For Green Day vocalist/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, the 25th anniversary celebration of Woodstock festival ceased to be a festival of peace, love and understanding when he spotted his friend Mike Dirnt spitting three broken teeth and a mouthful of blood onto the stage.
Security had the bassist pinioned on the stage floor, his blood and sweat-stained face slammed hard against a wedge monitor. Dropping his guitar, Armstrong dived in to rescue his friend, and punches rained down upon the pair of them. As a punk rock band, the notion of playing Woodstock II - a faux-nostalgic celebration of the original hippie festival - had always been something of a joke to Green Day. But right now, that joke didn't seem so funny anymore.
In truth, Woodstock II, held over the weekend of August 12 -14, 1994, and billed as 'Three More Days Of Peace And Music' had been descending into anarchy long before Green Day (literally) hit the stage. Days of torrential rain had transformed the 843-acre Winston Farm site in Saugerties, New York into a mud bath. Campsite facilities for a quarter of a million people who had paid $135 to attend were woefully inadequate, food and drink prices verged on the illegal, and around 100 people per hour were turning up to the site's two field hospitals, suffering from sprained ankles, hypothermia or both.
Peering through the tinted windows of the stretch limousine that had been sent to ferry his van to the festival - an unexpected consequence of Green Day's third album Dookie having already passed the 500,000 sales mark in the US alone - 22-year-old Billie Joe Armstrong observed the mud people rolling around in the filth with a mixture of incredulity, amusement, and horror.
"It was the closest thing to total chaos I've ever seen in my life," he would later admit. "I saw police and guards throwing down their badges, quitting on the spot saying, 'I can't do this anymore!' Technically, it was a human disaster."
Green Day had been allocated a 3pm slot on the site's South Stage on the festival's final day. The organisers' decision to preface the Californian trio's much-anticipated performance with three hours of WOMAD acts was, at best, short-sighted, and despite Peter Gabriel's repeated pleas for the crowd to show the African musicians onstage some respect, chants of 'Green Day! Green Day!' rang out throughout sets by Hassan Hackmoun and Geoffrey Oryema.
Under the circumstances, Billie Joe Armstrong's decision to open Green Day's 50-minute set with a song called Welcome to Paradise was mischievous, wonderfully inappropriate and not a little provocative, the blue-haired frontman taking great delight in teasing the weary, sodden, largely collegiate crowd with the opening line, "Dear mother, can you hear me whining?"
