Music Festivals

Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey, everybody, welcome back to Scaret all the time. I'm Chris Calari and I'm Edvcola, And today we were hoping to take a break from the chaos and madness and death and destruction of the Summer of Fear of twenty twenty six and do something just for ourselves, something that would be fun, something that would be relaxing. You might remember last summer we tried the same plan by taking a road trip with Let's Get Haunted, and that didn't go as planned. We ran into the same amount of violence and fear as we always do on this show. So this summer I figured, Okay, we'll try something a little bit different. Lollapalooza is just around the corner on July thirtieth. Maybe we should go to a music festival. Those aren't scary. But here's the thing. No one tells you about music festivals, or maybe just no no, but he told me they are one of the oldest and most reliably dangerous things that human beings do. We've been gathering in big, sweaty crowds to lose our minds to loud music since before Rome was an empire, and it's been ending in body counts for just as long. In fact, I think you can argue that music festivals haven't just killed people. They've killed entire decades with a special blend of aggression, drugs, violence, and supremely bad vibes, not to mention an encounter with the toxic combination of bodily fluids that ranks as a ten on our fear tier. So instead of relaxing and enjoying the summer, ed Ni this week are going to do a little time travel back through the ages and stages of music festivals passed to take a look at how and why it all went wrong. So turn this one up loud. The music's gonna get scary. What are we scared? When are we all the times? Now? Which is time full time scandal. So we don't get a chance to talk much about music on this show. I feel like it comes up in discussions when we're talking about like Satanism. Every once in a while we'll mention who's your favorite artist, Randy Newman. Every once in a while we'll mention Randy Newman, Connor Obst and Randy Newman, Connor Rovers and Randy Newman. I'm a tough road trip if I'm controlling the radio, tough road trip driver. We could do a whole episode of my fear of listening to Randy Newman with you for twelve hours. You might learn something, you might learn to love something. But we rarely get to put music at the center of an episode. I feel like this one is unique in the sense that I probably have a more personal connection to music and music festivals sort of than you do. Yeah. Probably, I mean I don't know. I have plenty of connections to music. I'm a human being who lived through their teenage. Years, right, But have you ever been to a music festival? Yeah? I went to the first. I want to say the first might have been the second, but either the first or second Governor's Ball. Okay, and it was awesome. That was for people who don't know that. Governor's Ball is a music festival in New York City that's on Randall Island. I think the first one that tried to do on Governor's Island there's an island off of an island in New York City and it's awesome. It was new. All the bands wanted to see were there, and it was two stages. Who were the bands you wanted to see? Fiona Apple, Modest Mouse Beck Okay, Okay, Fanta Graham I think was there that year. Okay, just starting off with Apple is the one I was most excited about. And it was awesome. She killed it was. Fiona Apple is a great artist. I just I can't it was so great. She was great. Anyway, So Governor's Ball Governor's Ball. And it's two stages, and so it's like you kind of run to the stage that you want to be kind of closer up to, and then there's like a little bit of time between. They do play at the same time, but like you always had an opportunity to like dip over. And it wasn't expensive. First off, I just found the tickets and I will put in the price of the ticket now on screen. It was sub one hundred dollars, all right. And it was not packed enough that if you just wanted to kind of dip out from where the music area was, there's not a big spot at all. I've never been to like really really really, I've never been a Courchelle or something that I'm saying. You can walk to the other stage in one and a half minutes, two minutes, and you can just dip out and like, oh, explosions in the sky or something's gonna play. Let me just go sit on the grass and like smoke a jay with my friend, as you know I'm with, And this was she brought them. She brought like jays in her bra Like. It wasn't telling me a hell on, you're telling me you did drugs at a music festival. I did, yeah, but I'm saying it was also like pre weed just being legal everywhere, so it's like wild. You had to put it in your in your in your clothes, yeah, to hide it. So you can just go and like sit in the grass still totally hear it, be completely comfortable smoke a jay. It's so super super fun. So it wasn't a scary at all music festival. No one passed out, no one died, you know. When I was with I don't hang out with people who were particularly troublesome. Sure, I mean I had plenty of friends like that in college and stuff. But I'm not gonna that's that's not who we brought to this well were it was. We weren't there for a rave or anything. No, But I mean a lot of the problems that happen at music festivals aren't necessarily happening to people who are necessarily misbehaving in some way. It's it's a combination of poor planning and heat. We'll we'll get into all of it. Yeah, Well this I. Don't remember what time of year it was, but it wasn't it was. It was a perfectly pleasant experience. And I don't give enough of a shit about Beck. So he was the headliner that night, and so it was like I think it was two days, but I only went for the one and I didn't give enough of shit about Beck, so that I went back to the ferry when he was like on like a second song, and I had like no problems getting It was just like a very for me, at least, a very pleasant I'm sure if you stayed to the end, it was a nightmare to get off the island. Yeah, but for me, it was very, very pleasant. Uh, the one day I think I was there. So okay, So so the only festival only music festival experience you've ever had was excellent. It was excellent, Yeah, And it was like I don't think I have been to any other music festival. Yeah, like in terms of it's two days, million bands. Yeah, Like I didn't go to warp Tour or anything like that, you know what I mean. That's most of my music festival experience is Warped Tour, although usually Warped Tour until the very last Warped Tour that I went to was just one day with like ten stages and the bands would all rotate through. Sure, the only other band the only other music festivals I've been to I worked at right, so it wasn't there as like I did Capitol Groove this past year with Grumpy Dumpling. I'm actually wearing a Grumpy Dumpling t shirt right now. And that was fun. Like Bleacher was really good. I got to see them play Bleachers, who. I'd never heard of in my life until that moment, and then like Cake plays, That's the only one I wanted to like get away from the from the stand and be like, hey, can I take a break to go see Cake. It's weird that Cakes playing. Yeah, Cakes, Cake's great. I've seen them live twice. Yeah, and so like that, but that was like I had to work. I only got to skip over there to like do some video work and shit. But we have some friends who have worked on the video production of EDC Electric Daisy Carnival in Vegas, and I don't. Crazy. I can't even imagine, dude. I also can't even imagine being in. Attendee because I don't do any more drugs. Right, and so outside of the drugs, I think one of the things. I don't know how you pushed through this same type of music that long without some drugs. Well, outside of yeah, the the drugs, and I sert I would never I'm not the kind of person who would joy and electronic music festival. I'm not the kind of person that enjoys the idea of a music festival in general. I mean, it sounds like you had a really great experience one. And then the rest of the time I was working any of. These festivals like Coachella or Boneru where you're outside for days on end and it's hot, and unless you're doing it, unless you have the money to do it. Well, that's something else too, like the price of the tickets. I saw for the fucking you know festival I just worked at We're Gonna be Dumpling this past year. You could have bought two to four weekend passes to Governor Ball when I went in twenty thirteen or whatever, twenty eight, whatever, twenty twelve, whatever year it was, right, I'll look that up too. I was like, how much are they spending to be here today, like in the Capital to watch Fucking Cake and a couple other bands. How much are they spending to be there? How much are they spending on a hotel? How much are they spending on food? The whole process of going to a festival, especially a big one where you can't even park very close. You gotta be taking a car and you're getting stuck in traffic. I mean that hasn't changed since the original Woodstock when they backed up the entire state of New York. You couldn't get. In and out. Yeah, And I think the Governor's Ball was also extra okay for me to do because it was all public transit. It's New York City, right, so it was like a buck on the subway, fifteen bucks taking Metro North in right then, I don't know, ten bucks for the fairy whatever less, you know what I mean. It was like, and you know, I wasn't. I didn't have to stay the night in the hotel or anything. I can just again take another fifteen dollars train ride back to Connecticut, right, And so yeah, that was so there's a lot of things had to fall into place to get me to go. And our friend Caro was up from Texas, so it was like, there's enough things had to fall into place to get me to go to a music festival. And thank god, it was a good experience. Yeah, yeah, you didn't. You didn't have to deal with no bathrooms and dehydration and everything. The craziest festival experience I ever had was the last Warped tour quote unquote last it never it was not the last, But in twenty nineteen, I think they did a two day festival on the East coast, a two day festival in the Midwest, and two days on the West coast instead of doing like a multiple city multiple cities. And I went to the one on the West coast up in San Francisco, and that was the closest to like a real festival experience I've ever had of two days in a parking lot by an amphitheater. You know, water was super expensive, Booze was super expensive, but. It was it was really really fun. But you will say this about expensive foods having worked the retail food at a venue for you know, at like a music festival, something I was shocked to learn until I was in. There is a lot of it's set pricing. Like you might go up to the dumpling place or you might go up to the Philly Cheese take place and it'd be like five dollars for a drink or whatever. That's completely out of their control, right, You basically signed the contract when you show up there, like, hey, everybody at these booths like you can't. It might just be a thing about you don't want other boots undercutting and it'll help with lines to be like who if they're offering it. For a dollar? But it was like very you had to agree to that. Yeah, And so now I always feel a little less bad about when I go to a concert and it's like twenty bucks or something like they there's sometimes there's rules that are completely out of control. Right the rules are set by like Aquafina or whatever, the water company. Well that well, two things first off, at this one, it was liquid death because of course it was right, and it was like, you only get liquid death water, and it's through the venue. Right or through the. Whatever they're coming, whoever's. Putting it on. Let's say it's let's say it's concerts. LLC does Coachella. They made a deal with liquid death, but then all the vendors have to use liquid death and use a set price and stuff. Gotcha, gotcha? Gotcha. Well, when we think of music festivals, we do tend to think of them as these modern inventions, whether it is Coachella or Lollapalooza or Bonaru or Firefest. But the first thing I learned when I started researching this episode, and one of the reasons that I think music festivals actually make a really great topic for this show, is that they are ancient, ancient, ancient. The first festival as we think of a festival, took place in five eighty two BC in ancient Greece during the Pythian Games, which were sort of like the Olympic Games. They took place every four years, but they included poetry, reading, speech, and other musical and game like competitions. So anything to keep the masses from voting. Pretty pretty much. People gathered at the Pythian Games to enjoy hymns and instrumental performances dedicated to Apollo, the god of arts and music. Now, the Pythian Games festivals were very straightforward and very low key compared to what would come next, sort of like I guess the modern equivalent might be the Newport Folk Festival before Bob Dylan went electric. Oh geez, back. When it was like real calm, before people freaked out. There was another Greek god, though, that had festivals thrown in his name, Dionysus or Bacchus. If you're Roman, is not the wine one. Yes, he was the god of wine theater and what the sources I used very politely called ritual ecstasy, which is a fancy way of saying losing your entire goddamn mind in a crowd. That's what these are people you were talking about, where they seem like they're fine, but then they get to a festival. Like I said, I didn't bring any creepos. Yeah too, it lose their minds or due to many drugs. But maybe the festival they get a little Bacianalian or whatever. Oh they did they did, both of these gods and and a lot of the sources that I use. Obviously, Dionysus is Greek and Bacchus's Roman. But a lot of these festivals and worship were not entirely interchangeable because they were different cultures but very very similar in many ways. I think they sort of fed on each other and built each other a little bit. But both of these gods, dine Nis and Bacchus, had all kinds of secret cults and worshipers connected to them, and they all had their own strange rituals and parties that were a lot crazier than the civilized celebration of the Pythian Games. So kiki cara glue may be related to the gelukugu. Oh my god, very fun. Name of the Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote quote secret activities called Teletai or Orgia teletubbies. Oh, maybe there is a Satanic panic, a Satanic panic tied to the teletubbies. I think the word that leaps out a little bit more for people is probably Orgia, oh Rgia. These activities took place