Lollapalooza
The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
With a Foreword by Kim Thayil of Soundgarden!
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.
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 US 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 creating the template for the modern American music festival and the scores of other contemporary destination events.
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. Today, Lollapalooza remains one of the world's largest music festivals, cemented by annual sellouts at destination events all over the globe and an estimated 400,000 attendees at the flagship Chicago fest each summer.
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, uncensored, and sometimes shocking first-person accounts. This is the story of Lollapalooza and the 1990s alternative-rock revolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
