Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. I'm in the studio with Rob Sheffield,

and today is really as much a therapy session as anything else.

We're dealing with our, I don't want to say PTSD,

I don't want to diminish the real PTSD.

However, as traumatic as it can be covering a large festival, I would say that was what Woodstock

99 was. And as we speak, it is 20 years specifically since the day of the riots and it was quite

an experience Rob and I were both there and we thought we'd kind of look back and try to put it into some context.

I just posted a story on Rollingstone.com trying to make some sense of it all sharing some

memories Rob's wonderful 1999 report Woodstock 99 99, Rage Against the Latrine, is up also on Rollingstone.com.

If you're really good at googling, you can find my accounts at the time that we're on a now defunct website called

SonicNet so there's a lot of history there I then spent a year

investigating it with my colleague Chris Nelson so there was a whole set of

investigative stories you can find if you're really good at using web. Archive.org that we spent a year on that you can't actually access.

So that's just the way it goes.

Anyway, Rob, before we started we were talking about the historical context and you had a few events you were thinking of in the music industry that kind of set this up or related to this or just were at the time.

Well, it's coming off this massive boom for rock and for pop music in general for all genres of pop music.

1999, it seems crazy in retrospect, people loved to trade $20 bills for CDs.

They could not be stopped from that.

People would go to stores and say any 20s I have,

I am trading them for astounding numbers of CDs.

People love to buy music in all genres. There was no genre that was

slacking commercially or creatively. So what's talking 99 was supposed to be a

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