30 Years Ago, The First Lollapalooza Felt Like One Wild 'House Party'

By Nicole Briese


It’s been 23 months since the chain-link gates of Lollapalooza last opened to concert-goers in Chicago’s Grant Park, and festival cofounder Perry Farrell is feeling just like the rest of us about the return of live music: carefully excited. “I wish to party, to put it simply,” Farrell tells MTV News on a July afternoon. “We’re getting through this with each other, although it’s been very difficult.”


His remarks follow the world’s worst pandemic in more than 100 years, which turned the live-music scene upside down in 2020. Farrell’s annual event, which started as a traveling showcase in the 1990s and relaunched in Chicago immediately after partnering with Texas-based organization C3 Presents in 2005, was forced to broadcast online. “I hope to party, man, I need to,” Farrell laments. “We all need to, we need to celebrate life, because every moment is fleeting. That’s how I’m feeling.”


He’ll soon have his chance. This weekend, Lollapalooza 2021 will open its gates to the public once more with a slew of new safety measures in place. Although it’s far from company as regular for the festival that garnered 400,000 guests in 2019 alone. Its reopening on July 29 marks more than the first major multi-genre music gathering to take place In America in the wake of COVID-19. There’s another major milestone at play here, as well — the festival’s thirtieth anniversary.


It was never supposed to last three decades. Because the story goes, Lollapalooza, the lovechild of Perry Farrell, music executive Marc Geiger, and booking agent Don Muller, actually began out in 1991 as a farewell tour for a musical group on the brink of implosion — Farrell’s own Jane’s Addiction. “I had no idea what it would become, I just knew that I was having fun,” Farrell, the group’s frontman, says. “I tend to look in front of me. Some days I look in back of me, [but] very seldom do I look down at my own feet.”


The formula was simple enough: Like Woodstock and other popular music fests that had come before it, Lollapalooza, inspired by the British Reading Festival that Farrell and his bandmates attended, could be headed up by numerous acts on different stages. Unlike other North American festivals, nevertheless, which were few and far between at the time, the bands would all travel as a crowd, with helps to avoid in 20 cities along the way.


The largely option lineup was a novelty on the music scene at the time. “It wasn’t just a number of bands, yet it also had a mindset, and yes it had a spirit to it, with activism involved,” explains Nine Inch Nails’s Trent Reznor, who played on the event’s first bill. “It felt like it had a purpose to it.”


The request to join the now-iconic order of beginning headlining acts, which also consisted of Rollins Musical group, Butthole Surfers, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ice-T, Living Colour, Violent Femmes, Fishbone, and naturally, Jane’s Addiction, proved irresistible to the future Oscar winner. “Jane’s Addiction was one of our preference bands, and at that time, probably the favorite band,” Reznor tells us. “When we got the call to mention that Perry had leveraged the success that he had to put on an option traveling festival, you know, we didn’t have to think at all for that.”


The experience marked his first foray into previously uncharted territory. “Lollapalooza would’ve been the initial festival I’d ever attended, ‘cause I don’t think there’d ever been one that appealed to me,” Reznor shares. “There weren’t a lot of festivals with Depeche Mode on [them], and bands like that that I cared about. Musically, it felt like, hey, here’s a new residence for people that couldn’t do something like this before, ‘cause it didn’t exist.”


Nine Inch Nails performing at Lollapalooza in 1991.


Festival-goers responded in droves. “In those days, people were routinely interested in the new groups coming up, even if they weren’t even signed yet,” Farrell says.


the initial show kicked off in Tempe, Arizona, on July 18, 1991, and its diverse roster of talent brought an energy to the stage that couldn’t be replicated by the arena tours of the era with acts like Nelson, The Scorpions, and Winger. “I’ll be sincere — there was a precognitive at the time, and I’m thinking now of watching Gibby Haynes [of the Butthole Surfers] blow off his shotgun over the crowd. I just thought, ‘Wow, man,’” Farrell recalls of the infamous 1991 moment once Haynes first fired a series of blank shells over shocked concert-goers’ heads.


Haynes’s onstage antics could be repeated several times while in the tour. “It was a 12-gauge shotgun, and I discharged it perhaps 12 times per show … for the whole summer,” he clarifies. Because the “Pepper” singer explains, the blasts were a way to replace the regular stage effects the musical group generally incorporated into its shows in the dark. It also served as a metaphor for Butthole Surfers itself: “It’s just loud, threatening, and scary.”


It was also something new and different. At the time, Perry says, record agencies aimed for tours really interested in “like, stadium rock, plus it wasn’t quite working out. It was sort of stale, you know? Watching everybody just let loose at Lollapalooza…,” he trails off. “You know any time your parents would go off on a vacation, nevertheless they wouldn’t take you, so that you were left so you would throw your residence party? It felt just like that.”


More than simply disrupting the status quo, though, the experience signified a changing of the guard for the music industry. “It felt like revolution was in the air,” Reznor remembers. “There were a lot of bands doing things that weren’t mainstream. They weren’t really being played on the radio, yet there was a lot of music that felt exhilarating that sort of fell just outdoors of that.”

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The event faced its challenges, to be sure: Fights erupted both onstage and off, namely, as Farrell has said, between him and guitarist Dave Navarro. Unexpected malfunctions also arose. “Our tools was … duct tape and homemade cases,” Reznor recalls. “It wasn’t pro-level gear we were touring with. And I look, and there’s Living Colour, and they’ve got … shit that looks like Guitar Center racks, put with each other flawlessly, professional job, stenciled logos on the side of their … they had cases!” He says. “I thought, man, we don’t have our shit with each other. We didn’t have any cash, nevertheless we didn’t know any better.”


