Here's to Woodstock '94.
As the three-day festival of music, muck and a bit of good-natured madness wound down Sunday, thousands of hard-core rock and roll fans sloshed through fields of mud and endured traffic-snarled highways to reach the hot showers and warm beds of home.
After performances by bands ranging from the young rap group Arrested Development to folk-rock legend Bob Dylan, who at 53 delivered one of the festival's strongest performances, the event was due to end early Monday morning with a final song by Peter Gabriel.
As they started heading out, some of the Woodstockers professed themselves thrilled to have been part of something larger than themselves. But almost all seemed worn out by a messy and wet reprise of the equally soggy 1969 Woodstock festival.
"Three days of mud is three days too much for me," said Danielle Roberts, a 23-year-old secretary from Trenton, N.J. But it was not too much for everyone. Some left thinking their generation was pretty cool.
"I think there's synergy here -- people were psyched before this happened, and they're even more now," said Hollis Conan, 18, of Newark, N.J. "I'm getting in touch with my fun side again. I feel like a little kid with a three-day recess."
At its peak Saturday night, Woodstock '94 drew about 350,000 people, nearly half of them gate-crashers who had little difficulty sneaking in without tickets, organizers said. They were there for the music, mainly, but the weather gave them more than they bargained for.
By late Sunday afternoon, with the concert still serving up bands, thousands of people had grabbed their backpacks and tents and headed for the rows of buses and cars.
Tisha Rugger, 17, of Charleston, Ill., didn't seem to mind the unfriendly elements as she stood barefoot and wrapped in a pink blanket holding a stuffed Sesame Street doll.
"Little Bert and me got in the mud together last night and he got to hear Nine Inch Nails," she said with a laugh. "We're both going to take a shower when we get home."
Even the early birds met delays of up to two hours trying to leave the muddied parking areas.
And by nightfall Sunday, waits of up to seven hours were reported at bus pickup points.
"We just want to get out of here before the rest of these maniacs," Joe Iannotti of Long Island said as he and his family headed for the exit.
A heated medical tent was set up for concert-goers walking around with chattering teeth and hypothermia. The event generated up to 5,000 injuries, predominantly minor, authorities said.
But there were four deaths, including those of an Ohio man, Edward Chatfield, who died Saturday of a ruptured spleen, and Joseph Guy Roussel of Copiague, N.Y., who succumbed the day before to diabetes complications.
Police arrested 16 people in the three days.
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