This Week in Rock History: The Crowd Goes Wild

This week in 1999, a festival honoring the 30th anniversary of the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Woodstock '99, was held on an Air Force base in upstate New York. Over 200,000 people attended the festival, which featured a lineup including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Limp Bizkit, Sheryl Crow, the Dave Matthews Band, Alanis Morrisette, Korn, Bush, and Rage Against the Machine. The festival, which was plagued all weekend by shortage of water and toilets, plus high concession prices, dissolved into chaos on the last night as fires were set and vendor stands, merchandise booths, and ATMs were looted. The festival ended abruptly when New York state troopers and other law-enforcement officials in riot gear dispersed the crowd.

. . .  in 1978, a big-budget movie based on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band opened in the United States. Although it featured three enormous stars of the moment, the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, and comic Steve Martin in acting roles, and despite having George Martin on board as musical director, arranger, and producer, it became one of the legendary flops of all time. Several soundtrack performances became hit singles, however, including Oh Darling by Robin Gibb, Aerosmith's version of Come Together, and Got to Get You Into My Life by Earth Wind and Fire.

. . . in 1977, Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin were in New Orleans on an American tour when Plant received a trans-Atlantic phone call from his wife telling him that their four-year-old son Karac was seriously ill with an unidentified infection. Two hours later, a second call came with news that Karac was dead. The boy's death inspired Plant to write All My Love, which appeared on In Through the Out Door in 1979.

. . . in 1943, Michael Phillip Jagger was born in Dartford, England. Of all the recordings Jagger has appeared on over the years, with the Rolling Stones, as a solo act, and with other performers, the most surprising one may be this, from 1963.