Various Artists: Woodstock '99 : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The severe dehydration and four-dollar water; the dumb-ape machismo and sexual-assault charges; the Sunday-night arson and white riot -- it's almost as if none of it happened. You have to look real hard to find allusions to any of the above on this two-CD souvenir of the sunny, raging, troubled, complex weekend that was Woodstock '99.

A nod in the credits to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, a nonprofit support group for victims of sexual violence; a stage announcement noting that a relay tower is alight, followed (giggle, giggle) by the Red Hot Chili Peppers' fest-closing cover, Jimi Hendrix's "Fire"; the sound of the crowd, stuck in a shit sandwich of avarice and refugee-camp hospitality, barking the chorus of rapper DMX's "Stop Being Greedy" -- otherwise, Woodstock '99 is a whitewash of the festival's well-documented lowlights, a triumph of convenient memory loss. But the album is not merely dishonest; it is shockingly dull, a leaden, clumsily selective account of the very thing that sucked an instant city of 220,000 into the dead zone of Griffiss Air Force Base: the music.

The thirty-two-act roster of Woodstock '99, spread over Red and Blue discs, is skewed, as the event itself was, to the crushing homogeneity of modern-rock radio. You wouldn't know that James Brown opened the weekend, or that George Clinton, Willie Nelson and Los Lobos were even on the premises. DMX and the Roots (the frisky "Adrenaline" is just a taste of how they killed on Friday) are the lone black rap artists here, accounting for a paltry six and a half minutes of the album's 149-minute running time.

What you do get, on the Red disc, is a lot of white metalheads busting hip-hop moves and mainstreamed punks -- narrow variations on well-bruised formulas. There are hot moments: Kid Rock's manic shot of "Bawitdaba"; the Offspring's bright bullet, "The Kids Aren't Alright." Buckcherry's "Lit Up" and Megadeth's "A Secret Place" break up the riff-and-chant parade with old-school, arena-rock hooks and moxie. But the bundling of boys-of-noise on one CD does not flatter younger bands like Godsmack and Sevendust; coming after Korn, Rage Against the Machine and Metallica, they can't help sounding like junior killers.

The mosh-free Blue disc is a snooze in its own unwitting way. Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews Band, Jewel, Elvis Costello, Bruce Hornsby and Everlast are balled together in a fat knot of midtempo folk-pop sobriety. The unfortunate effect is that of a dinner party where the kids and the adults are sitting at separate tables -- and the adults are morosely singing one another to sleep.

Finally, the one-track-per-act democracy of Woodstock '99 means that any sustained spell and momentum of real live performance are repeatedly broken. The 1970 and '71 albums from the original Woodstock featured Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone in stunning, extended segments that gave you some idea why living through the shitty weather and woeful organization of the '69 festival was worthwhile. This set, in turn, could have used more of Saturday's defining (for better and worse) typhoons -- Kid Rock, Rage, Limp Bizkit -- and less Jamiroquai.

If you were at Woodstock '99 and had a great time (there were reasons to be cheerful) or weren't and want to know what the deal was, borrow a friend's video of the pay-per-view telecast. Woodstock '99 features music from that weekend, but it is hardly an accurate record of what happened and who mattered. It is a carefully manicured fib -- and a bore. (RS 825)

DAVID FRICKE