in the mountains where the Bakhoi, or the worshippers of Bacchus engaged in ecstatic dancing, singing, revelry, and even eating raw meat. I don't know if you should be doing any of those things at a higher elevation. They did them at very high elevations, and at all times, at all times of the year too, as we will learn in a moment. But the wine induced Bacchic frenzy was seen as a temporary madness that would transport these worshipers from civilization to the wilderness, both literally and metaphorically. They were freeing themselves to become the more animalistic version of themselves. Okay, many of Dionysus's followers were women called maine Ads, which comes from a Greek word meaning the raving ones. Oh, same root word as maniac, same root word as madness. These are not nicknames you give to a chill group. And the main Ads had a signature move in the pit if you will, it's called spiragamos, which translates to the tearing apart. No, the ritual was, you work yourself into a frenzy, and then you grab a living thing, any living thing, usually a small animal, and you rip it to pieces with your bare hands. We got to put a stop to this and then you eat it raw. And that part has its own word too, homophagia. The Greeks had a lot of words around these rituals. I mean, I think about they have a lot of words in general. There's always like there's eleven words for love and like Greek or whatever, not necessarily eleven. But yeah, it does seem like English does tend to be a very like watered down language. Yeah, we narrowed the window, and so we just call it tearing an animal to pieces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now there's a great quote from historian Daniel Borstein describing what one of these wild scenes would look like, like we just did it. Well, this is he describes it. I think a little more colorfully. Okay, These drunken devotees of Dionysus, filled with their god, felt no pain or fatigue, for they possessed the powers of the God himself, and they enjoyed one another to the rhythm of drum and pipe. At the climax of their mad dances, the main ads, with their bare hands would tear apart some little animal that had nourished at their breast. Then, as Euripides observed, they would enjoy the banquet of raw flesh. Okay, so he is quoting something he had read. Well, he is like paraphrasing Eulipides, Euripides Euripides animals in half. No, he's the banquet of raw flesh was what Euripides observed them. Yeah, and then this guy Daniel Bornstein or whatever, Jason Bornstein. Daniel Jason Borstein. He is not from that time period. So he's paraphrasing what Eulipides Euripides saw. Well, he's he's describing what has been described by others. I don't think the entire description is paraphrase from Euripides. This guy sounds like someone he wishes he was there, and he's jealous. He is writing through jealousy. The lens of jealousy he might have been, And Euripides is like, I like to imagine Euripides in this scenario as the equivalent of like when Weiss goes to gathering at the juggalows or something and you just have some fucking nerd in like serial killer glasses. You know what I'm talking about, I do, And they're just sitting there like um, observing the fago get splashed around, and it's a wild scene it is, says Mackenzie mcluth of Vice News. Or what Well. Daniel Borsten here tells us that it wasn't just animals that would get spragmost in the pit. He says, on some occasions it was said they tore apart a tender child as if it were a fawn. This is where David gets hardest. There's a play from four h five BC called The Bake, and in it, a king named Pentheus makes the mistake of banning Dionysus worship in his city. Oh no, it's a good way to get yourself ripped. It's a great way to get yourself ripped. And what did you know it? Dionysus himself lures him out to the woods to spy on the main ads. But they catch him, and in their frenzy, they mistake him. I'm sure they said later, yea for a wild lion, and they tear him to pieces. Okay, which is incredible that anyone's torn a wild lion. Yeah, like, well we've done this before. We'll just say that's what happened. Yep, that's not how anyone's ever done it. The woman who rips King Pentheus's head clean off and goes parading around it like a trophy is his own mother. Oh my god, so she was getting really wild. Just what like mom's strength do we when your kids like under a car and you can like somehow lift a car for a second. She did that with pulling heads. There's also Orpheus, the legendary musician, the best musician according to these stories, who ever lived. It's funny that how many theaters we have. We have the Orpheum, we have live at the Apollo. Oh yeah, all these theaters are named after these like gods of music and plays and arts. Well yeah, Orpheus is the patriot state of music, and he got torn apart by main ads too, So the patron state of music getting torn apart by music fans. Fans have always turned on their own. I feel like you can't keep anyone happy. Fucking Rick and Morty fans screaming at people about Sechuwan saw us. Just enjoy the stuff and call today. The evidence for all of this doesn't just exist on old pieces of pottery and in ancient plays. In February of just last year, archaeologists digging in Pompeii uncovered a brand new Fresco portraying almost life size main ads, swords in hand, dead animals slung over their shoulders mid dance. There's a quote from one of the people who studied this fresco, and they said, quote alongside flute piping satyrs, they're engaged in a wild, ritualistic dance while shellfish, eels, squid, and poultry dangle above them. In the center of it all, a clothed woman awaits her initiation into the cult. Gabriel Zuchriegel, director of the Archaeological Park at Pompeii, explains that for the ancients, the bacante or the main ad expressed the wild, untamable side of women, the woman who and insert children, the house and the city, who breaks free from mail order to dance freely, go hunting and eat raw meat, and the mountains and the woods. So sort of like Lilith Fair. Yeah, so fair with that island lesbos Well. I don't know what they got up to over there. I'm just saying famous island. I don't know who they worship. But it's famous because there was like all the stuff depicted ladies, right, like all the archaeological digs and stuff and frescoes. Yes, it seemed like a matriarchal island. Yes, And I don't know if they I don't know. That's the street of Lesbos. I don't know if they were sent there or if they either. Way, I'm just saying it seems like it's probably a safe bet that they had a couple of these parties there. It probably this was the Governor's ball. That's the island they went to. The probably, yes, Yes, And the tickets were cheap. Tickets were cheap everywhere for everything until like ten twelve years ago. Yeah, well not really. We'll get into we'll get into some some festival pricing from a little bit prior to ten years ago. But well, these ritual twenty years well, these rituals might not sound exactly like modern day music festivals with set times at headliners and twenty two dollars waters. They revolved around gathering out in the woods to sing and dance and drink. And you can't tell me that modern music festivals aren't satisfying those exact same primal urges. It's the same thing. We call it different things. I think. The only difference and maybe not because I don't I wasn't there, I wasn't even there. I wasn't even fucking there, dude. I think the additional layer to a music festival today. I'm not going to try and be like cool and hype falutin about it. I was like, maybe there's a comparison to be made, blah blah blah, but like, uh, don't take this too seriously. This isn't an actual theory I have or anything, but like, lay it on me. It's just that, like. There's a stardom aspect now that that is a layered into it, where like where you were going to hang out with Bacchus at these parties, where now the Bacchus is the white stripes or the whatever, like there is like a replacement gods to go see. But you were just saying that's one of the only difference is to me, i'd argue, that's another similarity, the rock stars are the replacement God. Well, I didn't have I thought it was different until I had that thought. But then I thought that thought was so stupid that I was like, I don't want to actually, no, that's say that. That was my plan when I started the sentence. That thought is good. I think that's very accurate. I think that's that's not something that's not a conclusion or a parallel that I'd drawn in my research. But I think you're absolutely right. There was always a central figure to these celebrations, and we just have a different kind of central figure. Now it's not a god, it's a rock star. Who really, come on, if you're really, if you're good enough, rockstar, you're a god. So the romance be on your island during during COVID not even know what happened. The Romans took the whole Bacchus thing and really ran with it, eventually holding giant festivals called the Bacchanalia. And didn't I say that you did? You did? And in the year six BC, the Roman Senate got so scared of the parties happening during Bacchanalia that they banned it. They passed a decree called the Senators consult them de Baccanalibus, and it was so important that they carved it onto a bronze tablet, and we eventually dug that bronze tablet up in Italy in the sixteen hundreds. The Roman Senate was composed of. Guys who were wealthy. Were wealthy. They also though watched people fighting lions for entertainment. So it's not like, well they I think probably helped fund that. Like, again, all of these parties are to keep people in power. Yes, every one of these. Throw the Christians to the lions, let's have a full blown water battle in an arena. Is to just like keep people happy as you take all their body go to wars that didn't recurit to tax the out of shit. Well, and that's one of the things that's so interesting about the fact that they banned Bacchanalia, because it's not like these guys. The point I was about to make is that it's not like these guys didn't know how to have a good time. It's not like this isn't an empire that didn't know how to throw a crazy event. Banning the festival was about a lot more than just the party getting too wild. According to the Augustine historian Livy, the Senate had convinced itself that the Bacchanalia weren't really about partying at all. They were affront a cover for murders, poisonings, forged wills, fake testimonies, and a giant secret conspiracy against the state. Quote the Bacchus cult was held to be a threat to the security of the state. Investigators were appointed, rewards were offered to informants, legal processes were put in place, and the Senate began the official suppression of the cult. Throughout Italy, the stated penalty for holding a leadership position in the cult was death. Livy told us that there were more executions than imprisonments, and many committed suicide to avoid being indicted. What year was this, This was. One eighty six BC. So when I say across Italy, across what is now Italy, well, I just meant. We didn't even we you and I like, Rome didn't even have an emperor yet. So it really was the Senate. Yeah, right, So it's not like, oh, they still had the Senate once they had emperors. It was just like a sham, right thing. It's kind of like putin Senate or whatever. They just kind of vote the way they're supposed to or past things are being told to. Sure, So this really was just like a group of assholes who were they must have been doing such greasy shit that they were afraid that everything was a conspiracy against them. They're like, if anyone found out what we're doing, they'll obviously make fake parties. Does it at all sound like it has a parallel in modern time? Absolutely, absolutely not. Ultimately, seven thousand people were implicated in Bacchus and Bacchanalia related crimes. One classics scholar, a guy named Walter Burkett, said that the Roman reaction was so violent it had no comparison in history until the persecution of the Christians. I find it kind of charming too that despite all of this culty, cloak and dagger proto revolutionary stuff, the decree still didn't fully outlaw the worship of Bacchus. To your point, people love Bacchus, they love the bacchanalia, and I think the Senate knew, well, we can't erase this completely or we're gonna have a problem on our hands up. So bigger problem then the conspiracies were afraid of, will actually become fact if we yes pull Bacchanale off the calendar. Their solution to this was so modern it made me chuckle. After one eighty six PC, if you wanted to hold a Baka gathering, you had to get written permission from a city official. Your gathering was capped at five people, two men, three women, max so basically to curb Bacchus, the Romans invented the first festival permit. Yeah. I mean, like I talk about it a lot in the show. They're all about bureaucracy during that time period. Yeah, and he's in triplicate. They just didn't want and I saw somewhere else in my research too, that you had to get this written permission in front of like three hundred other senators or something like. You had to do it publicly. Yeah. Yeah, you had to get it publicly, notarized in front of the entire government. If you wanted to go play a lute and dance for five fee for five people, Well. They just want to know exactly where it's going to be so they can come make a problem for you pretty much. Yeah, that's it. That's what it is now. The permit was really important because in many of these ancient festivals, the specific place that the festival was going to happen was sacred, and the location mattered almost as much as the party or the festival itself. It's a little different today, but I think there is still that connection. Most of the biggest music festivals we can think of are tied to the location where they're held. Sure, woodstock isn't woodstock if you move it to Florida, Coachella is never going to work in Pennsylvania. The biggest ancient example of the location being important, and this is what I was talking about a little earlier when you said it seemed like a bad idea to be doing all this celebrating at altitude altitudes. Not only was it the altitude, one of the most or two of the most important places were on mountains in the middle of winter. This ritual was called the Aura Basia, which translates to the mountain going, And once every two years in the dead of winter, the women of a handful of different Greek cities would leave their homes and physically run up one of two specific mountains. Anower back to Greece. Yes, we've gone back in time a bit here. A little bit, yes, yes, yes, they would run up one of two