WOODSTOCK ’94
Woodstock '94 was a music festival organized in 1994 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the original Woodstock festival of 1969. It was promoted as "2 More Days of Peace and Music." The poster used to promote the first concert was revised to feature two birds perched on the neck of an electric guitar, instead of the original acoustic one. The event took place on Winston Farm in Saugerties, New York, about 10 miles from Woodstock, New York. The crowd at Woodstock '94 was estimated at 550,000. The size of the crowd was larger than concert organizers had planned for, and by the second night many of the event policies were logistically unenforceable. The festival was followed by Woodstock 1999. (More from Wikipedia)
But it wasn’t until I saw footage of Green Day’s live performance at Woodstock ’94 that I tuned into their punk roots. I had recently moved from New York to San Francisco and admitted as much to some of my work buddies, who assured me that this Bay Area rock band was very much a punk rock band from the beginning.
Green Day’s set at Woodstock ’94 was one of the most memorable of this revival of the original Woodstock festival 25 years earlier, though not necessarily because of the music. At one point during their performance, bandleader Billie Joe Armstrong started a “mud fight” with audience members, leading to a new nickname for the rock festival of Mudstock.
(June 2017)
