In the spring of 1991, word of a traveling art and music extravaganza masterminded by Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell began appearing in magazines and newspapers. Part Reading Festival and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, what would become known as Lollapalooza would serve not only as his band’s farewell tour but also feature a day-long mish-mash of bands and ideas all crammed together on a road trip across the United States.
Jane’s Addiction was everywhere in 1991, thanks to their inescapable single “Been Caught Stealing”. Still, whether such a financial and logistical nightmare would explode on the launching pad was an open question. Music festivals in America post-1970 conjured, at best, images of overrun porta potties, litigious town councils, and bad acid. Bringing such a mess to multiple cities over several weeks while turning a profit and avoiding fatalities was uncharted territory. Farrell was determined to see it through and/ or just idealistic enough not to give up hope and/ or very, very, very high most of the time.
Lollapalooza launched in July 1991 on an unforgivingly hot day in Chandler, Arizona, featuring sets by Living Colour, the Butthole Surfers, Ice-T, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, among others. “There were punk rockers in high, spiked hairdos and mohawks,” reported Salvatore Caputo in The Arizona Republic the next day. “There were people dressed in clownlike makeup. Others looked relatively collegiate. Also, some skateboarders with their turned-around baseball caps and baggy shorts. And countless young women dressed all in black with their hair dyed red and their lipstick a similar shade.”
When it was over, the show was broken down and moved to the next town, where a new mix of kids would pack together. This would be repeated more than twenty times that first year. Thanks to Lollapalooza, the doors to alternative culture were thrown wide open, and everybody came in.
Music journalist Richard Bienstock and journalist and Revolver founder Tom Beaujour chronicle the life and death of the festival as an annual touring concern from 1991-1997. They also explore its disembodied afterlife as a brand and annual destination concert in Chicago’s Grant Park in their new book, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival. Comprised of over 200 interviews with musicians, journalists, lawyers, crewmembers, accountants, and concert promoters, including the festival’s founders, it’s an authoritatively researched and lovingly assembled oral history of a tumultuous, adventurous, and wildly profitable era in the music business.
“I’ll be brutally honest with you,” festival co-founder Don Muller tells the authors, “We didn’t have a clue about what the hell we were doing. Zero. If anybody says differently, they’re lying. Because it was like, okay, we’re going to put all these bands together, and we think we can move it around the country…but what do we do with it?”
Bienstock and Beaujour’s previous book, Nöthin’ But a Good Time, is a sympathetic, sincere, and eye-opening oral history of 1980s hair metal. Following that with a chronicle of the ‘90s alternative rock is a choice that’s less of a non-sequitur than it seems at first glance. “It reflected on some level, my actual experience as a music consumer,” says Beaujour. “In high school, I was totally into hair metal, but I was equally into the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, and crazy about the first four R.E.M. records. I was riding in both lanes.”
“It wasn’t like there was this wall that came down,” he continues, “but there was this shift towards these new bands. The transition of the book is the same thing. There’s this demarcation that people make with [Nirvana’s] Nevermind, but really, you’ve got a world where Jane’s Addiction are playing shows with Guns N’ Roses, and Pearl Jam is opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The transition between the books and the thinking reflected what happened when I was 21. There was overlap. Soundgarden did tours with Skid Row.”
Nöthin’ But a Good Time ends in the early 1990s when Lollapalooza picks up, with the entire wave of bands that ruled over Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip either having evaporated overnight or frantically trading in their spandex for black leather and flannel shirts. The book underscores that what felt at the time like a tectonic shift in tastes and music industry practices was often little more than a costume change.
“I see a guy in the record label dressed with leggings with combat boots and oily hair, and I go, ‘We’re doomed,’” Britny Fox’s Dean Davidson told Bienstock and Beaujour in Nöthin’ But a Good Time. Said another way: had Dave Navarro been born a few years earlier, he might have been the guitarist for the glam metal band Trixter. If Tommy Lee had been born a few years later, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine him filling the drum chair in Jane’s Addiction.
“These bands had more in common, and a lot more connection, than the press and people usually give them credit for,” says Bienstock. “We think of the ‘90s stuff as so much more elevated and a different mindset and all that, but the point that’s made in the book, too, and especially in the early years of Lollapalooza, is that these are still just rock bands on the road.”
“So, what’s going on behind the scenes on the ’91 tour, especially with Jane’s Addiction, is hedonism on the same level as a Mötley Crüe tour. It’s thought of as this more progressive, elevated scene, but there are all the same sort of things going on because it is just rock and roll. They’re acting the same way as the bands they’re supposed to be the antidote for.”
While most of the flagship bands of grunge rock, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and Hole, would be featured in Lollapalooza acts, they ultimately make up a small piece of the story. The festival organizers struggled from summer to summer to curate a large tent with a main stage big enough to include hip-hop, trip-hop, electronic, industrial, noise, progressive, and indie rock, along with a side stage that showcased still more bands representing still more sub-genres.