specific mountains to dance for Dionysus. There was cythereon outside of Thebes, the same mountain where Pentheus got torn to pieces in the bake, and Parnassis above Delphi, which I think is probably the more famous location. Sure we know that women actually went and celebrated this because we actually have what amounts to a search and rescue record from ancient Greece. Plutarch, writing around one hundred AD, tells the story of a group of women doing the Oribasia at Delphi and they get cut off by a snowstorm at the top of Mount Parnassas. Every two years there must be some whatever the search and rescue situation is. You know, whoever operates in carries that out every two years, just to be like, all right, guys, it's coming up, you know what I mean, Like make sure we have like flys at the bottom of this mountain. It's like fire season. Make sure you've got everything lined up. But yes, they ended up having to send a rescue party up the mountain to bring the dancing women back down the mountain because they couldn't make it in the snow. Some stories say they found some women frozen mid dance. I think that's probably a bit of an exaggeration. Yeah, there's no way, but you find people lying down, yeah for sure. I think it also to me this reads as it was across economic rich people did it too, Yeah, because there's no version in which they're going to get the women unless they're rich, right, Like there's if it was just a bunch of pores went up to the top of the mountain, Yeah, who cares what happens to. Them, right, But the fact that like gods took them. Yeah, the lieutenant governor of whatever is like, my wife's not back yet, we should probably do something. She went out dancing. I told her hunt it's too cold. But if a poor. Comes to the door and it's like, my wife's not back yet, they're like, get off my property. Yeah, So that's what that makes me think that it was either maybe more for exclusively kind of the way music festivals are now just for rich people, or it was across you know, economic divides, a. Lot of these different cults and worshipers. There was different There was sort of a different levels in layers. I'm sure the poors did it at a sewer and then they're rich for like on Delphi. This is our mountain. Yeah, but yeah, it was it was across society. I don't I don't know how often poors and rich people would participate in the same rituals. It seemed like from someone what. I was reading that that did happen, that they were that they were more broadly socially accepting, but some of these also may have been more private as well. Us to town. The important location centered on the Theater of Dionysus, built into the south slope of the Acropolis and Athens in sixth century BC. This is the oldest theater in the world and hill. There still there. That's cool that they still have all that shit. It held sick considering we don't have. One of the greatest architectural things in America, which is Penn Station, which if anyone, by the way, is not aware of the original Penn Station, it's staggering, like it's huge, it's beautiful, it's so fucking cool, and I think we had it. This is in New York City Penn Station. There's Grand Central. Everyone knows there's a modern Pen Station, but there was a Penn Station in between, and it's staggeringly beautiful, and it existed for like fifty years or less, and then they were like, oh, it's gonna be way too expensive to put air conditioning in this, let's just tear it down. And the fact that we have a six thousand year old bottom of a mountain theater and we couldn't have a cool building for fifty years is so crazy, so American. Well, it's so American. I also think a lot of older stuff there was less of an impulse over the centuries to upgrade it necessarily. Well, this is just carved to the box. Yeah, it's we built this thing to just be here. We're not looking to put in nicer seats. Yeah, but when you look around at all these fucking boxes were building for people to live in. Yeah, they're terrible. And you're like, what an engineering and like architectural marvel, you've decided to just kick over Yeah, for no reason. Is crazy to me. But I do think that, and I might be wrong. You never are ed, you're always right. No, But the historical you know when you see like a placard somewhere, that's like protected by the historical whatever. The neighborhood I used to live in in Pasadena, but the whole neighborhood was protected. Yeah, but I think those types of things may or may not have been. This could be a misremembering was born because of tearing down Penn Station. It was like, WHOA, we should probably maybe oh, like try and protect some stuff. This is ridiculous, And I could be very wrong that that's the impetus for it. But I do know that there was a lot of people like picketing to be like, don't tear this down, and they still did. So I have no idea. If you're right protective, I wonder I think that maybe a leap forward and protective status of historical buildings may have come from that being torn down. Great, that's all full story. I'm just saying. But you know it took us any any architects or city planners in the comments, let us know if it adds on to something, and if. I'm way off, like we should have. Yeah, there should have been an optimic in protecting places. Well, the theater of Dionysus I bring up just because in terms of places where festivals happened that were important important, this was one of the most important. Every Greek play we have that survives, Sophocles and your Rifpides and the rest of them. They were all they premiered there. They premiered there. They were first performed there, usually at the annual city Dionysia festival, which was a hilarious festival that opened with a giant procession through Athens where worshippers carried enormous wooden phallacies through the streets to the theater before sacrificing enough bulls to feed the entire city. So big dick parade on the way, on the way to the theater. I feel like, if you tried. To do this today, Well, we're doing this. We're recording this in June. If we're having a big theater premiere, a big play premiering somewhere in New York City, you should get a group together, march down the street with giant wood and dix in hand, and see if they turn us away or not. No, it's the only city they won't. It's might be the only city that's to be fine. Lots of other cultures also had very important festival locations. The urge to throw festivals on that sort of sacred charge ground turns up time and time again. Two of the most interesting ones are an Egypt and Turkey. So in Egypt there was a holiday called the tech Festival, also known ed we should get tickets, also known as the Festival of Drunkenness. I don't know, I don't need to be around that. In my twenties. I want to go to this held at the Temple of mutt at Karnak. There is to this day a literal architectural feature of that temple complex called the Porch of Drunkenness. The festival commemorated a myth where the goddess Hathor, in her bloodthirsty lion form, was about to wipe out humanity, and the god Raw saved humanity by brewing seven thousand jars of beer and dying them red. Oh we know this story. Yes, we've talked about this story. I don't remember what episode in anything, but he dyed them all red, put them in her path, and Hathor drank all seven thousand jars of beer instead of destroying humanity, and when she woke up, she was a change. She was a change person, as anyone would be after drinking seven thousand jars of beer, you'd have a very different outlook on life. So the way that the Egyptians would celebrate this was to go to the temple, drink themselves stupid, pass out on the floor in the Hall of Drunkenness, and then drummers came in. This sounds incredibly awful. Drummers would come in and they would all commune. The next morning when the drummers would wake them up with drums. Oh, and while they were hungover, they would all commune in this like trance like state, which that part, No, thank you, I'll hang out at the porch of drunkenness. I'll try some of this blood beer. I thought the porch of drunkenness was gonna be that all the drunks who passed out in the temple, they like drag them outside of the porch. And then it's like you wake up and go home from there, and not to wait till the crack of dawn to wake you up with drums. And you guys want to talk, And it was like, no, I want advil? Can you invent Adville? But again, very much like a music festival. Being hungover while loud drums are playing. Oh true, sounds like a music festival. Yeah. And then there's the controvert, the more controver virtual festival grounds in Turkey. Go Beckley Tepe. Now, if you're at all interested in sort of alternative histories or chariots of the gods, ancient aliens kind of stuff, you've probably heard of, go Beckley Teppe. Before. There's been a couple of I think, very famous or at least popular Netflix documentaries by this pseudo archaeologist named Graham Hancock, who argues that this particular site is evidence of He has this whole crazy theory about cultures that may have existed, and he thinks that go Beckley Teppe is sort of the best evidence we have for this whole story that he's spun out in his head. Anyway, we won't get into all of the details of that, but it is a real place. We can't get in any of the fucking details of it. I'm sitting here so confused by who this Graham person is and what they did, but doesn't matter. Move on. Graham Hancock is sort of a loon. He's been on Joe Rogan a bunch. He's not actually an archaeologist, but he has as a theory about this sort of secret history of humanity that involves a civilization sort of possibly like the Atlanteans who were traveling the world and building temples and stuff. You know. His his evidence is like, hey, look that cat statue in that temple looks a lot like the cat statue in this old. Okay, gotcha, so its been made and they could no one could have traveled these two distances and had the same but I do I counter that with I was listening to something. It was the Temple of Solomon, the second Temple of Solomon. I don't know, something. Where Persians took over somewhere in the Middle East and then they some assholes tore down temple. It's a very famous Jewish temples. I won't get into it, but anyway, I think it's one of the temples. I think it was the second Temple of Solomon, after the first one was destroyed. They wanted to build it, and then they had requested that. I can't think of his name right now, something the Great Cyrus, the Great I want to say his name was. He was, I think a Persian leader. But he's his claim to fame, if you will, is when they took over places for their empire, they let everybody keep their shit. So it was like, hey, you believe in Jewish God, you believe in fucking Hinduism. Cool, Like that's protected under us. We're not trying to make you Muslim, We're not trying to make you any other thing. And part of that. Is they will also restore and update, like your temples are broken, we'll also fix we don't give a shit. It's a different god. And so anyway, Yeah, so in this way, that's what Cyrus was famous for. I think that's one of his things he's known for. It's why that Cyrus there great is that he was like at a time when people were very not chill about that stuff, he was pretty chill. About it about it, he was great about it anyway. He so that. I think it was the Jews who were like, hey, this our temple was destroyed in some stupid battle that someone did. Are you gonna rebuild it? Because like you're in charge now, and I guess he was like, yeah, I'm gonna rebuild it. And the reason to bring any. Of this up is they he was like, tell me what it looked like, and they were like, look like this, which apparently was complete bullshit. They were just like they made a way. They told him it was way nicer than it was. Oh right, So it's like yeah, it's like bring in your beater car somewhere and being like, yeah, you can fix this up, right, and then showing them a picture of a BMW Yeah and. So but in this case, the car wasn't even there. They just had a drawing of a car, and so Cyrus sees this according to the like lore or like. Not lore not a it's a real things. There is us that temple exists. But anyway, the reason I bring any of this up is that the guy that he was like, are you fucking kidding made this? Is you built this? This is insane and they're like, yeah, yeah, that was what it was as what it looked like. And so he's like, we can't, we can't. The only people in the world who can do this are Egyptian. So I have to go get Egyptians to do this. And so that is what I immediately thought of when you have this guy's like only aliens could have in this part of the world and blah blah blah. And of course ancient aliens type stuff's always around, like pyramids and shit. But it do find it funny that there is presumably shit written accounts written of this person basically being like, the best builders in the world, yeah, are in Egypt, and so we need to have them come do this. Yeah, I mean I have some people were traveling. I have no doubt that people were traveling. I have no doubt that cultures that we don't have any evidence we're communicating with each other, were in fact communicating with each other. It's just Graham Hancocks grand theory of all of this is one of those sort of grand unified theories of it that tries to tie together every mysterious location in the world, kind of a thing that's like okay, buddy, chill, you know. But anyway to bring it back to go Beckley Tepe. This is a real place. It is very old. It's something that we don't have a ton of explanation for. It's in southeastern Turkey. It's this giant hilltop sanctuary with massive carved limestone pillars, and we know that it's a round eleven thousand years old, which means it predates Stonehenge by six thousand years, it predates the Pyramids by like seven thousand years. It actually predates agriculture itself. This place was built, and it was built. It's not just like, uh, it's built. It's not the side of a mountain they carved into like the other. Place they well, it's not when I say massive line, not like a free standing structure, correct, right, Like the pillars are many of the pillars and pieces are in the ground and there's sort of like. Well, it's not that thing from any ad Jones. Is it inside of a mountain? No? No, no, no, no, that's that's wild from the end of from the end of Last Crusade. Yeah, you're talking about I can't think of what that place is called. That's fucking wild. Huh. No, this t happy doesn't look like much of anything, necessarily because very little of it is left. But the evidence that we have was that this place was built pre pottery, pre writing, pre farming, pre hunter