Woodstock 50 will not happen. There are other Woodstock anniversary celebrations afoot, sure. Several artists, including Santana and the Doobie Brothers, will play live at the original Woodstock site, in Bethel Woods, New York, beginning August 16. But this and other tribute events can’t call themselves Woodstock or even the Woodstock Experience, because if they do, they might just receive a cease and desist from Woodstock founder and owner of Woodstock Ventures, Michael Lang, whose efforts at his own anniversary celebration came to a litigious end earlier this year.

In the beginning, it was all going so well. They found a location in New York state, some hours from the original site which Lang had deemed “too small for what we’re envisioning.” He had gathered a genuinely surprising mix of acts slated to perform over three days, beginning August 16, from Miley Cyrus to Brandi Carlile to Earl Sweatshirt. Common was on hand at the press conference in March to announce the lineup alongside Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty; together they represented a cross section of new and old that the golden anniversary was meant to celebrate.

And then there was a lot of nitty-gritty bureaucracy and apparent mismanagement, some breach-of-contract letters and court appearances with former investors, which you can read about in detail here, but just know that things fell apart. Woodstock Ventures had acts but no venue. Then it had a venue but no acts. And finally, with a few weeks to go before the anniversary date, Lang and the gang called it quits.

In 1969 they came out to Woodstock for peace and love and drugs and Jimi; in 2019 we’ll all just stay home. There’s a metaphor here maybe, but what is it? That we’re the stay-at-home generation, the generation taken by carpal tunnel and lower-back pain, thanks to the sedentary lifestyle required of us? Or maybe the metaphor is this: What our parents’ generation could throw together with a little bit of money and a little bit of luck became a victim of its own success, and a failure on a systemic level that prevented their children from having even a fraction of what they did. And now, because of apparent mismanagement, we can’t even enjoy the version of the old thing made for us in order to extract our coin. It’s a toss-up, really.

One thing is for certain: It is better to have no anniversary festival at all than a Woodstock ’99 repeat.

MTV produced that event, and the result was something very close to the diametric opposite of the original—or rather both events trafficked in chaos, but the first was largely chaotic good and the anniversary festival was chaotic capitalism. Like the Woodstock 50 lineup was supposed to be, the Woodstock ’99 bill was diverse: Jamiroquai and Creed, DMX and Sheryl Crow, Limp Bizkit and the Insane Clown Posse. The organizers famously exacerbated the extreme heat plaguing the decommissioned Air Force base in the upstate New York town of Rome by overcharging for bottled water. People set fires. They pushed over the portable toilets. There were reports of sexual assault. Its Wikipedia page’s “controversy” section is divided into three whole subsections. Every section is substantial! It was a living Bosch painting for the Y2K generation.

Sheryl Crow called it “by far the worst gig I’ve ever been on” in a recent Rolling Stone article (how that is possible when you play right before Insane Clown Posse, I can’t tell you, but so it was). “It was a very MTV kind of moment,” she said. “No one could bring in any food or water, and the bottled water was super-expensive. It bred rebellion. The porta-potty got turned over, and the next thing I know, I’m playing bass and there’s feces being thrown right where I’m playing.”

Here are just a few things from Woodstock ’99 that feel a little foreboding from this side of the millennium: The water bottle thing. The trees cleared from the Air Force base so no one had anywhere to take shelter. Kid Rock (!) encouraged everyone to throw empty water bottles and then “quickly” left the stage. An anti-violence group handed out candles, and some people used them to start fires.

So yes, nothing at all is preferable to a proto-Coachella, MTV-feces nightmare. Maybe Woodstock ’99 was the exact moment that Gen-X apathy curdled into rage (artificial scarcity pricing of water would make anyone mad, and then throw in Fred Durst screaming “Break Stuff,” and, well). Anyway, given how things have shaken out in the last two decades, it’s a relief that we’re all staying home and putting our own rage into finding an alternative to SoulCycle.

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