Wow, sonicnet.com has produced a killer series of investigative journalism articles on Woodstock '99. I can't recommend these highly enough.

The two main organizers of Woodstock '99, John Scher and Mark Lang, amaze me every time I read an interview with them or see them speak on TV. Whenever they're asked about anything at all that happened at the event, their standard answer is, "We didn't hear about that problem [rape, fire, assault, lack of water, overflowing toilets, huge mountains of trash, etc] until the day after the concert ended." Yet they were there the entire time, giving press conferences on a regular basis about how successful the event was turning out to be. I guess they had their heads up their asses the entire time.

I have been thinking a lot about violence at rock shows this weekend. After reading a long article about Roskilde in Rolling Stone and then all these sonicnet articles about Woodstock, I am just wondering what the hell can be done about this. It makes me feel totally helpless and angry.

One other very interesting resource for information on this stuff is Crowd Management Strategies, a company that specializes in concert safety.