gathered. Like they just built this thing, almost like Stonehenge in the sense that the people who built it didn't live there. There's no evidence that anyone ever lived there. They druids or whatever came and dragged limestone. Yeah, they and we're pretty sure they built it to party. It's like if what if the movie Contact, all the stuff they're given was just to build a party machine. It was just to build like a beer helmet. Yeah, sort of. I mean like archaeologists alcoebecley Teppe have found enormous stone troughs that could have held up to over one hundred and fifty liters of liquid each and the chemical residue inside those troughs contains fermented grains or beer. There they've also found thousands upon thousands of grinding tools and bones of animals from what they assumed were these absolutely massive feasts. On animal meat. Oh. The team that excavated the site wrote in the journal Antiquity that early Neolithic communities at go Beckley Teppe created social cohesion through quote the carving of decorated pillar, dancing, feasting, and almost certainly the drinking of beer made from fermented wild crops. Now you'll remember, at the very beginning of this episode, I said that there were people going to music festivals before Rome was an empire. This is what I meant. We don't have evidence of what kind of music was being played, or if we would even really recognize it as music, but it was almost certainly central to the revelry happening here. And the thing that I find extra fascinating about this is that, and again, this isn't I'm not saying this is a accepted fact across all of archaeology. But the thirty thousand foot view that some scholars have taken on this is that human beings may not have domesticated wheat because it could be used. To make bread. They may have domesticated wheat because ancient rituals, Yeah, required enough beer to keep the festival going, which means the music festival isn't just older than civilization, it might be the reason that civilization exists. Yeah, it does sound like Egypt kind of took their thunder. Huh. Yeah, they later would be said that they invented beer. Yeah, they were the largest i think like distributor of wheat at the time in the ancient world. Yeah, they have all the crazy buildings that you can't explain. It sounds like Turkey was ahead of the curve on this. Yeah. And again, look o Beckley, Teppy is an outlier in terms of ancient places that we found, in terms of how ancient it is, and a lot of this evidence there's not reams of evidence for you know, it's very small amounts of scraped, fermented beer paste or whatever. But you know, it's still even the more realistic scientific version is still a lot of extrapolation. But the whole thing is very interesting to me that the thing that we still do today, gathering in places to drink and party and listen to music, might actually kind of be part of the reason that we built society at all, I. Wouldn't be surprised at all. Like I wouldn't be surprised at all, because I. Don't you know, it's core to being a person. Yeah, I think, And it's that's also what introduces you to your neighbors. Yeah, it was like I couldn't help but smell like delicious meats being cooked. And anyway, we live over here on this mesa. Yeah, what do you guys? It seems like honestly more than enough. And we brought we also made some. Beer, and we love to fucking party. We love the party. And let me tell you a little about me. I love the party. You guys have a whole mountain over here, and I'm hearing a party from way far away. My name's Rod. I like to party. No, it's uh, yeah, it's so, I do imagine, Like, what better way to You can't build a civilization without other people. What better way to meet other people than to have a party. Yep. Now we're going to take a massive leap into the future because over the next two thousand years or so. Which wouldn't even get you to the Pyramids based on what you said. Well, over the next two thousand years from the time of some of the Greek and Roman festivals are talking about. Over the next ten thousand years or whatever, from the period of Goblecki Teppe, music festivals evolved. In some eras, music festivals would cater to kings and queens, and other times they were more for the average citizen. Classical music was sometimes performed to large crowds, and according to Wikipedia, the modern music festival emerged in England in the eighteenth century as an extension of urban concert life into a form of seasonal cultural festivities structured around scheduled music performances or concerts. So the idea of hey guys, it's June, and we're going to have some music in the park, you know, in this day and this day was sort of an England mid eighteenth century thing. Okay. Sure. From there, music festivals ascended to their critical and commercial peak with the success of Woodstock in nineteen sixty nine. And that was a success. Huh, It was a success, Okay, Okay. It made a lot of money for that one guy who rented this farm out. Or yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it made a a lot of money for the guy who made a lot of money for the promoters it was held. If you're unaware of Woodstock, it was held on the grounds of a dairy farm about sixty miles south of the actual town of Woodstock in upstate New York. And for three days there the biggest rock stars in the world performed to a crowd of five hundred thousand drunk, high nude hippies who writhed around in the mud, hooting and hollering. And it was really probably another five hundred thousand people who claimed to have been there who weren't. I actually saw in my research. I saw somebody had written about there was a poll that was done I think in the eighties, and like thirty million people said that they have been there, but it was about five hundred thousand. And it really was, for the most part, everything positive that a music festival could ever hope to be. The music was good, the people were relatively chill. The weather wasn't perfect, but it wasn't terrible. Up for the traffic jams, the inbiblical traffic jams, it really wasn't too bad. But even still, there was a dark side to Woodstock. According to a fiftieth anniversary article in The Sun Quote, the festival saw least three deaths and more than seven hundred drug overdoses as chaos rained over the site. Now, I think the Sun here is definitely skewing a little. Hey, those damn hippies in this description, But hippies could be seen selling acid for just a dollar, which is based there is a foot I think it's a famous photo of a guy, a hippie with a cardboard sign that says acid one dollar, and. In terms of inflation, it kind of hasn't gone up that much. The main stage of Woodstock, Now, I don't really completely knock this because nothing actually bad happened, But according to the Sun, the main stage became a death trap with the possibility of mass electrocutions because of some of the rain. Okay, there were food and water short and six hundred people for every one toilet. Of the three people who died at the festival, two of them were killed by drug overdoses believed to be heroin, and the third was poor Raymond Missak, only seventeen, who was crushed to death while asleep in his sleeping bag by a tractor. Oh. The tractor driver basically was trying to clear the area of trash, and the driver claimed that he had tried to twice get everybody to leave, but there was so much trash and so many people ignoring him that unfortunately, poor Raymond was beneath the trash when he. Even if there weren't drugs and alcohol involved, just a working adult trying to get a bunch of teens to get out of an area. It's an impossible task. One report from Woodstock claimed that a fan suffering a bad trip climbed to the top of an eighty foot scaffold and threw himself off, which broke his back and required that he had to be airlifted to the nearest hospital. And my favorite horrible discover using terrible Woodstock fact the most common injury at the festival edge. You want to guess what maybe the most common injury was. I don't know. There's a lot of mud, I think so twisted ankles. No, so much words. The most common injury at Woodstock were sliced open feet as hippies strolled barefoot across a sea of trash. Oh doctor William Abrutzi, known as the rock dock, more like William. A foot see how many feet he had to take care of? Known as the foot dock, The rock Dock oversaw the medical response to the entire Woodstock site, and he reported that his team treated eight hundred and thirty six cases of slashed, open soles and toes. Disgusting, especially because all that mud, all that trash, and so few toilets. You know, there's a rich mixture. Going on in there. I'm surprised no one had to get something amputated. And it's pretty wild that Vietnam War is also going on at the same time. But this person the only person maybe who was allowed to say, having not been at Vietnam, this was my Vietnam. I think. So he's the only medic who could sit down on the bar and say that. But even despite all of that, Woodstock really was heaven on Earth compared to what would come next. So as Woodstock is making headlines around the world as this giant the peak of hippie culture. In nineteen sixty nine, the Rolling Stones are at the tail end of an American tour and they decide they want their own Woodstock because you can't have the biggest band of the time not having their own giant festival. And they are one of the only I'm not saying the only, but when they made that tongue logo. Uh, I think that's like no one else did that. Maybe the Grateful Dead and that don't have a time a time. Nobody else did what like branded where they were like, I made a brand for the band, and so of course the band that has a brand would like to have that brand painted up as the headliners of their own and festival. After saw how much money, Yeah, Woodstock made, it seems like maybe they were always thinking a little bit about money about like they were ahead of the curve on a couple things. Well, the Grateful Dead was involved in this too, so we'll get to that in a minute. But so they wanted to throw this concert that they would open the doors for free, called and they wanted to call it Woodstock West. Okay, they threw it together fast. Again, that's a very branding thing. What do people already know? Yes, they'll instantly know what we're doing. Yes, they threw it together fast, some would say way too fast. At a place called the Altamont Speedway and the Dry Hills of the East Bay area. This is how fast they put it together. Stage construction at the Speedway began on Thursday, December fourth, nineteen sixty nine, and the show was on Saturday. Oh my god, about three hundred thousand people showed up to the stage and venue that had been constructed in less than two days. And I really think maybe the first mistake here was, as we've learned a great festival, you gotta pick a location with good vibes. The dried out husk of land next to a race car track is as about as vibeless as a prison. Although even then, Johnny Cash played a famously good set in a prison, so somehow this was even worse. It was worse well, he didn't have the Hell's Angels doing fucking security. Now. Part of the reason that they chose this location is because while the concert was going to be free, part of the Rolling Stones plan here was that they wanted to create a documentary that they could release in theaters that was like a concert. They are unbelievably forward thinking with branding and marketing. Yes, and so they had already made a deal with the Mazles brothers who made a famous documentary called Salesman, and they were going to come out shoot the whole show and then release it in theaters, and they were going to make their money off of that. They planned to shoot to put the show on at Sears Point Raceway in Sonoma, which I imagine was a more beautiful location, But that site was owned by a company called film Ways, and film Waves had just lost a bunch of money over a tour date that the Rolling Stones canceled. Ooh, so as payback, the company wanted the distribution rights for the film that was going to come out of the concert, and the Stones were like, fuck you, we want all that money. So they went and found a different location, which was the Ultamont Speedway. Sounds like they made a lot of money. Then why are they still on tour at like ninety I mean, let's somebody else on the stage. The amount of kids that they must be paying for behind the scenes, I don't know. They probably made the same deals with the moms as they did with this, which was fuck you are keeping the money. And then, as you just noted a few moments ago, they made their second and really the worst mistake, the one that really caused this whole thing to come apart. The Rolling Stones hired the Hell's Angels as security for this concert. Now, this was originally the Grateful Dead's idea. The Grateful Dead had hired the Hell's Angels to be security at one of their shows before, and The Grateful Dead was supposed to play Altamont Speedway, so they were involved, and we'll get to that in a second. But the Angels had also been security for Jefferson Airplane before. I think these were security at concerts that weren't five thousand, three hundred thousand people. Correct, And it was also security in the loosest sense of the word. It seems insane that anyone would think this was that hiring one of the most notably dangerous outlaw biker gangs in history as security would be a good idea. But political scientist and cultural critic James Miller believes that because Ken Kesey, who was one of the inventor who was the inventor of the acid test, he invited the Hell's Angels to come to one of his outdoor acid tests, and since that had happened, the hippies sort of viewed the bikers unrealistically, idealizing them, Miller says, as noble savages and thus outlaw brothers of the counterculture. Okay, so there was this connection of like, well, do you take drugs? I do drugs? Yeah, and you guys are tough guys, but we're all on the same page here. Well, I was gonna bring up the drug thing and it's complete heresaying my part and just speculation. But I want to say, biker gangs constantly being on the move, we're selling a lot of drugs because yes, taking them from town to town. Yes, and then the throwing stone. I'm sorry, the Grateful Dead are so famously associated with drugs. Yes. I have to wonder if it was like, you know how it's like, oh, we bands have to go on tour to sell T shirts to actually make money. Yeah, if it was like some bands also had a deal with the biker gangs, being like, you sell drugs at the concert and we all keep a part of what's sold here, you get it. It's like, I'm wonder if if there was some element of that