Woodstock Then and Now.

• Author: Strauss, Neil
• Position: Rock concert

The '99 lest was marred by violence, but '69 was no garden either

When the smoke cleared and the drumming stopped around 6:30 a.m., some eight hours into the burning, looting, and youth-gone-wild marauding of Woodstock '99, an older state trooper turned to a group of bedraggled teenagers sitting near a coffee stand. "Remember Woodstock?" he said. "The first one?" Then he added sarcastically: "Peace."

But who does remember the Woodstock era? Ever since last July's Woodstock '99, commentators have fallen all over themselves to remind us that Woodstock '69 stood for peace and love, while this year's version symbolized violence and greed. The '99 moral: The kids aren't all right.

But in fact, the reality of the original Woodstock was much more complicated than the mythic Garden of Eden remembered in popular nostalgia. This year's Woodstock may have been more dangerous than its predecessor, especially for women, who were the victims of molestations, assaults, and even several rapes. But Woodstock '69, far from being a continuous lovefest, featured food shortages, overflowing toilets, standstill traffic, a lack of medical supplies, three deaths, heroin overdoses, countless bad trips, bonfires, and food stands burned to the ground. At one point, the Who's Pete Townshend even bashed peace activist Abbie Hoffman in the head with an electric guitar.

THINGS WE FORGET

The first Woodstock looked good mostly by contrast with a series of large-scale, audience-exploiting festivals in 1969 and 1970 that featured gate-crashing and rioting, leading to several deaths, hundreds of injuries, scores of arrests, and massive property damage.

Memory is selective. Few accounts of Woodstock '99 pointed out that co-promoter Michael Lang also was an organizer of another 1969 festival, Altamont. At that event members of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, hired as security guards, stabbed one audience member to death in plain view of the stage, beat up countless others, and punched out the Jefferson Airplane's Marty Balin during the group's set.

The Altamont festival is memorialized in the film Gimme Shelter, and if you want to see the dark underside of '60s rock festivals, rent it. The atmosphere of the concert, even leaving aside the menacing presence of the Hell's Angels, is scary. Interestingly, many things that seem unique to today's rock generation, like slam dancing and crowd-surfing, already appear in the film as concert staples.

Woodstock '99 also was not the...