30 years later, remembering the music and muddy chaos of Woodstock ’94

It was promoted as “2 More Days of Peace and Music.” It ended in a muddy and chaotic mess —anarchy to some and epic to others. It was a weekend of legendary performances.

While much has been made about the dumpster fire that was Woodstock ‘99 (see the documentary “Train Wreck”), much less has been spoken about the original anniversary concert, Woodstock ‘94. And that’s a shame.

Twenty-five years after a generation of peace, love, and happiness seekers gathered in New York in 1969, and five years before Woodstock ‘99, the original Woodstock organizers teamed up to try and repeat the magic of the original, getting space in Saugerties, New York about 70 miles from the original Woodstock site. It was Aug. 12-14, 1994, now 30 years ago.

The roster of bands was impressive: original Woodstock performers like Joe Cocker, Crosby Stills and Nash, Santana, and Country Joe returning to Woodstock to perform — alongside emerging artists like Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Blues Traveler, The Cranberries and Cypress Hill. They were all there. Metallica, Aerosmith, Salt-N-Pepa, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, Collective Soul, Porno For Pyros, Spin Doctors, Candle Box, Violent Femmes, Henry Rollins Band, Melissa Etheridge, Blind Melon and so many more.

It was definitely more corporate than 1969: fenced, ticketed and secured, with merch stands and food tents lined up and banks of pay phones pre-social media. It was the most organized music festival — until it wasn’t.

While tickets ran into the hundreds of dollars, some of us went to the show for free. I “worked’” at Woodstock ‘94 as part of a program arranged with nonprofits where they manned the concession stands. You got free admission to the entire weekend, if you got to Saugerties and worked the concession stands for a certain number of hours. Seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime for this music-obsessed college kid. What could go wrong with offering a bunch of people free admission to the weekend if they promised to work?

We were about to find out.

While throngs of attendees flooded into the Saugerties area, workers were put up nearby starting on Thursday — assigned to bunks — with shuttles taking us into the site each day. My concession stand was to the right of the main stage; close enough to see and hear everything.

We got a quick lesson in the concessions process (heating up premade hamburgers and chicken sandwiches) and handling the Woodstock cash “scrip.” MTV’s Kennedy stopped by our stand to greet the eager, unpaid workforce of concession people. I still have some of the coins from the weekend and a meal ticket entitling me to “one meal per shift,” dated Friday, Aug. 12, 1994. We didn’t know what we were doing but we KNEW it was EVERYTHING that we were there.

More and more people arrived as the bands really kicked off Friday on multiple stages: North, South and Rave stages. That night was amazing as bands played through the afternoon and well past midnight. Live, James, Sheryl Crow, Collective Soul, The Violent Femmes.

Peace, love and music are underway!

Blues Traveler, which had spent the past several years touring and seeing success on college radio and gaining even more momentum after a series of appearances on Letterman, got the call and was added to the Friday lineup.

Chan Kinchla, Blues Traveler guitarist, remembers it this way:

“We kind of fit the original kind of hippie jam ethos of the original Woodstock, I think that probably gave us a leg up,” Kinchla recently told KTLA. “We were the banner waivers of that type of music, along with some other cool bands, Phish, Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews.”

Kinchla describes beautiful weather on that Friday and a sea of people as they performed in the middle of the afternoon.

“We were kind of still unknown at that point, but we were like the first band before whole lot of really well-known bands. So, we kind of kicked off the festivities.”

He also remembers sharing a moment backstage with Sheryl Crow at Woodstock ’94; the band had been opening for her that year on some tour dates.

“She comes over and pecks me on the cheek and that was a very fond memory, and that was kind of right when she was blowing up, and us very shortly thereafter.”

The Blues Traveler “Four” album (“Run-around,” “Hook”) would go on to sell 6 million copies.

Kinchla says his memories of Friday were of how clean and well-run everything was.

That was Friday.

The band left Saugerties to play their next gig. And then Saturday hit. Or as Kinchla puts it, “I’m here to witness that before the rain and the onslaught of (chaos), everything was going great. And then humans, humans and nature took over…”

It’s hard to remember just how long it took for order to disintegrate into amazing chaos. By Sunday, the stands would be abandoned, the food would be gone and the scrip that people paid? I have no idea what happened to it. Peace, love and music turned into muddy mayhem, and it was so good.

According to some estimates, 164,000 tickets were sold, but maybe two or three times that number showed up by Saturday without tickets and with no intention of leaving.

Fences were trampled. Security was clearly overpowered. Concession stands were quickly overwhelmed. Organizational structure disintegrated.

We all ended up abandoning our concession posts. There was a feeling of chaos, danger and incredible: “I can’t believe I’m here to experience this.”

And then the rain came. Wikipedia describes it accurately: a hot and dry Friday gave way to muddy mayhem on Saturday as rain moved in and turned Saugerties into a mud bowl, shoes and shirts covered in mud, people making the grass into their own slip-and-slide down the hills, mud being used to scrawl messages on the wall, including one-person’s message that “normal Is Boring.” This was anything but boring.

Through it all, the music kept going. Saturday was HUGE. Joe Cocker and Crosby, Stills and Nash, joining the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, Primus, Cypress Hill and Aerosmith, which played an epic 24-song set.

Sunday was even BIGGER. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Allman Brothers, Arrested Development, Traffic, Bob Dylan — who declined the original Woodstock invitation but came in ‘94 — Santana and Peter Gabriel.

And Green Day: Much talk has been made of THEIR Woodstock ‘94 performance — part raucous, part riot. Legendary to many. 

By Sunday afternoon, pictures show the Saugerties area looking like a battlefield of mud, trash, debris, abandoned camping gear and more. But it was a festival for all ages.

In the end, the New York Times said the concert weekend wound down in a “sea of mud and trash and amid evidence of anarchy.”

The Roanoke Times called Woodstock ‘94 “an endless sea of people and mud and rank commercialism,” but it added that it “was a heck of a concert” that catapulted the careers of many who took the stage there. Over the years, appreciation for the roster of artists and performances has only grown.

In 2020, Louder Sound called Woodstock ‘94 “the craziest festival” that defined the 1990s.

As for what Kinchla remembers most about that weekend?

“That era, ‘94, was kind of the end of the pre-social media era. You know, by ‘99, social media had started to pervade. You know, that’s the information age generation. So it still kind of had its feelers out to the great past of word of mouth, and the magic of ’60s, ’70s and ’80s rock ‘n’ roll. So, I think ‘94 was kind of the end of an era.”

By the end of the weekend, hundreds of people had been treated by medics, and there were reports of three deaths at the festival. People streamed out of Saugerties on roads jammed for miles.

I caught a ride with my friend from Sharon, Massachusetts. We actually left way before the festival even ended to try and make our way out of the mess in Saugerties. His car broke down on the Massachusetts Turnpike on the way back from upstate New York. It took hours to get home, but we left with memories that have lasted 30 years. 

Tamara Lang, the widow of Woodstock founder Michael Lang, recently told John Barry of the Times Union, “I’m excited for the 30th anniversary (of Woodstock ‘94) to bring that event out of its shell. It got overshadowed by the fires and riots of ’99 and sort of forgotten. It’s the forgotten middle sibling.”

As someone who was there, that’s a shame.

Editor’s note: Blues Traveler is currently on tour celebrating 30 years of the “Four” album. Click here for dates and ticket info.

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