too. Maybe. I mean, either way, you don't bring up for three hundred thousand people. If the Hell's Angels were making money selling drugs at the concerts. I'm not sure how much of that they were splitting with any of the bands, But I would say, if it's a choice between having cops as security as your show, who are going to try to be who are going to be busting people selling drugs or Hell's Angels who are going to be selling the drugs. That's kind of what I'm you know, there you go. In any case, the story goes that the Hell's Angels were paid five hundred dollars in beer to make sure that the show didn't descend into chaos, because there's also the fact that the stage was constructed so quickly, and it was constructed at the essentially like the bottom of not a ravine, but like a slope, so everybody was kind of angled down and there was really just like a piece of rope basically between where the crowd was supposed to end and the stage began. So part of the concern here was security, but some of it was literally, we want a wall of big guys because we're afraid people are going to start just kind of falling onto the stage if we don't have a barrier. So there's there's debate as to how much actual security the Angels were expected to provide. Well, since their payment is things that get you drunk, yeah, I don't know how much they were expecting themselves. According to the road manager of The Rolling Stones nineteen sixty nine US tour Sam Cutler quote. The only agreement there ever was was the Angels would make sure nobody tampered with the generators. But that was the extent of it. There was no way they're gonna be the police force or anything like that. That's all bollocks. Multiple Hell's Angels have also stated, for better or for worse, that they really weren't planning to do much of anything at the show. One guy, Sony Barger, would recall, quote, I ain't no cop. I ain't never gonna pretend to be a cop. And you know what, I didn't go there to police nothing. Man. They told me if I could sit on the edge of the stage so nobody would climb over me, you know, I could drink beer until the show was over. And that's what I went there to do. That guy rules. But you do watch, you know, biker movies outside of Easy Rider, but like bikers showing up in movies for like thirty years, they're always just like super dangerous. Crime is oxygen. Yeah, I need to be doing crime to breathe. Yeah. And then my buddy got like this great tashi and book that you paid a bunch of money for us was into that like part, that historical aspect of it, and and it was like, oh, I think there was a portion where that really was what these gangs were. That it also that the movies that painted them with these like crime is Oxygen villains was drawn from something. Well, yeah, they were. They were. They were complete. I mean there's stilo outcasts on purpose. They wanted to they wanted to live that that bacchus ass life on Bachus on wheels. I think it was sort of a self fulfilling thing too, where like you know, your your tiganism, you're attracting big tough outsiders with not much else going on in life to your biker gang, and then when you have that many big tough guys and not much else going on and started doing partying, Like yeah, I think it's sort of a it's the mob feeds itself. It's the mob. It's the mob on wheels. And they were tough enough that they could do whatever the fuck they wanted and they took advantage of it. Anyway, whatever the thought process was or whatever promises were made, it all went wrong immediately. All day long, the angels are beating people with sawed off pool cues, the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane gets knocked unconscious on stage by a Hell's angel mid song. Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills and Nash gets stabbed in the leg, and the violence got so bad that the Grateful Dead, who were supposed to play, decided not to play their set out of concerns for safety of both themselves and the crowd. Dude, they were like, we didn't all of a sudden, like I remember we mentioned this, man, I don't even know these guys. Yeah we said that. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about it. But the Rolling Stones weren't pussies like the Grateful Dead. They came on anyway. And out in the crowd there's this eighteen year old kid named Meredith Hunter. He's young black man, and his sister had warned him not to go out to the show because the dried out hills in the east of the Bay had a reputation as being a little backwoods and potentially very bast And whether or not that's why he brought a gun, no one's really sure, but he did have a long barreled revolver in his jacket. So during The Stones is set, there's a whole bunch of scuffles and fights that break out. The stones stop and start the set a whole bunch of times because of the fights. And then during the song under My Thumb, Meredith Hunter gets grabbed by the angels near the stage. He breaks away from them and pulls his revolver, and a Hell's Angel named Alan Pisaro stabs him in the head, neck and back sixteen times kills him, and the whole thing is famously caught on film because of this documentary. Oh yeah, they had a crew there. They had a whole crew there, and the documentary would eventually be released as Gimme Shelter. Although when they were shooting, the cameraman who captured the footage of Meredith Hunter being killed didn't even realize that he'd captured it until they were reviewing the footage later, because it was so chaotic that even a lot of the cameramen were just sort of, you know, just film that you can film, which you can. Pesaro went to trial and was acquitted on self defense because Meredith had a gun and because the autopsy revealed Meredith Hunter was high on meth, which I imagine he bought from but even if Meredith Hunter was high on meth and waving a gun around. What's extra greasy about this whole thing is that for years his name was never even really mentioned, like gimme shelter. If you watched the documentary, they don't mention his name, and they the moment is played as look how much danger the Rolling Stones were in? Is basically kind of how it. Come knowing no element of it was targeted towards them or at them. It was completely unrelated to the band that was playing on stage. Right. There's some people I think the Stones manager came out and said that he saw this all happen. He was watching it from like a sound booth or something, and he who was like, when I saw that gun came out, I knew he was going to go for the for the band or something. But there's really no evidence for sure. Nobody in the death bullshit. But also the better question to be posed is not look how much danger the Rolling Stones was in. The question that should. Be posed or not posed with the statement that should be said is look how much danger the Rolling Stones put everyone in California. Pretty they are the ones who demanded the show. They're the ones who refused to make the deal with the other plays. They're the ones who agreed to the Hell's Angels. They're the ones who still went on because they knew that if they didn't go on, there would not be a racetrack there tomorrow, considering they're the headliners. So it's like, fuck you, Rolling Stones, right. Well, So, after Meredith Hunter was killed, the band eventually it took them some time, but they gave his family ten thousand dollars, which even. Then, what that's for nothing? Yeah, and they never acknowledged him and they never had any communication with the family. The money was just I assume passed to them through and in. Many ways, even though I do blame them wholeheartedly for every event that happened that day, it's not on them that that guy got killed by I mean, it's so knock on effect on them, right. But it's not like they were up there and responsible. They didn't really. They were playing a fucking show at that moment. So, but it is responsible in the sense that they put all those people in the place to have that happen. The fact the fact that Meredith Hunter was kind of coded as the bad guy after all of this was extra shitty because a week after this happened, Rolling Stone ran a piece about what went down at Altamont with quotes. Rolling Stone Magazine. Rolling Stone Magazine ran a piece about what went down at Altamont with numerous eyewitness reports that paid a very different story. Wouldn't you know about who the real aggressors were in this situation. The piece opens with an account from a witness who later testified at Pesaro's trial, and this guy said that an unidentified angel reached over and grabbed Meredith Hunter by the ear and hair and yanked on it, thinking it was funny, you know, laughing, and so Hunter shook loose, yanked away from him. Another angel hit him in the mouth, the witness went on, and Hunter tried to run, which is when four other Hell's angels jumped on him. According to the witness, after Pissaro stabbed Hunter in the back the first time, that was when Meredith Hunter pulled his gun and held it up in the air, he says, quote, you know, like that was kind of his last resort. Pissaro stabbed him in the neck, and someone also likely Pissaro, stabbed him in and around the kidney. Other angels kicked Meredith Hunter stood on his head and hit him with a garbage candld Before he died, audience members lifted his body onto the stage and the Hell's Angels pushed it off. So, like I said, this is the crime is oxygen era. Yes, that this big fashion book goes through when it goes through like the Biker History of America. His Meredith Hunter's death was so awful that we don't even remember that three other people died that day at Altamont Speedway. Two guys got run over by a car that we driven into the crowd by somebody, and one guy drowned in an irrigation canal. Can't believe they found that much water in California. Well, it's up north, it's up north. Supposedly two babies were also born there, So I guess if you're doing the mass scales of life, let it out. I think to maybe many of us. One three died at wood Woodmont, at Woodstock. The three died at Woodstock, so it only got them by one. Yeah, And before we move on from the hell, that was the Ultamont Speedway festival there. So there's a lot of outrage about how Meredith Hunter was portrayed in Gimme Shelter because they make him seem like this monster. After the movie came out, the Hell's Angels were also pissed off about how it made them look. There's a claim, and it's a not super well substantiated claim, but a claim made by a former FBI agent in two thousand and eight that a handful of the Hell's Angels were so mad about the heat that they caught from Gimme Shelter that they hatched a plot to a set fascinate Mick Jagger, and the plan was to come at his house from the water by boat. So the Hell's Angels got a boat and they raced it out across I don't know what bay or what area of water this was, but the plan fell apart because there was a storm that almost sank the Hell's Angel's boat and they turned around and gave up. Well, they better go that scientist from that movie pressure to find out what's the best day to storm the beach. Yeah, So I guess God protected Mick Jagger and kept them all alive on hundred years. Yeah for a guy. For a guy who famously sang at least a couple songs about the devil, you'd think, and sixteen year olds yeah. Wow, wow, wow wow. I mean bikers are interesting choice, you know what I mean. If it's a horrible event and horrible things happened, and I've never heard one piece about reviewing the music that day, like, I don't know, it's a lot of it's a lot like and then other than that, how was the play, Missus Lincoln? Yeah, you know what I mean, it's like so I don't know. It Like Woodstock, you have at least footage that's like, oh, iconic of the music. All we know about this is that it was just a shithole that that that turned into a hell hole. Well, and part of the reason that it holds this outsized place as just the worst is because it was just four months after hippies were standing on top of the world at Woodstock, and this concert, even at the time, was considered so awful that it really got the culture to turn its back completely almost overnight on music festivals. No, well yes, but but really moment rock and roll and free love, the fights and the drugs and the violence and death on display at Altamont disgusted even prominent members of the counterculture. Well, this is a question. I don't. I can't close my management now and see ultimate. I know the name, I know the was it like mostly paved because it's like a racetrack grounds they were? Or is it in like the grass like Woodmontson Jesus Christ, like what'stock somewhere? That's a good question. I think pavement makes things worse. Yes, when you're on the grass, you're having a good time. I don't think I know what's stock ninety four was. I think a lot of pavement around because it was in that like like militarized and dutchbook complex. We're gonna get to that in a second. Well before we move on from bikers. I think the crime is oxygen. That I always that's just a term I say about about well shlock movies. It's not a real thing. But like crime is oxygen. I think that's the thing of the past. They have like the one percenter patches now or like one percent of biker gangs or criminal activity or. Something like that now. But do you ever see mongols out here? I see them all the time. I've seen full rocker mongols, and I'm always just like give that a wide berth. Yeah, I feel like there's enough like it's always exciting. It's like seeing a rare bird for me. H. But I'm also like, I'm gonna let you go. I'm gonna give you plenty of space to go around my car. Right, Yeah, I don't anticipate any trouble. Blah blah blah. I don't see him at bars and stuff too. Yeah, they've seen him here at all season. I don't know if I've ever seen mongols. At a bar, but I've seen him here at our brewery. I assume they're not allowed to wear their colors or anything. Right, of course they are. They're on their vest, they're in full rocker. They parked the bikes out front. Oh wow. And but it's just like I've never seen anyone cause any trouble and anytime I've any seen anybody out, but I'm always just again, like just no funny. I feel like Sons of Anarchy actually had a really weird effect on biker culture because it was a modern outlaw biker story that lots of middle aged men thought was so cool that they wanted to become bikers. But I think it led to a wave of not dangerous or cool or whatever criminal bikers riding around like it all became more popular, but it became more popular with Middle America and just okay, regular dudes. Yeah, but I still see I think you're one hundred percent right, and that's an interesting take. But if I see a. Full rocker Mongol or a full rockers Angels, I don't think that's old dogs. No. I'm always just like, you know what, let's just not go the bathroom. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, yes. Part of the reason I said at the beginning of this episode that music festivals have killed entire decades is because Altamont was the first to do it. Altamont really is seen as the moment that killed the sixties, and the sixties were I mean, this was December sixty nine, so it was rolling over into the seventies, whether anyone wanted it to or not. But really, overnight, the idea of the sixties died at Altamont because it became such a black mark on the American soul. And believe it or not, as you just mentioned, in some ways the music festival they would kill the nineties was even worse so in the thirty years between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen ninety nine, music festivals waned and then grew in popularity. Despite the horrors of Altamont, the primal urge to gather, dance and sing never really went away, and hundreds of thousands of people would gather at festivals like Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in nineteen seventy three, Steve Wozniaks Us Festival in nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty three, and stadium festivals like Live Aid in the mid eighties. Security, water, food, and medical care always became difficult to provide to the massive number of fans drawn to these events. Yeah, when you look at like Freddie Mercury manipulating the crowd at Live AID or Live AID or Live. Eight, Live Aid, Okay, there may have been a Live eight eventually. Okay, Live Aid was the Yeah, gotcha. It's just it doesn't look real. You see that many people in front of someone, Yeah, it's pretty And I can't even imagine if something happened to somebody in the middle of that crowd, how anyone's getting help to that person. No, And and to be honest, most of those logistics still haven't really been figured out. Was really just the best you can do is try to prevent anything from happening. Logistics did get better into the nineties as more and more major labels started to get into the festival game. This is also when Lollapalooza started. Although interestingly, and I think maybe I remembered this, I couldn't. I couldn't quite grasp it. Lollapalooza didn't start as a festival. It started as a twenty one date farewell tour for Jane's addiction. He's shooting openers like violent femmes and iced tea. Oh, I had no idea, which that also goes to tell you how old fucking Perry Farrell is. If the original Lollapalooza was their farewell tour in nineteen ninety one. Randy Newman has ay talks about this at one point where he was just in a not the last album, I think the album before where he was talking about I went to the. I think I don't remember what band it might have been. Let's it was a it was a funny enough band that that like, let's just say def Leopard or something. The band he mentioned like a funny enough name. Like but he was just like, he's like, I remember going to the Deaf Leopard farewell tour. Yeah, and he's like, and they're back on tour this year. I mean tour in nineteen ninety one. You could have been the Rolling Stones doing a farewell tour in nineteen ninety one. I mean, Jesus Christ. Yeah, But it's just the idea. His whole thing is he has a song. It's called I'm Dead and I don't know it. Uh huh and uh or you're dead and you don't know. I'll fix it in the post. But either way, threat one way, and it's just about bands that are still on the road who absolutely shouldn't be. Yeah, and not in the song. But when he's like talking about the song, he was like, and I get it. He's like, nobody's a plotting at home. Yeah. Yeah, and I think about that old he's still on tour barely. I mean, like, I wish I can see him more. But yeah, his whole thing was about, like, guys like us aren't leaving and we're not making room for any younger people. We look back at the nineteen nineties now as this golden era, the economy was flourishing, Jobs are easy to find, the middle class was thriving, but it's easy to forget that things weren't perfect, and the nineties bred a seething discontent with the status quo. It's sort of nastier form of the disaffection that was captured by Woodstock at the end of the sixties. Music critic John Parles noted in a New York Times Pop View column in nineteen ninety one that quote, as their elders lightly chied themselves about their yuppy excesses and promised to be kinder and gentler convenience permitting, a younger generation faces an adulthood that promises nothing but bad news. Again, this is nineteen ninety one, not last week. Yeah, for a teenager in the nineteen nineties, sex has been contaminated by the threat of AIDS, and drugs are associated with oblivion rather than delight. And now sex is contaminated by COVID Like they don't go anywhere, They never now nobody's fucking no more like younger people and drugs aren't fun because fends them all. Yeah, you can't just go have drugs. Every heat wave stokes fears about holes in the ozone layer, and with an economy in which real income hasn't risen since nineteen seventy three. Fact check, it still hasn't risen. Yeah, that is so crazy, right since seventy three eighty Shit, they can look forward to move moving back in with their parents after graduation and competing for low paying service jobs. Oh my god, dude again nineteen ninety one, this man wrote this and it sounds exactly the same. And also a time period where we had a deficit that fell to zero. Yeah stuff during this era. Yeah. In other words, wow, wow, wow now came and imagine can even imagine what kids are going into the next twenty years now? In any case, everyone should have seen trouble coming. Rock and rap was getting grungier and angrier. Culture curdled into this very trashy, aggressive kind of fuck you mom. Like. Yes, Also, selling out was a big deal, Like people don't even like that if their favorite band was making money from. Yeah, that was a big deal in the in the nineties. If your if your favorite band made a deal with a brand or something, it was considered. Forget it, We'll stop buying the record. Yeah. Now it's now you have to start with the brand deal. Yeah. And so Yeah, if you weren't alive in the mid nineties to the end of the nineties. It was a weird time and it was into that environment that Woodstock attempted a comeback. Now, as you mentioned earlier, ed, this wasn't the first time that Woodstock has attempted a comeback. They'd actually held a tan at Tank. They'd held a tenth anniversary show at Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy nine, and a twenty fifth anniversary in Upstate New York in nineteen ninety four. That's not the one that was held on pavement that. I just said Woodstock ninety four, but I was. It was Woodstock ninety nine. Yeah. Neither of those were met with much enthusiasm. They were The ninety four Woodstock was sort of critically well received, but nobody was really all that excited. I do actually sort of at least they went back to Upstate New York. Yes, I do sort of vaguely, vaguely, vaguely remember, because I would have been in nineteen ninety four, I would have been. It would have been ten or no, you would have been eight eight. And I vaguely remember people talking about Woodstock ninety four on my bus because that was where Green Day played the show that really launched them into the stratosphere because it had rained and it had gotten super super muddy, and during Green Day's set the band was sort of encouraging it in the fans. Everybody started a giant mud pit mud fight. Well, just like the original Woodstock I think. Yes, but this was much more high energy, much more aggressive, more like a giant snowball fight with mud. And so I remember that being a thing because it was right before Dukie came out. I remember the T shirts more than anything. They had like the bird on the I think it was a replay of the original, yes iconography, but I remember the like Woodstock ninety four T shirts that had like the bird on a guitar and yes, yes, yes, yes, So I remember that more than I remember any knowledge or footage or anything from the. Yeah, there's not much else that was super memorable about it. But then in nineteen ninety nine, five years later, we were older, we were alder A couple of promoters, including one of the original Woodstock guys, decided to throw a thirtieth anniversary show. And there's lots there's podcasts, entire podcast about this, was a couple different documentaries about it, so some of this information we're going to kind of do the brief version of because there's a lot out there. It is a really fascinating moment in time. And again, music festivals killed the sixties, and this music festival exactly thirty years later killed the nineties. And nine to eleven would kill all future years. Yeah, nine to eleven just killed everything. Yeah, dude, that's outrageous. You could draw a line. July nineteen ninety nine, they go to throw this show, and once again I'll say they broke the cardinal rule of having a charged, meaningful location, and instead of choosing a nice open field or a storied amphitheater, they picked a decommissioned Air Force base in Rome, New York, which was not just miles of pavement and asphalt and nothing but heat and misery. It was also designated as a Super Fun Site in nineteen eighty seven, which means the soil and groundwater was contaminated from decades and military operations, or as one quote, I found, decades of aircraft maintenance, fire training, and waste disposal resulted in hazardous chemicals leaking into the surrounding environment. You gotta treat this stuff like taking mushrooms or acid like. You have to enter those experiences with an attitude and a surrounding that's going to make it the best time for you, right, and any deviation from that and you're having a really bad day. Instead, they picked a location that it feels like a level select from a fighting game. No yeah, I can see like ryu you get ready to fight somebody. No shade, no grass, just miles of asphalt. In late July, and around two hundred and twenty thousand people show up and it is hell on Earth. From basically hour one, the temperature hits one hundred degrees, which. Is bouncing off the fucking cemester. Just cooking you, yeah, cooking people. The promoters, apparently knowing that it was going to be very hot, promised free water, but the freewater stations are broken or barely dripping. A trickle. Bottle of water costs four dollars, and a slice of pizza cost twelve dollars in nineteen ninety nine, money which you know is still pretty bananas. I don't know exactly what that conversion would be to now, but you're probably talking about a an eight dollars ten dollars bottle of water and twenty five dollar piece of pizza. And a still pretty cash heavy society. Yeah, you're not. Your iPhone isn't venmoing, You're like, I need money probably at most of these things. Yes, the bathrooms come so well. You ran out a dough, you ran out of water, is what I'm getting at. Yes, Yes, the bathrooms completely collapse within the first day, and a Billboard reporter who was there wrote a twenty five year retrospective that describes the disgusting scene that ensued and I warn you listener and Edward. She's described being basically a ten on the fear tier. Oh no quote. The first thing that hit you was the unbearable, eye wateringly putrid stench. Then the slow realization that some of the quote mud the kids at Woodstock ninety nine were rubbing all over their viciously sunburnt, exhausted bodies and tossing at each other was not, in fact just mud. The sight of hundreds of young concert goers wallowing in the fetid pool of human waste mixed with dirt pooling around the porta potties would have made me sick. If it wasn't the twentieth worst thing I would end up experiencing and Woodstock all night. It was just one of the many flashing danger signs of the sinister apocalyptic vibe that slowly spread across the three day festival twenty five years ago. So hot bucket of piss and shit getting poured on two hundred thousand people. This might matpen. This is like the when the temperature bursts through the top of the of the thermometer from the fears deer. Wow. And it gets even worse because all of that filthy poop and pee runoff got into the water supply. And I don't I don't remember if this was in any of the documentaries, because I feel like I've never heard this before. People left Woodstock ninety nine with trench mouth, which, if you don't know what trench mouth is, is a gum infection that is so associated with the misery of soldiers living in filth in the trenches of World War One that that is what it's named after. Oh wow. So Woodstock ninety nine was so bad that people went to a concert and came home with a with an eighty year old today the World War One disease. Yeah. And then, of course, on top of all of this was the lineup, and I'm not going to say that Woodstock ninety nine was the audio equivalent of what the attendees were rolling around in, but it was the absolute peak of new metal and kind of angry caveman music. Okay, Limp Biscuit, corn Rock, God Smack, seven, dust Buck, Cherry DMX kind of sounds. Like a lineup where I can have all the same feelings these kids felt of being in misery without ever leaving my house. If all those bands were just like put on at my house. There were other gentler acts there too, The Counting Crows, Dave Matt's bandy Elson, and. Jewel, all things I've seen on their own. Yeah, thank god, none of those bands were greeted with the same dysentery we'll call it enthusiasm as the heavier bands. So famously, things really broke down during lymp Biscuits performance of Break Stuff and one I don't remember which of the documentaries it was really takes Lympiscuit the task for sort of being the ring leaders of the chaos that ensued. So I will say this about Limp Biscuit. When I was a kid, I hated olymp Biscuit. I was into film scores, I thought they were the stupidest band in the history of music. And then you went through your soul patch face no. Over the years, I do think break stuff. I'm not sure it's a great song in the traditional sense of songwriting, but it is a perfection of whatever it is, whatever that sort of caveman grunty. I just want to get pumped up and be aggressive vibe that is in that song. It's incredibly stupid, and I'm not saying that it's the best emotions to indulge, but it is a great angry pump up song if that's what you're looking for. I don't know. I don't think we're gonna win any golds on that in the way that eminem Lose Yourself is going to get us the gold. No. Well, you need to find what it is you're looking for to succeed