Lollapalooza 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.

Cover of Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival

(St. Martin’s Press)

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.”

Ken Bethea, left, and Rhett Miller of Old 97’s perform on the second stage at Lollapalooza in 1997.

(Sarah P. Weiss)

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.