![]() ![]() But at least I got to hug and kiss him before he left. I’ll be all right.’ I think about that now and that really breaks my heart. “And then his last words out the door were ‘You worry too much, Mom. “He did his little giggle and laugh and, ‘Not to worry, not to worry, Mom,’” she recalled. Lorelei couldn’t help but tell her son to be careful when she sent him off to the festival. But Woodstock ’99 was going to be a reprieve from that. He is just an amazing kid.”įor a young man, David DeRosia already had a lot of adult responsibilities. He would take me to doctors appointments. “If I needed help doing anything, he would help me,” Lorelei says. He left Florida, where he attended school, and moved in with Lorelei. Her health was so poor that she might have had to live at an assisted living facility. These illnesses affected her movement and even caused intermittent blindness. Lorelei suffers from a long list of illnesses, including brain lesions that mimic the symptoms of MS. He radiates an inherent kindness, the kind of feeling you hope you get from a neighbor or coworker.Īt home, David was a caregiver for his mother. He stands about 5-foot-9 and weighs around 340 pounds. He has dark hair and a goatee, and wears round glasses. David is either smiling or goofing off in every single one. The DeRosia family shared some photos of David with me via their lawyer. I mean, they turned everything into a party, and they were just so much fun to be around.” David Vadnais “What keeps me going, too, is I love to look at the old photos of these guys. “There was always some kind of goofing around and just being silly and that carried on until he was older and being with the Vadnais boys,” she says. Lorelei remembers them being an inseparable group. If David was the ringleader, the Vadnais brothers acted as a second family for David. “And you’re like, ‘Why in the world would anybody do this?’ But when they would tell the story you wanted to be part of it. “And they would just come back and they would talk about this great adventure where they just drove for four hours and found a vending machine in the Northeast that had French fries and they bought ’em,” Vadnais says. Their mission? Find a vending machine that sold French fries. Like the time DeRosia convinced Vadnais’s younger brother, Bryan, on a whim to drive four hours to New Hampshire. So once I got my money for graduation I didn’t really have much of an excuse that I didn’t have the money for the ticket.”ĭeRosia always had a way of talking his friends into new adventures. Everybody was fired up to go, and I’d just graduated that May. “I was actually the last one out of the five of us to jump in,” Vadnais says. That summer, David DeRosia convinced his best friend, David Vadnais Vadnais’s two brothers, Rob and Bryan and Bryan’s girlfriend to join him Woodstock ’99. He was especially excited to see the big Saturday night headliner: Metallica. For David DeRosia, Woodstock ’99 was a chance to see some of his favorite bands. In his friend group, he was known as the resident music fanatic––the first to get into Nine Inch Nails, the one who introduced everybody to Korn, the guy who was always in charge of the car stereo. Don’t do that.’”ĭavid couldn’t wait to get to Woodstock ’99. And I’m just so happy that I did that I was able to hug him and kiss him and give him the normal lectures. “Something told me, you know, take a couple hours, go home, and see him off. “Something told me to go home,” she says. But she felt a strong impulse to leave her shift early and see her son off. Lorelei had to work at her job that night. They wanted to get to Rome, New York, in time for the festival’s first official day on Friday. ![]() David’s plan was to drive through the night with his friends. Her son, a 24-year-old man named David DeRosia, was leaving late that night for Woodstock ’99 from their hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut. Subscribe here and check back each Tuesday through August 27 for new episodes. ![]() In this episode, we’ll look at the human toll of the 1999 festival.īelow is an excerpt from the fifth episode of Break Stuff. We’ve explored who’s to blame (or not to blame ) for what happened, how the seeds were planted for chaos, and the myth of the original Woodstock in 1969. But Woodstock ’99 revealed some hard truths behind the myths of the 1960s and the danger that nostalgia can engender.īreak Stuff, an eight-part documentary podcast series available exclusively on Luminary, investigates what went wrong at Woodstock ’99 and the legacy of the event as host Steven Hyden interviews promoters, attendees, journalists, and musicians. Incredibly, this was the third iteration of Woodstock, a festival originally known for peace, love, and hippie idealism. ![]() There were riots, looting, and numerous assaults, all set to a soundtrack of the era’s most aggressive rock bands. In 1999, a music festival in upstate New York became a social experiment. ![]()
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