Lollapalooza changed the music festival paradigm. The brainchild of Jane’s Addiction leader Perry Farrell, Lollapalooza launched in 1991 as a touring festival, bringing together artists from alternative rock, rap, industrial, and beyond for a wild and thrilling concert experience. Building on the debut’s runaway success, “Lolla” became an annual event. Over the next several years, the festival would grow and expand its reach, taking in cultural elements beyond music. And in the process, it influenced a generation and changed popular culture.
Mainstream artists like Metallica would eventually figure into the Lollapalooza lineup. And talks were underway to secure Nirvana’s participation in 1994, though Kurt Cobain passed away in April of that year. But part of what made Lollapalooza special was its spotlighting of an array of acts acts—like The Orb, Ice T & Body Count, The Vulgar Boatmen, Mercury Rev, Combustible Edison, Boredoms and Wu-Tang Clan—alongside major headlining artists like Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden.
More from Spin:
Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour are longtime music journalists. Their new book, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival, is a deep dive that takes readers well beyond the big names. The authors spoke with more than 200 individuals—many famous, many not—all closely connected to the festival during its celebrated ’90s era run. Sometimes vivid and other times hazy, the recollections are always unfiltered; Bienstock and Beaujour make a point of letting their interviewees tell their stories in their own words.
What inspired you to write this book?
Richard Bienstock: Tom and I have worked together for decades; we were at Guitar World together 25 years ago. He and I did a previous book, Nothing But a Good Time, an oral history of the ’80s hard rock industry: Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, that whole scene. That book ends with Nirvana coming in, the grunge and alternative takeover. This book starts at that point and carries forward, so it was just sort of the next step.
Also, I was 15 in ’91—right in my angsty, annoying teenage years—and I went to Lollapalooza that year. And it aligned perfectly.
How did you decide which of you worked on a particular chapter?
RB: It just happened naturally. We’d see who was finding and interviewing people [relevant] to a given year. And if one of us was doing more interviews from a year, it would wind up becoming our beat.
Tom Beaujour: I spent 25 years living in Hoboken. And a lot of people involved in the ’95 Lollapalooza were out of the Hoboken indie rock world, so there was often only one degree of separation. It made sense for me to do it.
RB: I did ’91 and ’92; they sort of flow into one another. I also went in ’93. I say I’ve been to two and a half, because in ’92, a Jones Beach show was rained out. A big storm came in and blew everything off the stage and into the water. So I went to Lollapalooza in ’92, but I did not actually see Lollapalooza in 1992.
Part of what makes the book so essential is that deep bench of varied voices telling their stories. Was that approach important to you from the start?
TB: Yes! That is the gravitational pull, because these are people who have had amazing experiences and are eager to talk… because they haven’t had to talk about it 100 times.
Were there any interviews you couldn’t get?
TB: I almost missed Patti Smith! I missed a voicemail from her—saying that she was going to do the interview—for three weeks! Terrifying things like that happen when you’re working on a big project like this. She did end up doing the interview, and she was incredibly gracious.
In your research and interviews, what surprised you the most?
RB: The ’90s alternative scene [is thought of] as being this very progressive, idealistic moment, very culturally and socially aware, especially in reaction to the music that came before. But one of the things that we [realized] is that at the end of the day, these are still just rock bands on the road. And when you have rock bands on the road, they act like rock bands. Sometimes even more extreme. When people are mashed together for two months, crazy shit happens.
TB: It’s [like] people on a pirate ship!
Lollapalooza has a colorful history, and your book documents many of the more outrageous episodes. What are your favorite over-the-top tales?
RB: There are a few! On the ’91 tour, Gibby Haynes would start Butthole Surfers sets by coming on stage with a shotgun, and firing blanks into the air [over] the crowd. Of course that is really insane to do, and it certainly would not fly today. But he was doing this daily.
And for one of the shows, he was going to come out on stage with Siouxsie and the Banshees. He walked out on stage, wasted, and dressed in a wig and an old lady’s floral print house dress. Shotgun in hand, he was ready to do “Helter Skelter” with the band. Then he started taking off all of his clothes. Siouxsie freaked out and tackled him on the stage! And it was just complete chaos. Paul Leary [almost] got his head shot off.
I love how the story is told in the book, from so many perspectives: people in Siouxsie’s band, guys in the Butthole Surfers and from Gibby himself. They all share what they thought was going on during a really insane moment that was playing out in front of an audience.
TB: For me, it’s when L7 and the Bad Seeds built papier-mâché wigs, cardboard cars, and a whole stage set to reenact the Kennedy assassination… on stage in Dallas. That one’s so crazy that it sounds like I’m making it up!
And honestly, even though it’s been told a number of times, there’s the event at the launch of Lollapalooza 1995 where Courtney Love slugged [Bikini Kill singer] Kathleen Hanna backstage. In the book, we present it like Rashomon, with all these different recollections. And Rich, I think you’d agree that there are so many crazy things involving Courtney Love…
RB: Yes!
Even with all the great stories, I’m left with the sense that some great material got left on the cutting room floor…
TB: Yes, especially from the ’95 tour. For us, the question was where to stop including those stories. Some of them are really funny; some are poignant. We would ask ourselves, “Is this one just too crazy? Is it exploitative?” Because it all happened, right? Rich was great, sort of checking me as I would send him pages: “Maybe this one’s a little bit too much like that one. Let’s dial it back.”
RB: Sometimes we’d get a crazy story that might not be able to be verified: “Somebody saw someone else do something, and nobody else remembers it in any form.” And you know, there’s a legal department that reads the book [before it’s published], soooo…
TB: There’s a lot of stuff that didn’t make it!
RB: But I still think we’ve been able to give a vivid picture of what was going on.
From your perspective, what’s the enduring legacy of Lollapalooza?
TB: We take this for granted now: there’s this permeable wall between rock and hip hop, but all of these things exist together; that’s how current festivals are programmed. But Perry and the Lollapalooza organizers walked it like they talked it. At the risk of alienating some of their audiences, they imposed diversity. Did the [audiences] in ’94 want to see George Clinton and P. Funk? I don’t know, but they did see them. And that’s great. They created an almost captive audience for music that might not have otherwise been shown to those kids.
And by ’97 Korn was at Lollapalooza, mixing metal and hip hop; they were kids who went to the early Lollapalooza.
RB: It revolutionized the touring festival culture in America, where it hadn’t really existed in any form. Lollapalooza was taking the idea of these big European festivals and bringing that to America, and making it into a touring concern.
It also introduced a lot of the things that we now take for granted: having exotic food, and arts and crafts-y things. Lollapalooza wasn’t necessarily the first to do it, but they certainly were the ones that normalized it, codified it, and made it something that you now expect to see.
And that’s separate from just the obvious. All the festivals that sprung up in its wake: H.O.R.D.E., Ozzfest, Lilith Fair. And then all that led into the current festival culture like Coachella. In fact, Lollapalooza organizers had a big hand in Coachella in the early days; Perry was helping out as a performer.
You can look at specific things that Lollapalooza did, and then just look at the general culture.
TB: It really normalized alternative culture. For a lot of 15 year olds in ’91, ’92, ’93, going to Lollapalooza was their first encounter of tattoo culture; the 1992 festival had the freak show. And it was all packaged in a safe and controlled way. A parent could feel like, “My kid’s gonna go, and they’re gonna come back.” The organizers of Lollapalooza did it as edgily as they could.
‘Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival’ is being released on hardcover on March 25 and is available for pre-order on Amazon.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.