The musical group got a quick education whenever their cables — one gifted to a 16-year-old Reznor by his father — started to melt in the over 100-degree Arizona sun. “You had to laugh, ‘cause what else could you do?” He says. “We blew it the initial 10 minutes we were out there! Though it did force us to go out and purchase some new cables.”


That wasn’t all that took a beating on the NIN stage. “I never knew you can throw a DX7 synthesizer,” Haynes says with a laugh. “[Trent] would, like, jump on it and throw [it]. Their road crew figured out how you can take pieces from a damaged one and assemble another one. They had, like, a Pick-n-Pull for synthesizers there.”


Amid all of the chaos, something else was born: a unbridled, feral energy that could no longer be held — and a unbreakable bond between the headlining acts. “Everybody became companions over the complete summer,” Haynes says. “At the end of it, everybody wanted it to keep going. It was really sad once it was over.”


Butthole Surfers performing at Lollapalooza in 1991.


There could be several more iconic moments to follow over the years. There was 1992, as soon as Eddie Vedder made his infamous lighting-truss climb before diving into the crowd. 1994, whenever a newly widowed Courtney Love dove headfirst into the crowd following a set. 2003, as soon as Steve-O was arrested for, as he later recounted, “pulling out [his] penis and peeing on potato chips." 2015, whenever Travis Scott instructed fans to storm the stage. Farrell’s own personalized preference was seeing Lady Gaga stage dive twice while in her 2010 set with Semi Precious Weapons.


“Lady Gaga showed up in, like, a see-through bodysuit? And went and stage dived in the crowd at one of the small stages, and so they were just ripping [at] her limbs,” Farrell says. “She looked like Mary Queen of Scots, [who] was beheaded, right? However she was enjoying herself. We did pull her up, and then she turned around and jumped back in. It’s so fucking cool, and it also makes me like her a lot. I thought that was very bold and very big of her.”


Those seemingly once-in-a-lifetime occurrences served because the driving forces for the near-instantaneous commercial success of the festival  and its participants. “I look back at that as a real turning point of Nine Inch Nails breaking through to some degree,” Reznor says. “The level of audience increased significantly immediately after those shows. It was a homemade, low-budget operation, and we got up to Lollapalooza, right now we’re playing real, professional venues.”


“Nine Inch Nails blew up so big in the middle of that middle of that tour,” Haynes remembers. “They are the ones that got the crowd began. The audiences went apeshit for them. It was on immediately after that.”

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Farrell, for his part, had spent a lifetime priming for success in his new role as a festival producer. Long before he was belting out hits like “Jane Says” and “Been Caught Stealing,” he was creating experiences for others as a vocalist and hype man for his first musical group, Psi Com. “We began putting on our own parties, because we didn’t feel like we may fit in at Gazzarri’s,” he recalls of the well known hair-metal joint that reigned on the Sunset Strip via early ‘90s. “We knew we weren’t welcome, so we put with each other our own damn party.”


The singer even personally printed up the tickets to his events. “Literally, we could be on the streets like Hare Krishna guys, except we’d be handing out handbills to people to go and visualize our show.” The more he took on, the more he learned. “Your circle of influence begins to widen and widen and widen, like whenever you drop a pebble — or an atom bomb — into the water.”


Those early lessons later allowed Farrell to bring the festival back to life right after sales started to plummet circa 1997. “At that time, there were probably four or five other festivals, plus it diluted our strength,” he explains. With insufficient headlining acts to go around, the decision was made to cancel the 1998 event. By 2003, Jane’s Addiction had not only reunited, nevertheless released its third studio album, Strays, produced by classic-rock legend Bob Ezrin (Kiss’s Destroyer, Pink Floyd’s The Wall). Farrell was then keeping corporation with modern rock gods Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine,  and late Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman Chris Cornell, once he had an epiphany. “Right right now, what’s going on in the world is folks are beginning to play video games,” he recalls thinking, “and I just sort of saw, oh man, we might do a Lollapalooza, bring in video gaming, and ... Talk about option energy.  I sort of got hot, so I just kinda lit a match. And then, it lit up again.”


A reunited Jane's Addiction performing at Lollapalooza in 2003.


Tapping his bandmates and companions as headliners, Farrell’s Lollapalooza was reborn as a traveling tour for the very last time. 2004 once again saw soft ticket sales, and in 2005, he, and also his partners at the William Morris Firm, made the choice to bring in an outdoors production agency in C3 Presents. With each other, they brought the festival back from the grave once more, this time as a destination festival in Chicago. To Farrell, it was the ideal choice for the event’s rebirth. “It reminds me of America a lot. There really are good people, and so they are different colors, shapes, sizes, sexual proclivities and ... Statistics of theology. They’re just, like, a hodgepodge of interesting people.”


The new, committed location was just the tip of the iceberg. With fresh faces at the helm of the ship, Lollapalooza’s once option lineup was rapidly expanding into other musical categories, with electronic-heavy acts like M83 and indie darlings like Death Cab for Cutie and Tegan and Sara appearing on the bill. As Farrell shares, although, it had never really been about any one specific genre. “Music is really holy to me. To me, it’s my religion as much as anything else. The sound that you’re bringing to me will either heal me or hurt me.”


The same can be mentioned of the festival scene at large. “I think the work that Perry did here In America, I would imagine that his impact was well-bought by building a tangible festival that’s interesting, that has an identity, that’s also commercially viable, is one of the main reasons in pursuing festivals now,” Reznor says.


From Farrell’s perspective, it’s the melting weed of attendees that makes it all worthwhile. “What is so cute is any time as soon as you visualize [people] all coming with each other and enjoying themselves and digging and appreciating each other’s culture, that’s what I get to do. That’s the most that I get out of it. That’s what I love about it.”