Lollapalooza : the uncensored story of alternative rock's wildest festival

Lollapalooza The uncensored story of alternative rock's wildest festival

Richard Bienstock

Book - 2025

"The definitive, no-holds-barred oral history of 1990s alt-rock festival Lollapalooza--told by the musicians, roadies, and industry insiders who lived it. From the New York Times bestselling authors of Nothin' But A Good Time. In Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, New York Times bestselling authors Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour tell the no-holds-barred history of the iconic music festival. Through hundreds of new interviews with artists, tour founders, festival organizers, promoters, publicists, sideshow freaks, stage crews, record label execs, reporters, roadies and more, Lollapalooza chronicles the tour's pioneering 1991-1997 run, and, in the process, alternative rock's... rise--as well as the reverberations that led to a massive shift in the music industry and the culture at large. Lollapalooza features original interviews with some of the biggest names in music, including Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Ice-T, Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, Patti Smith, Alice in Chains, Metallica and many more. Conceived by Farrell as a farewell tour for Jane's Addiction, Lollapalooza's inaugural outing across the U.S. in the summer of 1991 helped to coalesce an ideology and aesthetic that not only washed over popular music but seeped into fashion, film, television, literature, food, politics and more. Throughout the decade, Lollapalooza offered a vast and diverse ensemble of bands, breaking barriers of genre and uniting alternative rock, heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, industrial, goth, avant-garde, spoken word, electronic dance music and other styles under one big tent, and setting the template for the modern American music festival and the scores of other contemporary destination fests that are now an integral part of how audiences experience live music. Unorthodox not just in music, Lollapalooza also spotlighted visual arts, nonprofit organizations, political outfits and even the occasional freak show, offering a tantalizing cocktail of culture, art, and activism that, taken together, defined the alternative mindset that dominated the 1990s. Echoes of its impact reverberate strongly today - cemented by annual sell-outs at destination events all over the world, an estimation of 400,000 attendees at the flagship Chicago fest each summer, and a spot among the world's largest and longest-running music festivals. A nostalgic look back at 1990s music and culture, Lollapalooza traces the festival's groundbreaking origins, following the tour as it progresses through the decade, and documenting the action onstage, backstage, and behind-the-scenes in detailed and uncensored and sometimes shocking first-person accounts. This is the story of Lollapalooza and the 1990s alternative rock revolution"--

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Subjects
Lollapalooza (Festival)
Rock music festivals > United States > History.
Alternative rock music > United States > History and criticism.
Rock music > United States > 1991-2000 > History and criticism.
Alternative rock musicians > United States > Anecdotes.
Rock musicians > United States > Anecdotes.
Road crews (Concert tours) > United States > Anecdotes.
Sound recording executives and producers > United States > Anecdotes.
Oral histories.
Informational works.
Documents d'information.
Genres
Oral histories
Informational works
Documents d'information
Published
New York : St. Martin's Press 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Richard Bienstock (author)
Other Authors
Tom Beaujour (author), Kim Thayil (writer of foreword)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
"Foreword by Kim Thayil of Soundgarden"--Cover.
Physical Description
xix, 409 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781250283702
  • Foreword by Kim Thayil of Soundgarden
  • Cast of Characters
  • Introduction
  • 1. "The best band in the world"
  • 2. "Lolla what?"
  • 3. "I still think it's odd that it worked"
  • 1991
  • 1. Day One
  • 2. "The most intense thing I've ever seen done on a stage"
  • 3. "Body Count's in the house"
  • 4. "Job number one was to be as punk as fuck"
  • 5. "Perry was standing naked like Jesus"
  • 1992
  • 1. "This car is like punk rock!"
  • 2. "Eddie was a monkey"
  • 3. "This is s'pposed to be rock 'n' roll, not Moat-zart!"
  • 4. "A lean, mean freak machine"
  • 5. A Brief History of the Second Stage
  • 1993
  • 1. "Are we selling out by doing this thing?"
  • 2. "The most nakedest band on Lollapalooza"
  • 3. "A party on wheels"
  • 4. A Brief History of the Village
  • 1994
  • 1. "Oh shit-now we have to do it!"
  • 2. "Boxing the snowman"
  • 3. "Where are you going to find tofu in the middle of a field?"
  • 4. "A scene where a lot of the people use really pure heroin is probably not a scene meant to last"
  • 5. "Have you guys seen a Titleist?"
  • 1995
  • 1. "You can't be cool if nobody cares"
  • 2. "I don't think anyone expects that kind of violence"
  • 3. "Nerds on Lollapalooza"
  • 4. "Courtney was the spectacle"
  • 5. "Spinal Tap playing at the theme park"
  • 6. "Sinéad ended up just walking off the tour"
  • 7. "It was probably a very brief bit of nudity"
  • 8. "Fuck you, frat boy!"
  • 9. "Fantastic Voyage"
  • 10. "It was a beautiful afternoon"
  • 11. "It felt like we were winning for a few years"
  • 1996
  • 1. "It looked like a scene from Island of Lost Souls"
  • 2. "Welcome to the Lollapalooza that has a big cock!"
  • 1997
  • 1. "I begged Perry to shut the fucking thing down"
  • 2. "To some alternative kids, 'nu metal' was a dirty word"
  • 3. "I have tits, put me on your shoulders"
  • 4. "Allegedly, they drew guns on him"
  • 5. "We were still always going to be these outcasts"
  • 6. "I was never one of these cool drug addicts"
  • 7. "He was doubled up in pain"
  • 8. "A tepid success"
  • Epilogue
  • 1. "Amazing illegal cheese"
  • 2. "A full-on bloodbath"
  • 3. "I don't know how much you know about Lollapalooza…"
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
Review by Booklist Review