In different years, you might find vegan food, spoken word poets, booths with information on Planned Parenthood, Rock the Vote, or Free Tibet, attempts to incorporate early applications of the World Wide Web, and Matt “The Tube” Crowley, who would have his stomach pumped live and its contents consumed by members of the main stage acts.
“It seems normal now but if you really think about what they were doing it was so ahead of the curve,” says Beaujour. “They maybe knew they were asking too much of the audience and didn’t care. I think that in their mind, it was like, ‘Alright, you’re going to go to Lollapalooza, you’re going to see Arrested Development. You may not give a shit, and you may never go see them again, but at least, gosh darn it, you’ll have seen Arrested Development. For once in your life, you will see something different, and we’ll make you do it, even if you don’t like it. If it works, great. At least, it happened.’”
It was all too much, and there was just no way it could ever be enough. By the middle of the decade, Lollapalooza had so changed the mainstream concert-going experience that multiple competing festivals were created and sent on the road. Organizers scrambled to keep selling tickets while maintaining some of the messy eclecticism they aspired to. Headliners careened from Primus to Smashing Pumpkins to Sonic Youth to Metallica to the Prodigy. Pavement appeared squished between Sinead O’Connor and Cypress Hill. James warmed the crowd up for Korn. The Shaolin Monks did the same for Rancid.
“I think that a lot of the erratic behavior came more from them second-guessing themselves more than trying to please the audience,” says Bienstock. Along the way, Lollapalooza became a remarkable proving ground for bands who would, in time, come to find much larger audiences. It’s head-spinning to see the list of acts who appeared in supporting slots on the main stage or even on the second stage, laid out across the book’s 400 pages; Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, Beck, Rage Against the Machine, Coolio, Tool, Guided By Voices, the Roots, and many more.
In 1998, just seven years into its existence, Rolling Stone was referring to Lollapalooza as the “granddaddy” of rock festivals. With ticket sales down and unable to find a headliner the organizers could feel comfortable with, the organizers pulled the plug. The event returned briefly in 2003, with a reformed Jane’s Addiction topping the bill and adorned with corporate underwriting from Microsoft and Verizon. Such a move would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier, but by the 2000’s, it was already big tech’s world and we were just renting space in it.
“The way I always describe it, it’s like a good party,” Flaming Lips lead singer Wayne Coyne tells the authors. “It’s fun, everybody’s doing something cool, but the party just attracts too big of a party, you know? And then at some point, the party is just about people who like to party. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the reason everybody’s there.”
By picking through Lollapalooza’s contentious history, Bienstock and Beaujour find an engaging and often quite funny window into the business of rock music and fan culture in the 1990s. “The ‘90s concern with being cool in indie was so totally paramount,” says Beaujour. “It really was, I feel like, the north star in terms of the aesthetic for some of these bands.
“We realized that there are two 1990s. The notion of quote/unquote the ‘90s might be false because every time [festival organizers] tried to mix the really indie rock ‘90s with the commercial grunge ‘90s, Lollapalooza bursts into flames. It doesn’t work. Pavement and Soundgarden are probably more different than, say, Soundgarden and Poison. There are two universes occurring at once that really get conflated now.”
Lollapalooza may have taken alternative culture and dragged it into the sunlight; “defanged some of the really rough indie aspects of it, and then presented it to a much larger audience,” as the Rollins Band’s Chris Haskett tells the authors. Still, it did open up doors to all kinds of new bands, new ideas, and new experiences for tens of thousands of kids across the country who might have otherwise been shut out.
For one day a year, between 1991 and 1997, they could drive two hours into the middle of nowhere, stand in the mud and the heat for 11 hours, crowd surf, join in or run away from a mosh pit, eat tofu, get exposed to a social movement they weren’t going to find, otherwise, see their favorite band, and in the interim get knocked around by six or eight or a dozen others, and then go back home exhausted, and maybe find themselves filled up and ready for something else.
Yes, Lollapalooza was safe and more than a little sanitized. Yes, you could question its motives and look askance at its bona fides, but the idea of Lollapalooza, in the end, had an awful lot to recommend it at a time when big ideas were short in the offering.
“Before Lollapalooza, you weren’t going to a show and getting cool food, or having your face painted, or buying hemp products, or buying weird books,” says Bienstock. “It wasn’t like that stuff had never existed before, but Lollapalooza kind of codified it and made it a thing that people would come to expect. It created a safe space. It was also like exposure therapy. You couldn’t find other people online that felt the same way, but you could all show up in the same place.”
“It did not turn out to be a sustainable model,” says Beaujour. “The location festival is the new thing. Lollapalooza has created nostalgia for that because it does not exist anymore. Festivals now are more like a much better organized Woodstock. The structure of Lollapalooza, and this thing that it introduces, this notion of a traveling festival, sort of appears and dominates the landscape for, I don’t know, eight or nine years.”
“There’s no way a festival with that many bands could move around the country with reasonable ticket prices,” he continues. “It could not really last, so a lot of people look back on Lollapalooza with nostalgia because it really is a thing of the past. It doesn’t seem like something that could be mounted today. I don’t think it will happen again. It really is like an artifact that will not be replicated.”