Latest news with #Lollapalooza:TheUncensoredStoryofAlternativeRock'sWildestFestival
Los Angeles Times
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Lollapalooza oral history book retraces the festival's wild, revolutionary roots
In 1990, Jane's Addiction released 'Ritual de lo Habitual,' the Los Angeles alternative-metal band's critically acclaimed album. The band, beset by drug addiction, power struggles and dissension, decided to break up at the height of its popularity. Lead singer Perry Farrell came up with the idea for Lollapalooza, a 'Woodstock for the Lost Generation,' according to the New York Times, as a farewell tour for the imploding group. But it would become much more. Between 1991 and 1997, the traveling circus of a festival excited, entertained and empowered disaffected American youth, especially in its glorious early years. 'If Lollapalooza didn't single-handedly inaugurate what came to be known as 'alternative nation,' it went a long way toward codifying its ideals for a generation of teens and twentysomethings via a diverse mix of boundary-pushing musical acts, outsider fashion and art, political activism, and straight-up performative weirdness,' Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour write in their excellent oral history, 'Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival.' As the authors convincingly argue, Lollapalooza's impact cannot be understated. It inspired the successful Ozzfest, Lilith Fair, H.O.R.D.E. and the Warped Tour; brought combat boots, flannel, piercings, tattoos and other accouterments of once-marginalized youth to the mainstream; and helped turn Nine Inch Nails and Pearl Jam into superstars. So powerful is Lollapalooza's hold on popular culture that Farrell revived it in 2003. The festival continues to this day, attracting upward of 100,000 fans to Chicago's Grant Park every summer. At Lollapalooza's inception, festivals had become passé, with the US Festival, the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen and the Monterey Pop Festival little more than hazy memories. Lollapalooza's eclectic inaugural lineup, ranging from Jane's Addiction to the loud fusion punk of the Rollins Band to rapper Ice-T to post-punk pioneers Siouxise and the Banshees, hardly seemed like a bill to set the world afire and sell out amphitheaters across the country. In fact, Lollapalooza nearly derailed at its first show on July 18, 1991, at the sweltering Compton Terrace in Chandler, Ariz. With temperatures in the triple digits, Nine Inch Nails' equipment malfunctioned, leading Trent Reznor to trash the stage. A very wasted Dave Navarro, Jane's Addiction's talented guitarist, and Farrell began shoving each other at the side of the stage after the band's set. 'The tour could have collapsed there,' said Kevin Lyman, Lollapalooza's stage manager in 1991 and 1992. But it didn't. The festival's mix of left-of-the-dial artists, advocacy groups like Handgun Control Inc. and the National Abortion Rights Action League, and funky food and drinks captured the zeitgeist. In one of the worst summer concert seasons in more than a decade, Lollapalooza shined brightly. Things would only get better. With alternative nation on the ascendancy — Nirvana's classic 'Nevermind' and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' smash 'Blood Sugar Sex Magik' came out after the first festival — Lollapalooza 1992 was primed to explode. Farrell and company booked future superstars such as Pearl Jam, whose album 'Ten' was shooting up the charts; fellow Seattle grunge rockers Soundgarden; the industrial-metal juggernaut Ministry; and the Chili Peppers, who wore hats with flames coming out of them during their performance. Lollapalooza 1992 introduced the second stage for performers, arguably the first of its kind, which featured hot new acts: Rage Against the Machine and Stone Temple Pilots gave some of their earliest performances there. The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, a freak show that featured Slug the Sword Swallower, the Torture King and some dude who drank vomit, became a crowd favorite, making the world safe for 'The Jim Rose Twisted Tour' TV show. Bienstock and Beaujour, through their engaging and insightful interviews, capture the liberating, anything-goes ethos that was Lollapallooza 1992. I should know; I attended the opening show at the Shoreline Amphitheater in the Bay Area. Playing the second slot behind Lush in the midday sun, Pearl Jam burned through its set with new songs like 'Alive' and 'Jeremy.' One of rock's most charismatic and talented frontmen, Eddie Vedder, often climbed the scaffolding and towering speakers and dove into the crowd, doing whatever it took to grab the audience's