Third Time’s a Swarm for Woodstock Fest

The biggest music event of the summer started Thursday--a day before the first performance--as tens of thousands of music fans began arriving for Woodstock ’99.

Organizers expect more than 200,000 people when the 30th anniversary show officially kicks off today at noon with James Brown as the opening act.

Traffic had already begun to build around the two main gates leading onto the former Griffiss Air Force Base when organizers agreed to let concert-goers in at 9 a.m., three hours earlier than planned, to set up their tents.

Among the 50 acts on tap during the three-day festival: Sugar Ray, Sheryl Crow, Live, Willie Nelson, Bush, Jewel, Alanis Morissette, Insane Clown Posse, Metallica, Dave Matthews Band, Rage Against the Machine and Ice Cube.

“We’re not here to hear anyone special. We’re here to listen to it all,” said Jamie Jancosek, 23. “Except country.”

“That’s why it’s the best place to be,” added travel partner Kurt Miller, 20. “Everything is here.”

Although it is the 30th anniversary of the original festival, held on Max Yasgur’s farm, Woodstock ’99 is no throwback party.

Salespeople are hawking credit cards, and a tractor-trailer is serving as a video arcade. An extreme sports park and a B-52 hangar converted into a movie theater offer other diversions; another hangar will house all-night rave parties and an indoor stage for emerging bands.

“Every generation deserves its own Woodstock,” said Metropolitan Entertainment President John Scher, a promoter of the fest.

This is the second post-Woodstock Woodstock organized by Scher and Michael Lang, one of the original festival’s founders. The pair’s Woodstock II fest, held five years ago in upstate Saugerties, N.Y., on the 25th anniversary of the original Woodstock, drew 350,000 people--almost as many as the 400,000 who showed up in 1969.

Advance ticket sales have been respectable for this year’s shindig, with promoters saying they’ve sold about 120,000 tickets so far.

The only musician in the current lineup who performed at the original Woodstock is former Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart, who will play with his band Planet Drum. Scher said organizers ruled out original Woodstockers because those bands able to come weren’t “relevant” to teenagers and twenty-somethings or “reasonably intact.”

The goal for every Woodstock is to have its own ethos, said Wavy Gravy, the comedian, philanthropist and former member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters who will serve as master of ceremonies at Woodstock ‘99, as he did in ’94 and ’69. “You don’t try to repeat anything,” he said, “you just try to set up a palette for things to happen.”