Woodstock

The New York Times

April 1, 1998

By Neil Strauss

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"Eclectic Bill Shaping Up For Next Woodstock"

LOS ANGELES, March 31 — The promoters of Woodstock '99, a three-day rock event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the seminal rock festival, recently announced that they would reveal this year's lineup of bands next Thursday. But in the meantime the names of some of the top performers have begun to leak out, giving shape to an eclectic bill with potentially wide appeal.

Among those expected to perform are Korn, Sheryl Crow, Metallica, Counting Crows, Aerosmith, Alanis Morissette, Limp Bizkit, Bush, Willie Nelson, Hole and Ice Cube. A main (and maybe only) unifying theme is that none of these acts were at Woodstock the first time around. The full lineup is not yet set, but in a move to attract a younger generation, no acts that performed at the original Woodstock are expected to play this time.

"Especially for people in the Northeast, it's going to be quite the musical event of the summer," said Gary Bongiovanni, the editor in chief of Pollstar, a concert industry magazine. "It's a tremendous lineup of artists. If people are willing to spend a weekend camping out and putting up with the inconveniences that are the hallmark of this event, I suspect it will do very well."

The event, from July 23 to July 25, will have concerts on multiple stages during the day and a rave at night featuring dance acts like the Chemical Brothers. It is to be held at the Griffiss Technology Park, a former Air Force base at Rome, N.Y., near Syracuse.

It is not the site of the original festival, which was held a couple of hundred miles away in Bethel, N.Y., but one advantage the former base has over the previous site, promoters say, is that the military design should keep out the gate crashers (more than 100,000 of them) who invaded the original event.

Even at Woodstock '94, 350,000 people were estimated to have attended, though only some 200,000 tickets were sold. Other advantages at Griffiss include on-site parking and camping, built-in water and sewer systems and no brown acid.

When Michael Lang, one of the original producers of Woodstock, revived the festival in 1994, it was intended as a special occasion to commemorate the 25th anniversary. Now, the concert producer says, he intends to make Woodstock a regular institution, with a large-scale festival every five years full of whatever music is in favor with younger music fans at the time. John Scher, the president of Metropolitan Entertainment, who is promoting the event with Mr. Lang, would not comment on who would perform at the festival. He did say that because groups like Nine Inch Nails received a flurry of publicity at a critical point in their careers because of memorable performances at Woodstock '94, booking this year's event had been much easier, with band managers and agents eager to have their top bands involved.

Tickets are expected to go on sale this month at $150 for all three days. Though the promoters originally planned to mount another Woodstock in Austria this summer featuring Metallica, Iggy Pop and as many as 100 other acts, it was recently postponed until next year.

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