attention. Ministry also made an indelible impression, blasting everyone's eardrums to pieces. Singer Al Jourgensen, leaning against an animal bone statue that served as a mic stand, and his bandmates bludgeoned audiences into submission with their hypnotic heaviness, regularly paying fines for exceeding venue noise limits. Pearl Jam's guitarist Stone Gossard called the show a 'sonic concussion.' Lollapalooza 1992 was the festival's high point. It would never again have the same cultural and artistic resonance. The 1993 edition had a less impressive lineup headed by Primus and Alice in Chains. In 1994, organizers came close to nabbing Nirvana as that year's headliner before Kurt Cobain overdosed in Rome and killed himself a month later in April. As strong as 1994 artists Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, George Clinton and the P-Funk Allstars and the Breeders were, they couldn't compare to Nirvana. 1995's underwhelming lineup featured critically acclaimed, indie art-rock darlings Sonic Youth, but fans stayed away. The so-called 'Artypalooza' gave way to Lollapalooza 1996, derisively dubbed 'Dude-apalooza' for its predominantly white, aggressive lineup topped by decidedly nonalternative Metallica; Farrell temporarily left the festival in protest. Lollapalooza 1997, its swansong before the revival, skewed to ambitious electronic sounds from artists like Prodigy, the Orb and Orbital, a laudable but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reinvigorate the once-golden festival. Reflecting Lollapalooza's fall from the rarefied heights of its early '90s heyday, the 1997 version made little more than half the money of Lilith Fair, attracting an average attendance of 67% of venue capacity compared to 93% for that female-dominated festival. 'Lolla had its run, and we knew the model was breaking. It became too generic. It burned too bright,' said festival co-founder Marc Geiger. 'It needed a break.' Thankfully, 'Lollapalooza' the book, unlike the namesake festival itself, rarely flags. Bienstock and Beaujour, also authors of the bestselling, 'Nöthin' but a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion,' interviewed hundreds of artists, tour founders and Lollapalooza organizers, among others. Theirs is a fun, dishy and surprisingly moving read. They infuse their book with sex, drugs and rock and roll. Joe Klein, then guitarist for Siouxsie and the Banshees, for instance, remembered 'the most visible orgies': Ice-T's tour bus, presumably filled with groupies, bouncing up and down. Heroin and other hard drugs were a tour mainstay. The late Mark Lanegan, lead singer of the Screaming Trees, often dispatched a gofer to track down heroin, crack and meth throughout the '96 tour. Or he'd search for drugs himself. 'We would hit a town, and he'd head straight to the ghetto and almost get killed,' Trees guitarist Gary Lee Conner said. And what could be more rock and roll than members of Rage Against the Machine, the breakout stars of Lollapalooza '93, going onstage naked at a show in Philadelphia to protest the Parents Music Resource Center, Tipper Gore's controversial group that lobbied for parental advisory stickers on certain albums. With black tape on their mouths and the letters P, M, R, C written in big letters on their chests, the Rage dudes stood still for 15 minutes, guitar feedback serving as their backing music. Angry fans eventually pelted the would-be revolutionaries with beer, cups and even bottles of urine. That Lollapalooza has become such an important chapter in the annals of rock history may surprise nobody more than Farrell. 'I'm often asked, did I think Lollapalooza was going to be what it became?' he said. 'I mean, that's ridiculous. Of course not! How could I? I was just in it for kicks, period.' Ballon, a former Times, Forbes and Inc. Magazine reporter, teaches an advanced writing class at USC. He lives in Fullerton.
Washington Post
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Lollapalooza's weird, wild history
The first-ever show of the first-ever Lollapalooza tour took place on July 18, 1991, on a 120-degree day in the Arizona desert. It was so hot that Nine Inch Nails' equipment melted, and Trent Reznor, front man of the then-baby band, stormed off dramatically after trashing the stage ('Fire everyone,' he instructed a roadie). Dave Navarro and Perry Farrell, members of headlining band Jane's Addiction, came to blows during their set; no one was sure they'd make it to the next date of the six-week nationwide tour. 'Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival' is a riotous oral history of the granddaddy of alterna-tours, written by music journalists Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour.
