Carson Daly compares his Woodstock '99 experience to a 'military conflict'

Carson Daly remembers his harrowing experience at Woodstock '99 well. Due to the new Netflix documentary 'Trainwreck: Woodstock '99', which details the festival, the infamous event has been on the former talk show host's mind more than usual.

“I was recently asked about #woodstock99 a ton,” he wrote in an August 12 Instagram post. "All I can say is I thought I was going to die. It started out great, TRL live from the side of the main stage interviewing all the bands (like Jay from Jamiroquai) and started getting done bombarding with bottles, rocks, lighters, everything It got crazy, fast. Nightfall, Limp [Bizkit] plays "Break Stuff" and the prisoners were officially running the prison."

Eventually, he and his team decided to escape. "My boss @MTV Dave is telling our staff/crew behind the scenes, 'We can't guarantee your safety any longer, it's time to go!' I remember being in a production van driving recklessly through cornfields to safety,” he wrote. "It was so crazy and fuzzy now. I just remember feeling like I was in another country during a military conflict. I have so many funny memories from that time, it wasn't the 'one of them. Needless to say I didn't take the family back to Rome, NY for a vacation."

Daly, then host of MTV's video countdown show 'Total Request Live', also known as 'TRL', was covering the festival for the channel before he had to flee. Unlike the 1969 celebration of peace and love it attempted to emulate, as shown in the Netflix documentary, Woodstock '99 involved fires, destruction of property, polluted and toxic water, And much more. Another HBO documentary, "Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage", which aired in 2021, also detailed the disaster, which saw cops in riot gear descend on festival-goers as they ransacked the village of a seller, among tons of other chaos.

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