Post-Festival Stage Fright

Like ashes, the fallout from the fires and riots of Woodstock 99 are settling throughout the concert world and no one is more aware of the potentially smothering effects than the organizers of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio.

Tickets go on sale today for the Oct. 9-10 show, which will feature Beck, Tool, Rage Against the Machine, Morrissey and five dozen other acts. It will be the first major U.S. overnight festival since Woodstock, which means it will be under a microscope, one organizer said.

“I think there will be a higher sensitivity and more scrutiny after what people saw on TV with Woodstock,” said Moss Jacobs of Goldenvoice promoters. “When there’s a high-profile incident it’s naturally going to raise the attention level. . . . It’s like air travel after a plane crash or a gun show after a shooting rampage.”

The Coachella Festival is expected to draw a crowd up to 35,000 to the Empire Polo Club, which is less than one-sixth the size of the Woodstock audience. Organizers and Indio city officials say the festivals will also be light-years apart in their music, site conditions and overall vibe. Still, the two shows are linked by timing.

“Yes,” Jacobs said with a sigh, “it was uncomfortable watching what happened there with our show coming up.”

Woodstock 99 will likely be remembered for the violence of its fiery finale, when riot police cleared the festival grounds in upstate New York as looters and arsonists attacked vendor trucks. Police are also investigating at least six rape allegations by female fans.

The ugliness prompted Woodstock co-promoter John Scher to say plans for a fourth Woodstock festival, which had been eyed in 2004, will be shelved “if we can’t figure out a way to deal with the things that went wrong.”

Those same issues may call into question the future of other large festivals, which already wrestle with logistical problems such as securing insurance coverage, community support and artist issues.

Multiple-day festivals are popular in Europe but are relatively rare in the United States, where summer shows at amphitheaters dominate the concert venue landscape. Far more popular are single-day festivals, which in recent years have included Lollapalooza, the Family Values Tour, the Warped Tour and Lilith Fair.

The multiple-day shows can create especially intense conditions for fans that test their patience and health.

Tensions at Woodstock 99, for instance, were at a fever pitch by the show’s close. Overflowing toilets, mounds of trash, lack of potable water and high-priced food were cited as catalysts for the rampage.

One promoter says he has already noticed a post-Woodstock surge of awareness among concert organizers regarding comfort levels at outdoor shows. “This is a reality check,” said Kevin Lyman, co-founder of the Warped Tour. “These kids pay our bills and they need to be treated like humans.”

Using similar terms, Jacobs said the planners of the Coachella Valley Festival have placed a priority on “a high human comfort level.” Among their tactics: extra toilets, creating more shade, bringing in benches and tables for eating areas, stepping up cleaning crews and trash collection, and keeping the crowd capped well below capacity.

Indio police have also crafted a traffic management plan to smooth out snarls that formed when the Empire Polo Club hosted its last major rock event: a Pearl Jam concert for 25,000 fans in November 1993, also handled by Goldenvoice.

The site of the Coachella Valley Festival--basically a palm-lined field--is similar to the Woodstock 99 setting at a former air force base in Rome, N.Y., but the music lineup is very different. The Woodstock bill was eclectic (Willie Nelson, Elvis Costello and the Offspring are hardly look-alike acts) but the heart of the bill was the blistering crash and bash of Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine and Metallica on Saturday night.

Rage returns for the Coachella Valley Festival, but the majority of the bill is orientated toward dance, DJs and alternative rock. The fans will likely be an older crowd and less aggressive, says Indio Mayor Chris Silva.

“It’s a totally different menu,” Silva said. “The bands that created the problems at Woodstock, well, we’re not having those types of bands here.”

No band who played Woodstock has received more criticism--or notoriety--than Limp Bizkit, the rap-rock outfit from Jacksonville, Fla. The Red Hot Chili Peppers may have been on stage when the festival’s finale turned sour, but it was Limp Bizkit’s incendiary performance a day earlier that seems most associated with the destruction.

Bizkit frontman Fred Durst told the fans “there are no rules” as some in the crowd attacked towers and scaffolding near the stage. The group’s song “Break Stuff” intensified the mosh pit scene further.

The band came into the show with a No. 1 album in its “Significant Other” and an image of volatility. Just a week before, Durst was arrested in St. Paul, Minn., on misdemeanor assault charges for allegedly kicking a security guard in the head during the show.

“Limp Bizkit has to be careful they don’t get a reputation for ignoring public safety,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert industry trade. “People are watching them now. You can get banned from anywhere and you can also get sued into obscurity.”

Jeff Kwatinetz, a partner in the Firm management company that handles both Limp Bizkit and the upcoming Family Values Tour, said there has been no slacking of interest in the group. He also said the Woodstock chaos should be blamed on the organizers, not the artists.

“You put Rage, Limp Bizkit and Metallica on in a row and you don’t expect kids to get pretty intense? They exploded. They were psyched, they were ready to rock,” Kwatinetz said.

Bizkit will headline the Family Values Tour, which is expected to kick off in late September with in-door arena shows featuring DMX, the Insane Clown Posse and Filter. Will the frenzy and destruction at Woodstock dissuade fans--or, for the younger fans, their parents--from buying tickets?

Brian Murphy, president of Avalon Entertainment, says the Woodstock woes were a product of the show’s duration and ragged conditions, and when Bizkit is brought into an arena for a four-hour Family Values show, “all of that goes away.”

“They had one of the most amazing sets at Woodstock,” says Murphy, whose company is among those bidding for the Family Values show expected in Los Angeles sometime in October. “I think Family Values will be a smash hit.”