Chicago Tribune
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Remember when Lollapalooza was cool? New book ‘Uncensored' dives into the history
If you're a music fan of a certain age, 'Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival,' a new oral history of the 34-year-old bacchanal, assembled from hundreds of interviews by music writers Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock, will swing from bittersweetly nostalgic to hedonistic to coldly rational. It begins, as so many festivals once did, with ambitious dreams of cultural utopias, and it concludes, as so many music festivals now do, in spreadsheets and brand marketing. That's where Lollapalooza currently stands, as a corporate, and civic, behemoth, so entrenched with local leadership that the 2025 festival already announced it will close most of Grant Park to the public for nearly a month this summer. Now that's influence. Though as the authors make depressingly obvious: It used to be about the music, man! Indeed, if you are either too old or too young to realize, Lollapalooza, by most standards of cool, was pretty cool — decades ago, for a short time. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips says in the book, tracing Lolla's trajectory: 'At some point, the party is just about people who like to party.' 'It's a long slog,' former Tribune music critic Greg Kot explains in the forlorn final pages. 'So, kids do drugs and pick up girls, or girls pick up guys, or guys pick up guys, and it becomes something other than the music. It becomes this other thing altogether.' And yet, once again, as summer music lineups land this month and 14-year-olds in Lake Forest hound their parents for a spare $400 to attend another weekend-long sauna along Michigan Avenue, Lollapalooza promises to be a blockbuster. From July 31 to Aug. 3, Grant Park will host its 20th Lollapalooza, a potent reminder of how this festival has remained naggingly immune to the impacts of blah headliners, weak economies and a lack of inspiration. Perhaps that last part is unfair: Lolla, as this oral history lays out, still has a purpose, and even a vision, albeit a broad commercial one. The lineup of 2025 music acts is expected out at 10 a.m. Tuesday. My favorite story in the book is about the contemporary Chicago incarnation (which gets addressed briefly, as an addendum to the traveling festival). It's told by Stuart Ross, a former Lolla accountant and tour director. Because he also handles Tom Waits, a representative from C3 Presents (Lolla's Austin, Texas-based producer) called one year to ask if Waits would play the festival. Ross said Lolla 'skews a little young' now, besides C3's financial offer was 'absurdly low' — Waits could make more playing a single show in a Chicago theater. C3's reply? 'I don't know how much you know about Lollapalooza …' 1 of Perry Farrell leads Jane's Addiction at Lollapalooza in Chicago's Grant Park on July 30, 2016. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune) See, by 2005, by the time Lolla impresario Perry Farrell decided to anchor the festival annually in Grant Park, a lot of generational knowledge, and taste, was tossed aside. Though to be fair, a decade earlier, when Lollapalooza was only four years old, it was already less interested in turning audiences on to new music than it was a marketing platform pushing a sanitized version of indie college rock to 20-something Gen Xers. Duane Denison, the guitarist of Chicago's The Jesus Lizard, which played the 1995 edition of Lollapalooza, admits they joined the tour partly because they were being courted by big labels at the time: It was 'kind of a strategic move.' And that's also the year that nearly broke Lollapalooza. The lineup (Pavement, Sinead O'Connor, Hole, Beck, Yo La Tengo, The Roots, Sonic Youth as headliner) was too good to appeal to every nook of the country, snooty as that sounds. The authors illustrate this well: Whenever Lollapalooza veered from a streamlined industry cool, toward its craggier inspiration, ticket sales slowed. In fact, as stunning as it sounds: Lollapalooza folded briefly in 1998, partly because the organizers weren't thrilled with the new lineup. Who knew that was an option? Few remember, but Lollapalooza was conceived as a farewell tour for Farrell's band, Jane's Addiction. He wanted something special, a kind of traveling happening, part Rolling Thunder Revue, part Freakout. The proposal came at a time when the concert industry was still shaking off images from the '60s and '70s of naked, stoned, sometimes rioting audiences taking over small towns for weekend-long music festivals. Farrell wanted to bring exactly this image to every region of the country, for a day or two at a time. Lolla founder after Lolla founder said the same thing: They didn't know what they were doing. Still, the premise was eye-popping for 1991: Ask tens of thousands of edgier-minded rock fans to converge on a location, let them get wasted, let them crowd surf, offer them pamphlets and petitions from progressive causes, give them better-than-usual food and expose them to hours of bands they probably didn't know that well. As a veteran of the first few traveling Lollas, I'll vouch: Farrell and Co. didn't know what they were doing. I recall chaotic crowds, iffy food and badly organized tables for groups such as Rock the Vote and Planned Parenthood. Still, the timing was perfect. Lollapalooza, for its first several years, resembled a rough outline of a