Chainsaws, Cognac, and a 12-gauge gun: Woodstock 94’s strangest performance
Perhaps when we look back over the course of music history, we can see where we’ve maybe been prone to a bit of an exaggeration – not every rockstar, after all, was a ‘great’ or a ‘god’, not every big gig was iconic or history-defining. That said, everyone can agree that Woodstock in 1994 was the closest real life has ever come to an apocalypse, and even that’s putting it lightly.
Amidst the barrage of chaos that was the weekend of August 12th – 14th, 1994, one performance somehow managed to stand out above the rest for ramping up the weirdness quite a bit – well, a lot – more. That crown of mass hysteria firmly belongs to Jackyl, the Southern American hair metal rockers who certainly lived up to their genre’s namesake with a hair-raising turn on Friday’s North Stage.
The thing was, beneath all the antics was perhaps a major dose of imposter syndrome, as Jackyl weren’t exactly a big-name billing. They’d had one reasonable hit with ‘Lumberjack’ but other than that couldn’t really compare with supersonic rockers on a bigger scale. “We had to beg to be on the bill,” admitted the band’s frontman, Jesse James Dupree.
But seeing that as a reckoning more than a hindrance, Dupree proclaimed, “We took it by the balls and made it a Jackyl Awareness Day.” If you were to imagine the complete stereotype of a rockstar – smashed TVs, wrecked hotel rooms, and so on – this was exactly the hype that the band felt they had to live up to.
In the space of an hour’s setlist, the frontman had gyrated across the stage, pouring a bottle of Cognac into the pit as he went, pretended to pleasure himself, cut his hand and smeared the blood over his body, and most alarmingly shot a 12-gauge goose gun at the crowd in tribute to dearly departed rockers and Woodstock icons Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. Because nothing screams ‘in loving memory’ more than threatening thousands of lives, but still – “I didn’t kill nobody,” Dupree testified.
Speaking of Hendrix, the justified guitar God’s synonymous Woodstock performance from 25 years prior was clearly a seminal inspiration to Dupree as it was to so many. To this end, the Jackyl man – slightly toe-curlingly, you must admit – replicated the iconic moment when Hendrix lit a stool on fire, before adding his own twist of cutting it in half with a chainsaw in an ode to ‘Lumberjack’.
At the very least, they were nothing if not memorable. Jackyl’s performance was clearly and proudly flying the flag of rebellion and the cause of the underdog. Whether that translated to everyone who saw it was another matter, but as Dupree states himself, “We are the kings of the politically incorrect. We felt it our civic responsibility that these people got double their money’s worth, otherwise they would’ve been ripped off.” It’s fair to say that the audience probably wouldn’t have been worrying too much about that – just whether they made it out alive.