At the first Lollapalooza, how many guitars did Trent Reznor smash? How many times did Perry Farrell get naked on stage? And is lollapalooza even a real word? Bienstock and Beaujour, coauthors of Nöthin' but a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion (2021), answer these burning questions and more. Following the same format as Nöthin' but a Good Time, the book is compiled from interviews with the people who were there, including members of bands like Tool, Jane's Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, and many more. What begins in 1991 as a farewell tour for Jane's Addiction quickly transforms into one of the biggest summer music festivals in the U.S., continuing to this day. Lovers of 1990s alternative rock music and fans of Craig Schuftan's Entertain Us: The Rise and Fall of Alternative Rock in the Nineties (2012) will enjoy this unflinching look at music festival culture and the rise and fall of alternative rock.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bestsellers Bienstock and Beaujour (coauthors of Nothin' But a Good Time) team up for a rollicking oral history of the Lollapalooza musical festival and how it fueled the "alternative-rock revolution" of the 1990s. Founded by Jane's Addiction front man Perry Farrell in 1991, the festival combined an eclectic lineup with a progressive social message and catapulted alt-rock bands like Nine Inch Nails and the Jesus Lizard into the spotlight. Yet such successes contributed to the festival's decline, the authors note, as it struggled to grow while retaining the alternative sound it had helped popularize. The crisis peaked in 1996, when Metallica was picked to headline, a choice seen by some--including Farrell, who quit in protest of what he saw as a capitulation to "big money" and "macho" rock culture--as evidence that Lollapalooza had "lost the alternative plot." The festival was postponed indefinitely in 1998 and restarted in 2003, when Farrell rejoined. Drawing from an impressive array of interviews with band members, music journalists, and festival organizers, the authors vividly capture the chaos of the festival's early days ("Job number one on Lollapalooza was to be as punk as fuck.... I would throw beers at , I would throw beers at the audience," recalls Nine Inch Nails' Richard Patrick). The result is a colorful, captivating slice of music history. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Bienstock and Beaujour (coauthors of Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion) have constructed an oral history of the Lollapalooza music festival, which helped define and promote alternative rock in the '90s. Conducting over 200 interviews, they begin with Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell, who jump-started the traveling event in 1991 with an eclectic, innovative lineup. The authors chronologically detail the festival's first seven years (1991--97) before it faded into an eight-year hiatus. The festival's second year spotlighted soon-to-be grunge/alternative icons Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and helped advance the alienated Generation X culture of liberal causes and alternative lifestyles. The book highlights Alice in Chains and Rage Against the Machine in 1993, the commercial success in 1994 with Smashing Pumpkins, a continuation of the alternative theme with Hole and Sonic Youth in 1995, and a turn to metal-oriented bands such as Metallica in 1996. They conclude with the 1997 festival, which focused on electronic acts such as Orbital and Prodigy. VERDICT This breezy oral history will appeal to most rock fans. The authors explore the festival's impact on '90s rock culture and provide intimate portrayals of the bands that Lollapalooza featured.--Dr. Dave Szatmary

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A humdinger of an oral history. In the tradition of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain'sPlease Kill Me and their ownNothin' But a Good Time, Bienstock and Beaujour spliced together dozens of interviews with musicians, producers, staff, and others on the scene to craft an epic story of 1990s rock and roll as filtered through the heroin-hazy lens of the granddaddy of American music festivals. Originally conceived of as a farewell tour for the volatile Los Angeles band Jane's Addiction by the band's shamanistic frontman, Perry Farrell, Lollapalooza quickly evolved into an annual showcase for the hot new category called "alternative rock," meaning anything too niche, noisy, or weird for commercial radio. College radio favorites like the Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Nine Inch Nails, the Breeders, and Hole, all of whom played the festival in the first three years, seemed to fit the bill according to most critics' criteria. But the loose and inclusive criteria of the organizers also drew in Ice-T's metal band Body Count, Ice Cube, Sinead O'Connor, Arrested Development, Devo, and Metallica, as well as the wild carnival freaks of Seattle's Jim Rose Circus and MTV'sJackass. Reading like the script of a tightly edited film or TV series, the book's interview subjects recount backstage antics (and occasional dramas) that were often as anarchic as the performances on stage. The book's merit, however, is not just in its close views of rock music and performance. Lollapalooza occurred at the dawn of the internet age and the infancy of viral culture. As several interviewees state, it was the era before cell phones, and yet by decade's end, youth culture generally began to look like Lollapalooza culture. Essential addition to any rock history library. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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