Messed Up Things That Happened At Woodstock '99

Someday, we'll have a national reckoning concerning the mysterious popularity of Limp Bizkit. (Lest we forget, their third album, "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water," debuted at Number 1 in 2000 with first-week sales of more than a million copies.) But in 1999, they were undoubtedly one of the main attractions at Woodstock

Someday, we'll have a national reckoning concerning the mysterious popularity of Limp Bizkit. (Lest we forget, their third album, "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water," debuted at Number 1 in 2000 with first-week sales of more than a million copies.) But in 1999, they were undoubtedly one of the main attractions at Woodstock '99, and lead singer Fred Durst did his level best to make a bad situation much, much worse.

As reported by the San Francisco Examiner, the festival's organizers could see that the crowd's mood was turning ugly, so they asked Durst to try to calm the situation. He promptly went out onstage and did the literal opposite, shouting, "I don't think you should mellow out. This is 1999, motherf*ckers — stick those Birkenstocks up your a**!" The band then launched into one of their biggest hits, a song called "Break Stuff."

As The Ringer notes, Limp Bizkit is often mistakenly blamed for directly starting the riots that closed out Woodstock '99, but this is inaccurate — the fires and vandalism didn't break out fully during Limp Bizkit's performance. But as promoter John Scher notes, Durst was a "cheerleader" for the chaos, and his speech and the band's performance of an incendiary song that celebrates violence no doubt increased the likelihood of the festival ending in flames.

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