social movement. Or maybe a gold rush. Either way, for an all-day show at an amphitheater, it was smart, rowdy and surprisingly organic reflection of where a lot of suburban culture was in the early 1990s, moving away from strictly rock 'n' roll toward a mash of hop hop and metal and indie and industrial sounds. My favorite sleeping bag was swept off a lawn by a rampaging crowd, moshing to Ice-T. The next year, during Soundgarden, the audience tore down part of the wooden fence surrounding the theater and lit bonfires across the lawn. Lollapalooza offered a smoothed-over taste of risk, rebranded as 'alternative.' But the tours themselves, the interviews reveal, were straight from a decades-old lifestyle: Drugs and more drugs, with much less sex than before, some pranks and plenty of ego. Not very much nice is said about Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins — especially from the Beastie Boys, which didn't care for him. Farrell has an issue with Green Day, so the band calls him out on stage, requiring a lot of scrambling assistants to calm frictions. (Billie Joe Armstrong: 'He had minions that would come up and say 'Perry Farrell's really angry that you dedicated 'Chump' to him.' And I'm like, 'Tell him to stop acting like one.'') As the festival returns year after year, and commercial alternative rock sounds ever closer to an echo of actual alternatives, audiences start to mock anything genuinely different. As Gerald Casale of Devo recalls: 'When I saw that crowd and when I watched how they interacted, I thought, 'You know what? De-evolution is real!'' Cracks spread through the festival's brain trust, and whatever tension exists between faux-alternative and real alternative came to a head when megastars Metallica headlined in 1996. It's a quaint thought today: Metallica has headlined several times since, and Lolla is now too much part of the mainstream to offer a lineup that's anything less than mercenary. The history plays this pretty neutral but the point is glaring: Farrell hand-selects lineups at first. By the time the festival arrives in Grant Park, C3 is citing brand studies that claim Lollapalooza is one of the most recognized brands in the world. As with any rock history, eventually you feel the energy drain and the bones calcify. The irony, of course, is that Lollapalooza rages on, even stronger, as part of the machine. Bienstock and Beaujour offer a lively peek at what was, however vague it was. Times change. Culture shifts. Lolla became much broader to survive, says festival cofounder Marc Geiger. It no longer reflects a niche or a movement anymore because, in the age of streaming, no decade, genre or sensation gets more relevant than any other. Time is a flat circle. A lot of purists still pine for that old idealistic Lolla, he says. 'But there's people who want record stores, too.'
CBS News
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
New book documents oral history of Lollapalooza from traveling festival to Grant Park staple
Lollapalooza is an essential part of summer in Chicago, and a new book has created a record of the oral history of one of the city's most defining festivals . "Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival" is comprised mostly of quotes from the original rock stars, promoters and roadies who made and continue to make the music festival a cultural phenomenon. "In telling the story of Lola, you're telling the story of a cultural movement," said co-author Richard Bienstock. "No one died on Lollapalooza and they really could have," said co-author Tom Beaujour. More than 30 year after the first notes rang out, Beaujour and Bienstock are telling the festival's story. "It's really about this wacky idea you could have a festival that panned out, which was not a given when it started," Beaujour said. While the show is now a summer fixture at Grant Park, it started as a traveling festival in 1991. "Lolla was conceived as a farewell tour for Jane's Addiction,' Bienstock explained. "Depending on who you talk to, they knew this was going to be their last hurrah and they wanted to do something special. Then it's enormously successful, and they continue to do it." The original festival ran through 1997. There were other versions planned after that, but a little bit of right place, right time luck led to its current iteration. "The group that does Austin City Limits was looking for another event, and the City of Chicago was looking for another festival," Beaujour said. So Lollapalooza returned in 2005 with a permanent home in Chicago. "Giving Grant Park to a festival is a pretty big deal," said Beaujour. "The city itself was really keen on having it happen as well." "It's become a global phenomenon based on the Chicago version," Bienstock said. Along the way the festival has faced challenges, controversies and some downright strange stories about the bands not covered in the book. "If you had a problem, it was not necessarily a good decision," Beaujour said. "You were isolated, you had huge amounts of time on your hands. A lot of people relapsed on Lollapalooza." "You see a lot of funny reactions between bands, or just bizarre, where Ministry and Henry Rollins almost get into a fight," Bienstock said. "For me, it's just really important for people to really understand what it's like to be a musician and how much work it is," Beaujour added. The book comes out on March 25. Lollapalooza will returns to Grant Park this summer from July 31 through August 3.
