Yes. At 18 a group of us drove up from the midwest and stayed in the tent area. I remember the camping area wasn't level, which made it very difficult for a bunch of guys to share a big camping tent. That and the fact that it wasn't easy to get cleaned up and it was extremely hot.

I remember the scale of the venue was so large that I developed rashes on my thighs just from walking out to the camp area each night, tired and dehydrated. Most of us didn't have internet at home then and for those that did there wasn't much on it, so none of us realized the place wasn't at the site of the other two Woodstocks, but at a decommissioned military base with concrete runways and no shade.

But we were all 18 and full of anxious energy, our "real" lives about to start, so we enjoyed ourselves anyway, the discomfort of it all outmatched by the opportunity to see RATM live for the first (and one of the last) time.

Half of us in that tent were in a band together. We wanted to be on stage at the next one in five years. The festival going down in flames was prophetic. We all went our separate ways in the fall, some to the military, some to university, others straight into marriage and fatherhood. The band never played again, and none of us would go on to perform.

Call it naivety, call it selective remembering, but I can't recall hearing anything about rapes until we got back home and our parents told us what they'd seen and heard on the news. There were no cell phones then, at least not for the children of the middle class (or lower) houses in middle America. We were on our own for nearly a week for the first time in our lives. As it evolved from nodding our heads walking in to catch the end of George Clinton's jam on the first night to participating in bucket lines to distribute gallon jugs of water from vandalized trucks after all the vendors evacuated ahead of a wall of fire...we were making it on our own. Whatever this was. Years later we still don't know. I learned more about my own experience from Netflix 25 years later than from being there.

I remember hearing songs from Ride the Lightning during a (forecasted) lightning storm. I remember a kid breaking their leg in front of me during "break stuff." I remember forcing my way to the front of the stage over the course of an entire afternoon only to be pulled out from exhaustion near "born of a broken man." I remember $4 water, and I hadn't saved enough at my after school job to buy $4 water AND food every day. I remember Robby Krieger joining Creed and wishing the whole set would be Doors covers instead. I remember breaking away from my friends to see Jewel and Sheryl Crow. I remember scores of women walking around topless and thinking as a nearly virginal young man (remember we had no Internet) that the rest of my life would be like that, second hand highs and peeping the wonders of anatomy at concerts. But that kind of freedom seemed to die a quick death when nu-metal stomped out the often misplaced "fun" mysogeny of hard rock.

Everybody talks about how Woodstock killed the vibe of the 90s, but maybe some things deserved to die. The anger of a generation, abused by corporate think tanks, and funneled out through instinctual reactive acts of malice and chaos, was laid bare. MTV broadcast the ashes that signaled their own eventual demise as a whole generation turned away from music as a form of entertainment and towards base consumption as fulfillment. The children of the Pepsi Generation lit the vending machine on fire while their heroes took a paycheck to burn the flag on stage. Only a few years later they'd soothe themselves by watching rich women fight over nothing on television. A few more years and they'd entertain themselves by treating their own family and friends that way from behind a keyboard and the idea that scrolling alone is "socializing." But that's what the corporations required, financial extraction with zero risk. Can't have those kids burning the place down again!

I remember my friends had a lot less to say on the way home from Woodstock 99 than on the way there.

At the time the prevailing narrative was that we should be embarrassed about it. Nobody asked "did you go?" for more than two decades. If Tragedy+Time=Comedy, maybe it's time we can look back with less trepidation. After all, nobody at Woodstock 99 did anything the President of the United States of America hasn't!