabilitation counsellor working as a volunteer told the Washington Post that he saw women being pulled into the pit and having their clothes removed before being assaulted and raped by men in the crowd. “They were pushed in against their will and really raped,” Schneider recalled. “From my vantage point it looked like initially there was a struggle and after that there were other people holding them down. It seemed like most of the crowd around were cheering them on.”
At one photo booth, a big trailer, guys were lining up to buy film and disposable cameras. Women were standing on top of the trailer, stripping away halter tops and T-shirts. Down on the ground, men were backing away from the trailer to catch a few shots with their disposable cameras. The trailer was providing a one-hour processing service.
On July 25, the third and final day, all hell broke loose. In an example of Sixties cultural arrogance, the organisers decided to put on a candle-lit evening tribute to Jimi Hendrix. They gave out a candle to almost each and every member of an already disgruntled crowd of youths who held Sixties values and icons in complete contempt. During the Hendrix tribute the kids daydreamed about what best to do with their lit candles. They decided to start bonfires and soon the entire airbase was going up in flames. Post-apocalyptic images of raw male torsos, buildings being torn apart, and smoke and flames were broadcast into people’s homes via pay-per-view. Some of the garbage fires were 40 feet wide and 20 feet tall.
Five gig attendees and two troopers were injured, one of them seriously, when a trailer was toppled over onto them. Rioters used equipment, cooking oil, gas cylinders and vendors booths as fuel. It looked like the darkest moments from Apocalypse Now. They were breaking into payphones, tearing down a three mile long “Peace Walk". Light stands and speaker towers were toppled and smashed. A mob tried to destroy a radio station truck. The biggest fires and the real trouble erupted during, but not because of, The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ set. According to LA Magazine the Peppers “got stuck with the cheque Durst left".
The rioters’ shining hour came when they spotted, and torched, a large fleet of huge articulated lorries located near the perimeter fence. According to Michael Lang: “It spread from one trailer to the next and pretty soon twelve trailers were blazing. This huge incredible image of people dancing around a pyre …” It was a remarkably poetic form of male violence. The following day the image appeared on TV screens all over the world, ensuring that Woodstock was, once more, a zeitgeist of the times we live in.
The much-maligned Peace Patrol, Woodstock’s under--trained security staff, had earlier been accused of encouraging the sexism in the pit, while not taking accusations of sexual harassment seriously. When the rioting started they did next to nothing to control the situation. Transcripts of security walkie-talkie communications were disclosed in the press. “Let it burn … Get out!” urged one security supervisor. In another tape a security guard told HQ: “I’m getting my ass kicked out here.” The advice he got from his supervisor was, “Kid, go home. Take the security shirt off and walk away. They don’t pay enough. Pull out. Let it burn. Let ‘em trash it. Get out.”
Spin magazine reported: “the vastly outnumbered security force unsuccessfully attempting to quell the chaos and ultimately giving up as fires and looting sprouted across the trash-strewn landscape.”
“Pull your fucking people out of there. Get ‘em out. What are you trying to stop it for?” said one exasperated security supervisor. “All units abandon! All units abandon!”
It shouldn’t have come as such a big surprise. The clear marketing implication behind Woodstock ‘99 had been that it was the first such festival since ‘69. In reality there was also a Woodstock ‘94 featuring a typical bill of hard-line rock acts, organised by Michael Lang. It too ended mired down in violence and controversy originating in the mosh pits.
Woodstock ‘94 took place on a Catskills farm that ended up looking like it’d been hit by a hurricane. One reporter said that in the aftermath it seemed that the farm had been the site of an uprising. “While music shreds the airwaves,” one attendee reported in an online diary, “sweaty bodies slam and bang into each other. They catapult off stages into jerking frenzied masses.” Bumps, bruises, bloody noses and broken bones were trophies displayed with pride by the well toned and tattooed mohawk youths who were the Woodstock ‘94 generation. Betraying a musician’s indifference to what goes on in the pit, Blind Melon vocalist Shannon Hoon responded to rumours of three deaths in the crowd by asking the audience to “give them all a big God bless you” before launching into the band’s new single. Four thousand ‘94 Woodstockers sought first aid in the Catskills, while two hundred and fifty were treated at the on-site hospital. The media was being disingenuous when it claimed to be shocked by the ‘99 riots.
In the vast controversies that emerged in the aftermath of the Woodstock riots, there was scant comment on the alleged rapes and definite violent sexism which characterised the weekend.
The other violence, however, encouraged stimulating commentaries on many aspects of American youth.
Nashville activist Tim Wise, in his critique of the riots, The Kids Are All-White, pointed out that the alienation which caused the kids to riot had roots in profoundly white and suburban concerns. How nobody’d picked up the trash. How the toilets were filthy. How they couldn’t get a cheap burger. “What happened at Woodstock,” Wise declared, “was not a sociopolitical rebellion against corporate greed and expensive foodstuffs (after all these folks thought nothing of forking out $150 for tickets, nor additional hundreds for beer, T-shirts, tattoos, and body piercings).”
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