to what you're doing, and that success requires energy being output. You're saying, I. Lose Yourself will get you that gold medal because we have Michael Phelps listen to it before every. Swim, sure, and it's like, I feel like you're gonna lift more in the gym to that than you will to. Break stef I don't know if you'll lift more in the gym to lose yourself than break stuff. No, because break stuff you'll just drop the weights. You'll lose yourself. You'll be focused. That's what I'm getting at. So I'm perform nine n I would have been a little early for him, but. He probably he was on I think he was on like the Family Values tour that came. I think after Woodstock ninety nine for sure he might. Have been there. I'm not sure, so yeah, I have lots of mixed feelings. I've also worked with Limp Biscuit as an ad on a music video more than a decade ago at this point, and was very surprised at at least the people they'd become, if maybe not the people they were. And anyway, I went back and I watched this performance because it's so roundly laid at their feet, and I will say this, they've maintained that they weren't trying to start a riot, and if you listen to the part of the song right before things go bad in a different context, it's a fairly positive message. Fred Durst, in the middle of the bridge of break Stuff, gets on the mic and says quote time to reach deep down inside and take all that negative energy, all that negative energy, and let that shit out of your fucking system. You got girl problems, you got boy problems, you got parent problems, you got boss problems, you got job problems, you got a problem with me, you got a problem with yourself. It's time to take all that negative energy and put it the fuck out. When this song kicks in, I want you to fucking kick in. And then of course he starts screaming, give me something to break. And the yeah people took it literally. Yeah, And look, was it the most responsible thing at all to be playing break stuff in the middle of the day of this particular festival. I don't think it's on them, man. It's like you can put explicit lyrics on the front of every CD you want. I don't think video. Games make fucking school shooters, and I don't think music yes monsters. I think I think what he underestimated, the problem that he didn't shout out was the problem that the entire crowd had, which was the whole festival, was the main problem that all of them had. I mean, I think you can be the sweetest person in the world and get caught up in a riot, ye know what I mean. And so you could find yourself pulling TVs out of a department store when you didn't plan to, when one hundred thousand people around you were doing crazy shit. Yes, and so the final breakdown in chorus hits and all these hundreds of thousands of people go nuts. At the same time, people rip the plywood off the lighting towers and crowds surf on it over people's heads. The medical tents are flooded with injured kids within minutes. One reporter who was there described kids coming into the medical tent begging the promoters to stop the show because it was the scariest thing they'd ever seen in their lives. Which, you know, this whole scene might be the closest a modern music festival has ever come to the chaos and delirium of the main ads carrying the little animals, except they weren't women this time around. They were mostly very angry men who could afford. The tickets and you could take the time off work and love limp biscuits. There were women there too. Well, I'm sure their stories were really something we want to go into on this show. So then comes Sunday Night, the Grand finale of Woodstock ninety nine, and again more bad ideas left and right that I almost think are worse than playing break stuff. And this kind of feels like Altamont had a good idea of making it free. Yeah, because I'm like, if I'm one of those people who came into the tent on Saturday night being like I just witnessed Hell on Earth, Yeah, you just. Leave because you're like getting costed me a dime to leave here. Yeah, we're here. It's like, I'm sure you had friends who were like, let's fucking get out of here, and the other people who are like, well, we paid the tickets for Sunday, that's true, and so if it was free, I'd be like I'm dipping right Yeah, right. Well, on this night, a peace organization handed out tens of thousands of candles to the crowd. I'm sorry, what we're adding fire to this? We are adding fire to this, both. The methane gas coming out of these fucking porta potties. Yeah, so it's gonna bloat surprised, nothing like actually exploded. But yes, they handed out these candles and I don't remember what the what the vigil exactly was for, not anyone that had died during during the week later and they were to be They wanted people to hold up these lit candles during the Red Hot Chili Peppers closing set, and then the Chili Peppers made this all way worse by playing if. They ever done anything that didn't make it worse, I mean, whether it's an interview or a performance. They played a cover of Jimi Hendrix's song Fire, and as they played this, really, I don't know it's it's it wasn't as aggressive as a olymp biscuit song, but it's a I mean, fire is an aggressive song. Choice to add this to the set list, Yes, they thought it was cool. And then, in something that's surprised really no one except everybody involved in the in the concert, the candles started to light bonfires, and the bonfires lit the audio towers, the trucks, the ATMs, the merch trailers. It all burned, The crowds toppled the speaker towers, voting began, and the promoters, at this point, realizing that they had fully lost control, brought in hundreds of state troopers and cops in riot gear to clear the festival grounds of kids, which made everything worse because now there's cops and fights. And luckily no one died in any of the fires, but three people across the weekend did die, mostly from the heat. One I think there. Every one of these three to four. Yeah, so far. The most famous or infamous death was a kid who collapsed in the metallica pit and his body was measured to be at one hundred and seven degrees when they recovered him. Wow, I thought the measurement was going to be how flat he'd become, like he was under the feet of the mash. Bit No, and then they peeled him off. This is a real person, so I don't want to say anymore. Yeah, no, it was. It was. It was pretty bad, and there were at least four alleged rapes and multiple sexualists over the course of the entire festival, none of which you've ever prosecuted. And really one of the worst things about Woodstock ninety nine is the continued in those documentaries. It just came out like two years ago. Are some of the promoters being like, they took their tops off, what do you expect us to do? Yeah? Like that's greasy, And I thought, this is just the first one where we have the data too, and I remember where they're. Like, oh, Woodstock was. All the other ones were fine too, but we either don't have the data or people came forward or promoters who yeah, just said the same thing. Yeah, there's just too many elements to not make that. Even if it wasn't an angry young manfest that this one sounded. Like it was. You have people inebriated, you have it too loud to hear anythink, people get lost from their friends. Yeah, it's it's crazy. It's crazy. And then and after the fires burned everything down, that was the end of it. That was the end of We never did a Woodstock again. We never did a Woodstock again. I think very recently somebody tried to get it going again and it never even made it through through the planning stages. Yeah. What's funny is that, like all of these stories that you've chosen, I don't know the other ones. You know, we make fun of Electric Daisy j DC, Electric Daisy Carnival, Yeah, like we make fun of that, We make fun of this dip lo fucking type shit. Yeah, we make fun of these European tours, which is your daft, punky ass. Like dance music, dance music festivals. We make fun of them because on the face of it, they look stupid as hell. Yeah, and I couldn't imagine not being on drugs there, right, But it just feels like only the rock and roll festivals are the ones that make historical waves in the. Musical festival problems. Well, there is one more that we're going to get to in just a moment here that's not quite a dance festival. But I will say this before we move on from Woodstock ninety nine. Like I said earlier, I think it's fair to say that Altamont killed the sixties and Woodstock ninety nine killed the nineties. But festivals kept going, and they actually got bigger after this. If anything, they became more corporate in an attempt to make everything safer. Well not even the corporate thing. To that point, I was working at slinging dumplings at the place, and some of the people who came up to buy dumplings were like, you know, we asked people like, hey, are you from the area? You know, just talk to people while they're waiting for food to come out and stuff, And there were people who were like, oh, I was supposed to go to bonrou but it got canceled because of like weather or some issue, and they were like, so the promoter sent us an email that was like, hey, sorry about Bonrou. Here's like twenty other twenty other music festivals that we also own. These tickets will be transferable to any of these other ones. Oh wow. And so they were like, ah, so we chose this one because you know, just up the road, you know, kind of a train ride away. Yeah, and so, yeah, they're very corporatized in the sense that like bon Rou might be owned by the same person who does eat probably TC. Yeah, one of those types of things. Yeah. I mean they integrated wristbands and apps and influencer tents and you know, did everything they could to turn these music festivals into things that feel a lot safer and like you can bring your kids to a lot of them and that sort of stuff. But the same dangers that we've been talking about this entire time have always lurked. Too many people, too little water, not enough water, and not enough safe exits out of these crowds. And then one music festival went wrong in a way that I think yanksters all the way back to the start of this episode, back to a giant crowd losing their minds to music in the dark, and a whole civilization taking a look at what's going on, deciding what was really happening down there was something straight out of hell. So November fifth, twenty twenty one astro World Festival in Houston. Oh, I know, true, I know what. This is going to be. Named after Travis Scott's chart topping twenty eighteen smash record astro World, which in turn was named after Travis Scott's fond childhood memories of going to six Flags astro World, which had been since shut down. I remember this sort of because I had just figured out or learned who Travis Scott was. He's a rapper. If you're unfamiliar with Travis Scott, he's a huge, internationally famous rapper. But this was in the middle of COVID when I became aware of him, because I was playing Fortnite at the time, and Fortnite hosted this live digital event where you could attend a Travis Scott performance in the game. Oh, because it was COVID and you couldn't go places. Yeah, So he did like a big performance as like a giant hologram. Travis Scott in Fortnite. But anyway, this Astra World Festival had been going since twenty eighteen, and the first night of the twenty twenty one festival, Travis Scott is headlining, And I think people were already a little bit like, you know, COVID wasn't really over yet. There was a big question they'd canceled it the year prior, and there was a big question as to like how safe this really was to be having this many kids out there. Well, even if you take the disease out of it. I mean, do you remember we went to a friend's wedding. Not the wedding. What's it called. It's not a baby shower, it's a thing. It's like an engagement party. Okay, we had gone to you were there. We were at a friend's engagement party. And it was like right at the time of like the vaccine was out, but like people weren't going back to the office. We'd also all been like cooped up for like a year and change. And I remember they had paid a bunch of money to have like a DJ and a dance floor and all this shit, and I remember that nobody used the DJ or dance floor. Everyone was just so excited to be in the same room with someone talking that everyone just kept talking, like everyone was just like so excited to be in relation in conversations with the person who's right there. And then you're bringing and bopping and it was just like you're catching up, what have you been doing? And so money not well spent on the dance floor. But it was just a thing that I couldn't have seen coming of, like how society was going to spend time together again. And I think a bigger danger than will these kids get sick, is like these people. Have longed to do who knows what? We couldn't have guessed what getting together in a crowd would be after a year of not being together. Yeah, and so you couldn't you know, wild horses couldn't keep people from going to this, I bet no. And when Travis Scott is performing during the headlining set of the first night, there is what's called a crowd surge or a crowd crush, where all of a sudden, the entire crowd basically rushes towards the stage and compresses from you know, if you're standing in a. Like on purpose or just happened. Yeah, Like I mean the first show I ever went to at the Hershey Park Stadium was Blanquidity two and Green Day and Saves the Day was opening. And when Saves the Day was on, we're all standing on the floor of the stadium, you know, everyone's watching, and more and more people are coming in, and Saves the Day plays, they get off the stage, and a little bit later, Blinkwin eighty two comes on and everybody goes, whoa. You know, they all run to words the front. Oh okay, and all of these people you have standing in a field are now compressing in on each other. And I remember I was there with a friend and he immediately freaked out and left because the feeling is insane, like you suddenly realize that. You just trapped. Yeah, you can't move, you can't move, And you know, we weren't. I don't think we were really in danger, but it was a really uncomfortable feeling of like I can't move, I don't know where to go, I can't get out of here. Like I'm not. Particularly claustrophobic, but I remember feeling claustrophobic in that moment of like holy shit. And so that happened at Astroworld, where the crowd crushed in. Hundreds of people got hurt. I don't know exactly the mechanics of this particular crowd crush, but it was really really bad. I mean you see it. I think in Europe too, like in famous like soccer