With all the attention now going to the dangerous and disastrous Woodstock '99 thanks to the new HBO Max documentary, David Crosby looked back to Crosby, Stills, & Nash's “return to the garden” when they played the second Woodstock festival back in 1994.
Crosby, who has just released his latest solo set, For Free, recalled to Stereogum, “It was awful. Absolutely f***ing awful. Man, are you kidding? We went on after Nine Inch Nails. Does that give you a clue? Can you imagine us singing 'Heeeelplessly hoooopin' to a mosh pit? Okay? Are we getting it? Is the picture coming in clear?”
“Croz” went on to explain, “It was about as inappropriate and as bad a setting as you could possibly think of for us. And it was a very bad scene anyway. Everyone was trying to capitalize on it. A bottle of water was five dollars or some s***. It was not funny, not good. I didn’t like any part of it at all. And then a high power cable, a power line fell on our bus. If you touch that you died. Cute, fun. It was a bad experience. It proves you can’t really try to duplicate something like that and have it work. Everybody tried to take advantage of it and they screwed it up.”
David Crosby told us the original 1969 festival and the 1994 version had essentially zero in common: “The first one was fabulous, the second one was a media zoo. Good music got played, but as a performer, it was nowhere near fun. You were too uptight, performers couldn’t even hang out. We were all segregated into, you know, ‘Well, if you’re on on this night, you can’t even see the people who are coming on the next night.'”
