RHCP's Flea Pleaded With Woodstock 99 Crowd to Stop Groping Women

HBO’s Woodstock 99 documentary paints a visceral picture of one of the most disastrous festivals in history. In addition to the festival organizers, who made countless fundamental errors in planning the event, bands like Limp Bizkit and Red Hot Chili Peppers are painted as primary instigators of the chaos that unfolded. However, what Woodstock 99 didn’t show you was that RHCP bassist Flea had pleaded with the crowd to stop groping women in the pit.

Woodstock 99 already left some important context about Red Hot Chili Peppers' set out of the documentary. In reality, RHCP didn’t play Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” in response to the bonfires in the distance, but as a pre-planned tribute to Hendrix and Woodstock 1969 at the request of the Hendrix’s sister.

“She said, ‘Hey, I know you guys do Jimi Hendrix songs. What do you think if I could get a Hendrix song before, like as your last song before the tribute thing, you know? It'd be kind of a nice segue.’ And we're like, ‘OK, that sounds cool,’” RHCP drummer Chad Smith recalls.

“[The fire] literally looked like a little hamburger stand had a grease fire or something,” Smith continues. “It looked like nothing from where we were at.”

As Woodstock 99 shows, the Offspring frontman Dexter Holland called out incidents of groping he noticed in the crowd. Flea's plea was left on the cutting room floor.

“Hey, you know, just because a girl out there wants to feel free and take her shirt off doesn’t mean a bunch of you have to go grab her tits and stuff,” Flea said. “Because they’re her tits, they’re not yours. You gotta leave those tits alone. Those tits are a girl’s private property and they’re a beautiful thing so you’ve gotta respect them. Everyone should be kind to each other out there.”

Watch Flea address the crowd at 55:00 into the footage below.