matches, Yeah, like were crowd crush incidents or like faulty. You add a crowd crush to old infrastructure and now you got bleachers falling down and shit. Yeah, and that's when you end up in trouble. Yeah. So hundreds of people got hurt and ten kids died. Ten ten, which is a lot. That's a fucking ton. It might be more. I didn't check this, but that might be the most people who have ever. Died at a music festival, is I mean, so far, that's way higher than any of the ones we've covered. Yeah, So ten kids die, and within hours before the victims were even all identified, the Internet decided that something evil had happened at Astro World. This was not a crowd density failure. I was about to say, the only time I've ever heard of this other than the news, was you telling me about it in satanic panic? Oh yeah, we may have touched on you touched on how people were like Travis Scott's the Devil or something or Yeah, so the Internet decided that this had all been a Satanic ritual and that these dead kids weren't killed in a tragic accident that could have been prevented. They were killed on purpose by Travis Scott or the Illuminati or whoever this is q one. This was not saying. It was QAnon. What I'm saying, ish peek. QAnon may have been like a year or two earlier, maybe, but right around right around the same time. And so yeah, people people felt that this was done on purpose to keep Travis Scott wealthy and powerful and talented or whatever. Now, oh my god, that's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. Yeah, it's probably true, and I look like an asshole in five years. I mean, it's like a they just keep showing clips of me from this show every time. I'm like, there's no way. That's not true, that that this this artist sacrifices people to stay popular, or this town sacrifices people to keep the wind away. Well look, look I I I don't know a ton of Travis Scott music. I never heard a single track, so I could be wrong. Maybe people will yell. Maybe every single track is called like I'm doing it for the Devil. No, it's not, okay in that case, the fucking it. There's a couple there's a couple of Travis Scott songs you might recognize that have been on like the radio or that you would have heard. What I'm certain I know the music if you're a person who's on their fifth fucking year of a giant music festival. Yeah, and we're the chosen artists for the like Fortnite COVID. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I imagine you're one of the biggest artists in the world. Yeah. That said, let's be real sicko mode. One of his hits is No Rain and Blood by Slayer, like the talent commensurate to the Satanic sacrifice to receive the talent. I'm not sure it really goes hand in hand here. But in the wake of QAnon and COVID, the conspiracy mill was already spun up, and the theory was that if you looked at the stage for Astro World from above, it was shaped like an upside down cross and there was a big arch of fire behind Travis Scott that people said was an entrance to hell. There was also there was also a video playing on stage. It was a hologram of like a winged kind of like creature that opened the show, kind of inside these towers of flame. And twenty three million. People saw this video of this bat online and it was viewed as proof that this was a satanic ritual taking place. Wait when you say twenty three million people like it was this concert was televised. Well, I think there were eemed No, there were a couple of Sorry, I wasn't very clear that there were a couple of popular conspiracy videos that were put together that twenty three million people viewed. This particular theory got you that this was all done as a ritual. There were other theorists pointing out that you entered the festival by walking through a giant sculpture of Travis Scott's open mouth that looked a little bit like a painting from the fifteen hundreds depicting the literal mouth of Hell. It's the same open Travis Scott mouth that's on the cover of Astro World from twenty eighteen, which did not generate any satanic, you know, hell comparisons. The festival's tagline was see you on the other side, which some people thought sounded satanic. Some people did astrology. The tragedy happened in scorpio season, and there were some people online pointing out that scorpio sounds like corpse, and so therefore in this language, guess and therefore these things were somehow connected. And one person even said that the tragedy happened exactly six hundred and sixty six months and six days after the founding of the Church of Satan, which I feel like, when you're saying six hundred and sixty six months, that's a pretty You're you're being really flexible there about how many sixes you want to try to put in that could be broken down as years, that could be broken down as days. It's like, it's like meeting a new fucking parrot, and it was like, oh, they're twenty three months, Yeah, exactly two years. Idiot. So anyway, all of this got so big online that at one point, if you typed astro World into the search bar of TikTok, which was the main way by which all these theories were spreading, the app was automatically suggesting Astroworld Festival demonic oh wow, and TikTok started pulling a lot of these videos down to try to quell the spread of conspiracy, truth all the truth. Yes, maybe this was all done to help make TikTok more popular here. It is well, nobody says suicide or sex in these so we have to leave them up. Yeah, exactly exactly. And so look, I mean, I won't even I won't even give any more of these conspiracy theories any like credit or time on air. But I do think the reason I bring this up is sort of the last stop on our fear festival here, is that I think this incident really rhymes with where the episode began. People saw a bunch of people losing their minds in a celebration and decided, I mean, granted there were bodies here, but immediately said that this was ritualistic. This there's cult base, that there was something demonic going on here. Which is weird. It's a weird place to go with it. The only place in my mind to go with it is ten kids died, and this is a fucking tragedy. They died just having fun or trying to have fun. This is whether it was preventable or not, it is something we hate to see and I'm sure everyone involved was horrified, and that's the end of the story. Yeah, Like, we'll try and do what we can to make sure it doesn't happen again. It seems like a freak incident where rabbit fans who were extra rabbit because they've been stuck in their fucking houses for a year and a half, who for whatever reason wanted to get closer to the stage, and then this happened, and that's the end of the story. I genuinely do not know except for the year and a half we were all indoors and the rise of TikTok creating a breed of fucking yeah, a nonsense filter you can put on everything without that. I don't know if this is seen as anything other than a tragedy at a concert. And it's very surprising to me that we would even go to the like, we shouldn't have even had an opportunity for you to be like this echoes this other thing. Well, I think there's something that's a me as a bummer. Yeah, I think there's something to be said about the you know, if we're looking at music festivals from sort of a fear perspective, obviously a lot of the things that are terrible that can happen at them are accidents and deaths and what have you. But there's something to be said about the fact that there is I think because it is primal, and because it is sweaty and expressive and whether people. I mean, obviously, in this case there were real tragedies. But I think what I'm getting at is, even in the cases where there aren't real tragedies, I think you've always had people casting down an eye or aspersions on what a music festival is or might what might happen there because of that very primal, sexual, sweaty element to all of it. That really has. Never changed from the very beginning of getting around to getting to dance around a fire. You know, when you picture witches it's Salem, you imagine them dancing around a fire. And I imagine the villagers dancing around a fire as they burn witches there, not the other way around. But I mean, look, Burning Man's not for me, and it's not a music festival, but it is a thing where like the guy from accounting is going to be there in assless chaps, yeah, bartering things for a week and having the best time of their life yep. And there was a murder at burning Man just a few years ago that I almost put in here, but I decided not to be music not a music festival. What I'm saying is that that the draw of it, yeah, is always going to be there, the draw of community, in the draw of being something that you're not for just two days. Maybe Yeah, it's it's exciting and it's and you want it to go off without a hitch. It's just difficult when you get and listen. This is where I agree with these senators. It's different which senators, the Romans and yeah, okay, this is never the new Ones, the like. I think there is an element of like, keep it to seven people and that this is definitely not gonna happen. You know, there's a reason. I Well it's not that reason, I guess, but I do prefer club shows, although you know there have been tragedy club Yeah, not Paradise, but the the Great White Show, Great White Show. Yeah, the band was Great White. But I'm saying there could be there could be problems. Yeah, there could be problems in smaller venues for sure, but yeah, generally the problems aren't But you're not. Going to have the fun potentially you would have a big music festival. You're not going to have that that bacchus ass stuff at the fucking satellite, right, all right, paup bless Satellite true, you know, or Paradise Rock CLB in Boston or. Toad's plays or something. It's gonna be an awesome experience. But the bands you're gonna want to see. That would be at a festival, You're just not gonna have an opportunity to see them there. Yeah, they're too fucking big. So the only way to see a band that you love is to go to something that's dangerous. Yeah, I guess, I guess that's uh. You put that about as best as anybody could. The only way to see music you love is to put yourself in danger. Yeah, and that's how it should be. Yeah. Well, with that said, ad, where would you put music festivals on the fear tier? The ones that are have a doorway to Hell or the regular ones? They're kind of like a six plus for me, just because if you're adding anxiety as a fear, where like my fun is being is being fucked up by being anxious about things around me or the people I've brought mm hmm. Yeah, it's like a six, or like a six or seven because it's like, I'm more worried about who needs a drink? Fuck, I'm gonna get waters for both of us. But now I'll never find them again because they want to stay where they are, so because they've already been there for a bit to be this close to the band, and it's like, well, when am I going to use the bathroom? Fucked there's a huge line. Oh my god, the kids are all wearing the. Piss and shit. Yeah, And so it's like it's a six or seven of my fear tier. I fear if part of fear is anxiety, I'm having a hard time there. Sure. And then on top of that, if I get. Too fucked up, am I gonna get assaulted or crushed? Yeah? And so I think you'd be crazy to put a put it anything less than a six. But if you're being a rational person, but if you're looking at it as I'm just gonna go get fucked up. I'm having an awesome time listening to music, it's a two because I'm gonna never watch a news story about someone getting pushed in front of a subway and then stop using subways, like right, like the we just covered four major festivals that are modern festivals, and until Travis Scott it peaked at four deaths and even the injuries were like in the low hundreds and we're talking three hundred, four hundred thousand attendees. Yeah, So if you want to go to a music festival and you can fucking somehow afford it, now go absolutely go. You're gonna probably have an awesome time. No different than going to New York City or San Francisco or Los Angeles or any major city in the country where there is right now some news channel telling you it's dangerous. Yeah, it won't be and you'll have a blast. But in terms of like my own personal neuroses regarding if fear is what stops you from doing something and anxiety is things prepping to stop you from doing something, I put it as like a six in terms of my own personal have a good time. Sure, Well, if you I think I think you said you'll you'll put it at six. I think you said you have to be crazy to put it at a two. I think I'm gonna put it at a four. I am I am less anxious about the things that you are anxious about. It gets me such I do, I can't even enjoy It's I'm having a horrible time. But it's a it's a four from the sense of I know how badly it can go wrong, and I would be nervous at any large enough festival that one of those things could go wrong. I also know I'd never drink enough water, so I'd be very nervous that I would overheat and collapse. Well, it's also funny to be asked this question when we're forty. Yeah, that's true. Like now forty year old puts a music festival on their fear tire is probably higher than where a twenty year old. Music festivals exist for and continued to be put on because of twenty year. Olds, that's true. And aged out. We've aged out to have a And if you asked a twenty one year old right now, hey, what's like your biggest problem with a music festival, they'd be like, there aren't enough in the year to go to. Yeah, And so they just haven't lived quite honestly, haven't lived enough life to find the annoyances about all of the things that they're just going to blindly stumble into and that's great. I think it's great that like you don't eat from the tree of knowledge. You should be at twenty, you should be on exactly by the worldliness. You should see your favorite bands, you should do all that stuff. But at forty it's like I'm gonna be hyper selective. Yeah, but where I'm. Going absolutely well. I think that's a good place to leave it for this episode. Ed, you guys you know the show. It's Scared all the Time Until next time. I'm Chris Calari and I'm Edvvicola, and we'll see in the pit. No we won't. We can't afford to go to the show. Bye bye. Scared All the Time is co produced by Chris Calari and Edvacola. Written by Chris Calari, edited by Edvacola. Additional support and Keeper of Sanity is test Fightful. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual. Stu and Mister Disclaimer is And just. A reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You get all kinds of cool shit in return, depending on the tear you choose. 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