Books: "Lollapaolooza" By Bienstock & Beaujour

Lollapaolooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival

By Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour

St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 432 pages; $32.00

Richard Beinstock is the former senior editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He is the author of several books, including Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, and he co-authored Nothin' But a Good Time with Tom Beaujour. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and SPIN.

Tom Beaujour is a journalist and a co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Revolver, America's premier hard rock and heavy metal monthly. He has produced and mixed albums by Nada Surf, Guided by Voices, and the Juliana Hatfield Three, among many artists.

Lollapaolooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival is their new book, and it is, to say the least, an entertaining read. This is a no-holds-barred oral history of the 1990s alt-rock festival, told by the musicians, roadies, and industry insiders who took part in once of the most definitive times in music.

The bands you will encounter are instantly memorable, from Jane's Addiction to Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Ice-T, Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, Patti Smith, Alice in Chains, and Metallica.

Perry Farrell, the lead singer of Jane's Addiction, along with the band's manager Ted Gardner and agents Mark Geiger and Don Muller, conceived this festival as a farewell tour for the band. It turned out to be so much more, as Lollapalooza's inaugural tour in the summer of 1991 had an unprecedented itinerary of two dozen stops in various U.S. cities. 

Inspired by the long-running Reading Festival in England, Lollapalooza offered a vast and diverse selection of bands that broke 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. 

Lollapalooza set 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 take in live performances. In addition to music, the tour gave a spotlight to visual arts, nonprofit organizations, political outfits, and even an occasional freak show, which all set the tone for the alternative mindset that dominated the 1990s. 

The impact continues to this day, as there are annual sell-outs at destination events all over the world, an estimated 400,000 at the flagship Chicago fest every summer, and its place among the world's largest and longest-running music festivals.

This book's main focus is how Lollapalooza was created and its immediate impact, as Beinstock and Beaujour write in this excerpt: On September 24, 1991, Nirvana released their second album, Nevermind, and, as the story goes, instantaneously rearranged the popular music landscape. Seemingly overnight, big hair, bright hooks, and blatant hedonism were out; raw, urgent sounds, thrift-shop DIY style, and social consciousness (with a healthy dose of cynicism) were in. A generation of music fans discarded the outmoded sounds and ethos of their older brothers and sisters, and the underground music scene, long operating and surviving via a network of college radio stations, sweaty dive bars, fanzines, and indie record labels, squinted its eyes and stepped out into the mainstream sun. The alternative nation was born.

It's the widely accepted narrative, but it's also - all apologies to Nirvana - inaccurate. By the time Nevermind hit store shelves and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" became an inescapable anthem perched at the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100, the Lollapalooza festival - a modern-day medicine show featuring "seven raucous bands and a circus tent full of political and social-action groups," as The New York Times put it in an early review - had just, mere weeks earlier, wrapped its inaugural run. The brainchild of Perry Farrell, the shamanistic front man of psychedelic L.A. hard rockers Jane's Addiction, Lollapalooza's two-month expedition across the US in the summer of 1991 had helped to coalesce an ideology and aesthetic that would not only wash over popular music but seep into fashion, film, television, literature, food, politics...essentially the culture at large.

Throughout the 1990s - specifically, the years 1991 to 1997, when the festival closed its first chapter - Lollapalooza functioned as the nerve center and proving ground for the alternative music revolution. The list of bands that graced its stage reads like a who's who of nineties superstars (Jane's Addiction, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth, Green Day, Beck, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Snoop Dogg, Tool, Rage Against the Machine, Ice-T, Hole, Pavement), with a healthy smattering of outsiders (Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, Shaolin Monks, Waylon Jennings...Metallica?) thrown in for good measure.

Year in and year out, the festival garnered wall-to-wall coverage on MTV, in music mags like Rolling Stone and SPIN, and across mainstream media. The ascent and influence of Lollapalooza are inextricably linked to the rise of alternative music through the decade (did the bands fuel the fest, or did the fest fuel the careers of the bands?). And the cultural and societal concerns - women's rights, gun control, racial inclusiveness, progressive politics - that were given tent space, both figuratively and literally, at Lollapalooza (the then-new Rock the Vote organization registered twenty-five-thousand new voters on the first Lollapalooza tour, fueling a wave that would be credited with helping to put Bill Clinton in the White House), likewise became tied to the scene itself.  Lollapalooza was a traveling "Woodstock for the Lost Generation," a New York Times headline screamed, a gathering as much about people, philosophies, and shared values as it was about the bands performing onstage. It set the template for the modern American music festival and paved the way for touring concerns like Warped, Lilith Fair, Ozzfest, and, later, Bonnaroo, Coachella, and the scores of other contemporary destination fests that are now an integral part of how audiences experience live music.

Which was not necessarily Farrell's initial intention. "I'm often asked, did I think Lollapalooza was going to be what it became?" he says. "I mean, that's ridiculous. Of course not! How could I? I was just in it for kicks, period."